A Wild Last Boss Appears! – Episode 1

Content Warning: Gore

What’s it about? In the year of their lord, 2800, Lufas Maphaal returns. That’s right, the Black-Winged Tyrant, the Great Conqueror, the leader of the Twelve Heavenly Stars, she’s back. Only…wasn’t this just a game? At least that’s what one man who gets stuck in his MMORPG character’s body thinks until things get very, very real.

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Ah, my first dark fantasy of the season. Feels like premieres really are here! And it’s kind of perfect because recently, I’ve been very into reading LitRPG novels (i.e. I’m in my Dungeon Crawler Carl era), so this feels like a suitable first taste of what Fall 2025 is going to bring.

Question is, will A Wild Last Boss Appears! follow the current trend of man-meets-RPG and is kind of horrible by everyone’s standards, or do we have another Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra on our hands? Hope for the latter, prepare for the former—let’s dive in!

Episode 1 starts in medias res with the rise of Lufas Maphaal, a young woman who intends to raze the land in a blaze of unholy fire. Stronger after her return from the grave, Lufas is set on utter destruction. With her iconic black wings, she’ll sail into the skies, raining down magical fire until her reign is supreme.

Thankfully this is just a video game–at least for now.

Then the plot kicks in and our unwitting, unnamed protagonist is transported into Exogate Online proper–as Lufas herself. Things get a bit more interesting as Lufas tries to find her place two hundred years after her defeat by a society who never expected her to rise once again.

What ensues is Lufas reestablishing her place in the world, now embodied by a young man who must learn how to use her powers mid-crisis and strive to set things to right in a world where the Demon King thrives and her subordinates rampage across the land.

Anime like A Wild Last Boss Appears! are the current meat and potatoes of anime seasons, and have been for quite some time. They’re your basic light novel or web novel adaptation, set in a mish-mash MMORPG-meets-Fantasy Fulfillment in a vaguely european-esque DnD society. Throw in a twist–in this case, the unnamed protagonist becomes his character Lufas and also, becomes a girl, and you’ve got anime, baby!

And it’s perfectly fine viewing: the art suits the dark fantasy vibes, contrasting well against Lufas’ internal monologue as she adjusts to going from a character on the screen to a breathing, living being in a world that once reviled her and still isn’t quite sure what to do with her now that she’s back. Largely, this premiere avoids most of the more icky tropes of the genre–weird slave stuff, pointless and cruel sexual assault, that kind of thing–which makes it a perfectly serviceable adaptation, especially for folks who have read J-Novel Club’s ongoing English localization of the manga and the light novels.

I’ll be real: A Wild Last Boss Appears! is perfectly okay. I don’t expect anything big out of it—certainly not a conversation around gender with its male protagonist existing in a female body—and I think that’s okay. I’d much rather have a show like this that is a possibly shallow but not malicious fantasy rather than an isekai that pulls edgelord crap that ultimately is a thinly veiled way to hate on marginalized genders and be a cruel, cishet male power fantasy. 

When I call series like this the meat and potatoes, I mean that they fill out a season with enough new shows to suit a variety of tastes. While some are hard for me to understand in terms of adaptation—I like dark fantasy but I don’t think it has to be crass or use sexual assault to entice—I also understand that anime is a business that serves its financial interest first and thus chases the sure thing.

There’s only so many isekai that the industry can carry Atlas-style before the trend is bound to collapse. As a critic and researcher, I can note that escapism is in—and isekai, dark fantasy, and their linked subgenres suit that need. But from the perspective of a viewer, I’m just happy there’s shows for all,. While I’ll always openly critique series that are overtly gross, I also enjoy the power to just not engage with a series. Thankfully, A Wild Last Boss Appears! is pretty mild as far as dark fantasy go, though I’m prepared to have words if necessary. I love to critique the things I love: anime will never be excluded from my most lovingly critical examinations.

In the end, A Wild Last Boss Appears! is a perfectly fine show that I think a lot of people looking for a different flavor of “protagonist enters the video game” will enjoy. And who knows? I might end up circling back around to this once I make my choices for what I’ll be watching to wind down 2025.