Anime Review: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!

Silver Link

Genre: Comedy, Fantasy

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Meet Cararina Claes – she’s rich and a noble lady, soon to be engaged to a prince. At least, that’s who she thinks she is. In reality, Catarina is a Japanese schoolgirl who died and somehow ended up reincarnated into her favourite otome game… but not as the heroine. Instead, she realises that her role is that of the villainess or the person who tries to ruin the chances of the heroine – and her ultimate fate in every route in the game always involved either her death or banishment. Knowing the game as well as she does, can Catarina thwart this fate and change the plot so that she can achieve her own happy ending?

If the above summary wasn’t obvious enough, this is an anime with a large focus on comedy to tell its story. It also relies fairly heavily on standard tropes of otome games and romance series and assumes that the audience will understand these tropes too. If you are familiar the comedy is sharp and on the nail pretty much the whole time throughout this first episode, but even if you aren’t this is an anime that still works regardless and will get a few chuckles even if some of the contexts might be a little lost.

This first episode focuses on the young Catarina, so herself and the cast we do see are mostly children at this point. Despite the focus on comedy, Catarina herself is fairly likable and charming even if she’s not a typical ‘nice’ girl, which does separate her from traditional heroines in these types of series. Surprisingly, despite the generally light nature of the series, it does manage to hit some emotional beats too such as when Catarina tries to befriend her adopted brother to stop him being lonely (another cause of her getting a bad end in the future). The majority of the cast aside from Catarina are mostly modeled off various tropes like the “prince” and the “tsundere” but in this case, it feels intentional rather than lazy. Still, hopefully the characters themselves will be able to develop over the course of the series to show other personality traits outside of their initial archetypes. Whilst Catarina seems to not be interested in romance but is just trying to manipulate the characters to avoid a grim fate instead, it seems her actions are accidentally making the various love interests more interested in her so I can see this going down a reverse harem route.

The art style is cute and colourful which fits the otome theme well, with background animations reminiscent of muted watercolours which adds to the fantasy setting well. The opening song is comedic and bouncy which again works well with the genre of the series.  This series reminded me a lot of Ouran High School Host Club in terms of its comedy and characters, which isn’t a bad thing. The first episode only introduces three of the cast which actually serves as a better introduction to these characters and helps make them more memorable. Catarina is the star of the show however and she runs it well – whether it’s viewing her inner thoughts through a round table of mini-Catarinas as they discuss the best option to take, or seeing her reacting to the characters around her, she’s a joy to watch.