One thing that I liked about this first episode is that it spent basically zero time setting up the premise. It was self-aware enough to know that viewers of this show are likely to already be familiar with the trappings and conventions of the otome isekai genre already. The game that this world is based on is as generic and prototypical as you can get. Additionally, we spent absolutely zero time talking about the MC’s previous life other than that she played this game and liked the Villainess. Sorry all you truck-kun lovers out there.

This first episode is a bit of a speedrun of the origin story behind our young Villainess. She studies a lot, practices good manners, gets crazy strong for an eight year old, and has a hell of a sweet tooth. I thought it was funny how she viewed things as a Villainess test, like when the king was asking her questions:

Speaking of, her plan of inciting a revolution for independence in a neighboring region so that her Kingdom can profit is a very Villainess-y move for sure. No saintess is going to advocate for stoking the fires of war, leave that kind of thing to the Villainess.

I am going to try to give this a couple more episodes time permitting, and I look forward to skipping ahead in time a bit to see how the school life goes, as that is usually the setting for the otome games. I suspect that these roses are going to be important. Our MC keeps getting portrayed alongside a black rose in the OP and ED (and her mom was carrying it in the beginning of the episode). So, I suspect that the MC is also a special rose person alongside this golden rose protagonist. We’ll see how it all plays out. @rikka@ani.social

I’m already not a fan of the villainess isekai genre, but this one felt especially empty to me. I do enjoy characters that have fun acting evil, and our main has that going for her, but I struggled to ever root for her when one of the first things she says was basically “the villainess is right - bullying uppity commoners is good, actually, because they should know their place”, which is a wild position to have in the modern day. I then got a bit distracted when they introduced our romantic lead, who appears to be a good 5 years older than our main. As teenagers this would be creepy enough (if she’s 15 and off to magic school, he’d already be 20), but he starts following her around and staring at her when she is 8 and he is probably 13, which was a HUGE red flag for me that I don’t think I’d be able to get past. It’s so bizarre to me because why not just make them the same age?

I’m getting a bit bogged down in these details, but I think that’s largely because it didn’t seem to have any substance to preoccupy myself with instead. It seems like the main draw for the show is to see her have fun trying to be evil, but that really isn’t enough for me. I give the premiere a 1/5

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. Something about her earnestness about being a villainess was just so silly, especially with the absurd power creep. Not sure that will hold up for long, especially when she is older.

This was a bit rough. The visuals in particular. I don’t know about the novel, but there were some scenes in here that weren’t in the manga. Those scenes felt a little too spoonfeedy.

I like the manga, but not sure about the anime yet. I’ll give it a few more episodes.