When you’ve watched anime for a while, you pick up on certain trends series seem to have. Quite often, you can tell the quality of a series or how unique it will be purely by the name or one piece of artwork. Is that judging a book by its cover? Definitely, but a lot of the time, that cover really doesn’t lie when it comes to these things. It’s especially true when you keep up on seasonals since you see the best and most generic of what the industry has to offer.

You usually pick up on what the heavy hitters will be fairly easy, and likewise, you know what the bland garbage will often be as well. So when I was reading the title of The Greatest Demon Lord Is Reborn as a Typical Nobody, my radar went off, but not the good kind. It sounded painfully generic, but because of one piece of really pretty artwork I saw, I decided to add it to my already giant list of seasonals. I knew it wouldn’t be good, but I figured it’d be some fantasy comfort food to consume. And I was right.

My opinion of the anime as we head towards the end of the season is pretty much exactly what I expected. It’s incredibly generic. The main character is kind of bland. He has a harem of equally bland girls for the most part. Everyone loves him because he’s strong and overpowered, again, making things bland. It also suffers from not really having a decent overarching plot, which these kinds of fantasy shows often have issues with. It’s not an isekai, but calling it one will describe it pretty well. It’s not an isekai but plays out like a pretty generic one.

Or so I thought! Well, ok, it’s still generic and plagued by all the things I mentioned, but it does have one interesting part about it, and thankfully, it’s the main draw of the entire series. You would assume it’s about Ard, our main badass living his new life, not as the demon lord this time. For the most part, it follows the generic trend of extraordinary person fails at looking ordinary, which a lot of these series do, but Greatest Demon Lord does something slightly different than I normally see.

They actually decide to pull a fast one on us, and rather than continuing to make excuses for Ard to fly under the radar, some of the main characters actively know that Ard is the demon lord reincarnated and make attempts to push him to admit it, whether that’s with forcing him to use his full power or just being annoying as hell.

So the idea of the plot doesn’t really change. It’s still a strong guy trying to fly under the radar, but you have a lot of added tension when his identity, which is a pretty big deal, as you might imagine, is constantly being hung above him. So every time he does have to lash out or protect someone, it’s now less about him being insanely strong but more about showing that he could actually be the demon lord.

Now, this doesn’t actually matter all that much because even if his identity did come out, you know his friends wouldn’t abandon him or anything, but you can imagine that it might shake things up. The enjoyment comes more from the fact that the whole hiding his identity thing overtakes the usual trying not to stand out. It doesn’t change much, which is why it’s still pretty bland, but it does enough interesting to make the overused concept kind of fun.

It also just enjoys playing with the idea, like having a play reenacting certain events in history where Ard actually plays the demon lord and different stuff like that. It’s not at all a bad series, it’s just pretty generic fantasy, but I do think the staff were fairly competent in how they wanted to put things together, even if the actual story was bland. The art is also very nice, for the most part. You have a few ugly still frames, but the magic and fight scenes, as well as the colors, are usually very pretty, so I give them props for that.

The Greatest Demon Lord is still bland fantasy seasonal stuff. It’s not quite garbage, that would be too harsh, but it’s definitely one of those series you’ll forget right when you finish watching it. That being said, it does manage to do one or two things to change up a very overused format, which I respect if nothing else. Do I recommend it? I don’t know. If you want. It looks pretty, and it’s kind of fun, but that’s about it.

Thank you very much for reading

I don’t know what joke to make here. Be cool. Be like Ard.