The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen Blu-Ray Review
Pride Royal Ivy is the first crown princess of her kingdom, and a horrible brat to boot, tormenting her servants and making everyone’s lives around her miserable. When she turns eight years old however, she regains her memories from her previous life; she was reborn into the video game ‘Our Ray of Light’ and when she grows up, she becomes a tyrannical Queen who destroys her kingdom, only to be slain by the main protagonist, her sister princess Tiara, and her various love interests who have all been wronged by Pride, one way or another. Now with the knowledge of her past life, and what her life may become, Pride decides to turn her life around, to become a Queen worthy of her kingdom and countrymen. But can she really make a better future for herself? Or she is doomed to become the murderous, evil Queen of the future, no matter what she does?
Based on a light novel of the same name by Tenichi, with a manga adaptation to boot (both licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment), this anime is one of the popular genre of villainess-isekai, where a regular person (usually female) is killed in our modern world, and finds themselves either in a book, video game, etc. but as a character meant to be the villain of that story. So it becomes not just an escapist fantasy of living in a fantasy world different from our own, but also a tale of defying the fate that the protagonist knows about, and has to use either their knowledge, or skills from the world, to do so. The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen is very much playing into these tropes, and at the start, I was expecting the anime to be paint-by-numbers – the realising of their past life, the changing of the story to save themselves, the potential suitors suddenly taking interest in the ‘new’ villainess’ personality change, etc. But despite a rocky start, the anime did win me over by the end of its first season.
The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen angle is quite subtle but noticeable as you go on; we never learn anything about Princess Pride’s past life, but whoever they are now knows exactly what Pride was originally: a murderous, scheming, evil, powerful Queen who wasn’t above torture, killing or using magic to control her subjects. This Pride is terrified of that possible outcome, and so begins work on trying to change that fate.
It’s not a simple task of just changing herself as a person however, Pride has a growing worry that the original, evil Pride will eventually surface one day, and so THIS Pride makes long-term plans to have the original protagonists in place to kill her quickly if the original Pride surfaces. For example, her adoptive brother and assistant, Stale; in the original story he was forced into a magical contract with Pride, and then killed his own birth mother. But this Pride makes that no such contract happen; not only is the mother allowed to maintain contact with him, but she also makes Stale promise her that if she ever becomes a vile Queen, he is to stop her by any means necessary. Stale is obviously baffled by this request, because why would someone who allowed him to keep contact with his birth mother, and have personal freedom, become a monster? It’s these grand gestures for a brighter future, but with an underline of uncertainty that make Pride interesting to follow. Yes, she’s overpowered with her cheat codes to learn sword art as soon as she wields it, and also knows the future, so she can prevent certain events from happening, but deep in her heart she’s terrified of what will happen if she suddenly loses her mind once more and becomes evil.
As the anime is taking place over several years (she’s 8 in the opening episode, and in her early teens by Episode 12) we see Pride growing up, changing the story, growing in popularity but also getting closer to the age (18) when the game is meant to start and she becomes the final boss. I like that the story doesn’t start at 18, or just jump from 8 to 18, and I liked watching the gradual change in the kingdom as well as Pride’s friends, despite her growing worries about the ticking clock.
I found myself interested in the expanded cast as well. Pride has two main love interests in this story, that were originally love interests for Tiara in the game, but due to Pride’s actions, both her adoptive brother Stride, and a knight Arthur, become Pride’s closest friends and start to fall for her. But Pride is oblivious to them, thinking that they’ll fall for Tiara eventually. It’s fun to see them be rivals for Pride’s affection, but I liked them bonding as friends, as well as having their own internal conflicts and desires outside of Pride herself (such as building a better Kingdom, or growing their combat skills, etc). It makes the world feel fuller and the cast not just satellites to the heroine herself.
The weakest part of the series to me however was the over-abundance of ‘tell don’t show’. There are many scenes where it feels as if characters were over-explaining either a plot point, or their own emotional turmoil. For example, one pivotal scene for Arthur, when he monologues how he wants to become a knight to protect Pride. This could have easily been two sentences, but instead it lasts minutes at a time, saying the same thing over and over again but in different ways. There are a lot of scenes like that where I started to tune out, because it feels like padding rather than emotional engagement. What’s funny though, is that there are plenty of examples within the same anime which don’t suffer from that. There are numerous flashbacks to the original timeline, where we’re shown Pride’s cruel behaviour towards her subjects, within a black border and sharper shadows to illustrate that this is what originally happened in the darker timeline. But when we cut back to the present timeline, there’s no over-explaining of the scene or what it meant, it trusts the audience to understand what that was and that THIS new timeline is different. It almost felt like there were two different directors involved in the production: one afraid to confuse the audience to the point of over-explaining, and the other who trusts the audience to get it.
The animation is provided by OLM, Team Yoshioka, and I wouldn’t say this was their best work. The character designs all look great, and there are vibrant colours to showcase the royal clothes, the kingdom and so on. But where it lacks is in the very stiff movements, and action scenes are incredibly dull.
The Blu-ray comes with Japanese and English dub, with English regular and hard-of-hearing subtitles, which I did appreciate. The English dub is overall okay; Karlii Hoch as Pride is excellent in balancing the powerful leader she is, with the vulnerability she exhibits when worrying about her potential future. The weakest for me are the voices for Stale and Arthur (James Marler and Brandon Hearnsberger respectively); they get better as they go along, but when they’re first introduced as boys from about 7 years old upwards, you can hear the strain on their voices and it’s uncomfortable to listen to. The on-discs extras are clean opening and endings, plus disc credits.
The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen starts off slow but gradually becomes an exploration of the villainess-isekai anime, rather than a paint-by-numbers example of the genre. It’s far from a perfect show, but there’s enough intrigue in there to make it worth a watch if you’re a fan of the genre. The anime is only 12 episodes long, and covers about the first two light novels, but a second season has been announced for next year, so this release is a good way to get into the show before the anime continues.
Our review copy was supplied by MVM.
