The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Demon Lord 2099

Fused Era Year 2099—Shinjuku. The dazzling prosperity of this massive city-state conceals a lurid darkness just beneath its surface. It is here—in this megalopolis that represents the pinnacle of human development—where the legendary Demon Lord Veltol makes his second coming. To rule this brave new world, he will have to take hold of the future for himself.

Demon Lord 2099 is based on the light novel series by Daigo Murasaki with illustrations by Kureta. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Demon Lord 2099 is a triumph of execution, as much about it suggests mediocrity. At its heart lies a hoary cliche of the demon lord being resurrected years after his final confrontation with the capital-h Hero. The beginning exposition throws a bunch of proper nouns at you, and the names are super goofy—Holy Sword Ixasorde, Demon Lord Veltol Velvet Velsvalt, and so on. It has fantasy racism (although it's surely just a coincidence, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of immortals standing in a concentration camp behind barbed wire was jarring to see on Yom Kippur, to say the least) and a world combining magic and technology into something more powerful. The animation is middling, generally on-model but with lots of obvious shortcuts.

Despite all this, I found myself fully drawn into the story.

In my review of TsumaSho, I talked about how I like it when anime find threads to pull on in their fantastical set ups, especially when iterating on well-established story formats. Rip van Winkle demon lords rank up there along with RPG-based isekai for stock anime plots—and while they're usually mined for comedy, DEMON LORD 2099 finds the inherent melancholy of the idea. What happens when you wake up and the world has moved on and changed beyond your recognition? Whomst among your followers has remained loyal and what about those who have forged their own paths? What was it like for the loyalists, waiting all those years? Level 1 Demon Lord and One Room Hero took a critical eye to what life is like that final confrontation for the hero, but cloaked it in crass comedy that can be a struggle to get through. DEMON LORD 2099 asks these questions up front with the occasional aside for comic relief.

The episode offers a lot of promises about future story developments as well. Most tantalizing are the hints of something amiss with Gram, the hero who defeated *ctrl-c* *ctrl-v* Veltol Velvet Velsvalt. The scenes between the two were charged, almost homoerotic. As Veltol disintegrated, Gram gave him a speech about how humans were able to triumph because their frail mortality motivates them to live in the little time they have. And yet, thousands of years later, Gram still seems to be around. And then there's the hacker girl, who puts porn onto the huge screens that plaster the city's buildings and then jabbers on about how she's a punk rebel. I loved her immediately.

And while the animation is middling and riddled with shortcuts, the staff behind it understand that if you're going to hold on a shot for a long time, it should still be visually striking. The city's drab grey-green contrasts beautifully with the blue glow of Veltol's demon lord suit. Can't animate a character much beyond their mouth moving? Make them beautiful to look at!

DEMON LORD 2099 came completely out of nowhere for me. Up until I turned it on, I kept forgetting it existed unless I was looking directly at the list of premieres. Now it's on my weekly watchlist—will it be on yours too?

I like the concept here: a demon lord is defeated and when he resurrects the world is completely different. Not only have hundreds of years passed but his world and Earth have magically merged—and that's not mentioning the two recent wars that happened in the post-apocalypse. When he died, the demon lord was unquestionably the strongest creature aside from the hero who defeated him. In the world he awakens in, he is the weakest. Technology has simply outpaced his natural talent.

It's a great way to start an adventure. Our protagonist, Veltol, is at his lowest point. A random street thug can beat him up. Of his loyal subjects, only one remains. The rest are dead, missing, or have turned traitors. His headquarters is no longer a castle but a single-room apartment in the slums—and one he only has because of his said remaining loyal subject. Simply put, he has one heck of an uphill battle if he intends to dominate the world as he once did.

There's just one problem with what we see in Demon Lord 2099: I don't care about any of it. There's nothing about Veltol that makes him the tiniest bit sympathetic. We weren't fighting for the future of his people. He was just a tyrant who ruled by might. He's a sack of walking, talking ego, and nothing more.

As for the other characters, we get a single conversation with each of them. Machina is loyalty personified—and it's clear she's suffered over the centuries because of it. Meanwhile, Takahashi is a hacker who hacks hackingly. And that's all I can say about either. The only other person to get any meaningful screen time is Marcus, who is just a bundle of jealousy and envy. At this point, it's hard to see him as a worse person than Veltol. It may have been for personal reasons but he did give magic to the masses—greatly improving the average person's life.

In the end, we're left with a show that has a great concept but no real emotional connection. Hopefully, this will change over the next few weeks but I'm undecided if I will be there to watch or not.

I grew up in the 90s, kids, which means that I learned early on that most valuable of cross-medium marketing lessons: If you slap the year 2099 onto any previously well-worn, familiar concept, then it immediately becomes radical to the extreme. So, with its title alone, Demon Lord 2099 was obviously set to appeal to me. What's more, I love fusing cyberpunk-ish and fantasy aesthetics together, and Demon Lord 2099 is definitely working inside of that Shadowrun-esque zone that I wish more stories were confident enough to dip their toes into. Orcs, knights, demons, and the like are all exponentially more badass when they wear shades inside and can find the occasion to look to their partners in crime after hacking into some kind of gizmotron doodad to say, “I'm in.” Demon Lord 2099 has a cute little hacker gal whose definition of disrupting the system apparently includes spamming the citywide hologram screens with hardcore pornography, which I guess means that the show is going 2-0 so far as its concept is concerned.

Finally, I appreciate the way that Demon Lord 2099 is handling its fish-out-of-water concept, which is a great foundation to marry to the whole fantasy-cyberpunk thing. Veltol the Demon Lord isn't just waking up in a world that is completely different from the one he left; two entire civilizations have basically lived through the insane post-apocalyptic fantasy war that could be the main plot of a different show, which means that the show's hero and its audience are on the same page when it comes to catching up with the world building. It gets to keep the inherent speculative fun of a cyberpunk setting while also reveling in the usual fantasy anime tropes—all while avoiding the stale feeling that could have resulted if either half of the premise were isolated on their own. Everyone wins!

Really, the one major downside to this premiere is just how much catch-up we have to indulge in to get Veltol up to speed with what his loyal servant Machina has been up to for the last 500 years. Not only do we have a dump-truck's worth of proper nouns to unpack, but the plot also has to set up the basic revenge quest that Veltol is going to be embarking on, now that he knows that the once faithful Marcus has betrayed him and left poor Machina to live in the (relative) squalor of a typical one-room apartment. It doesn't leave a lot of room for Demon Lord 2099 to impress us with whatever action, comedy, or character-writing skills that it has to work with now that we've got all of the exposition out of the way. Still, with production values this solid and a cast of interesting characters to work with, I think Demon Lord 2099 has plenty of potential to make good on the promise of its story and deliver a hell of a fun time this fall.

Demon Lord 2099 was one of the trailers that caught me off-guard during this season's Trailer Watch Party. What looked like yet another riff on the usual demon lord reincarnation gimmick actually seemed to be infused with comedy as we watch Demon Lord Vetol Velvet Velsvalt resurrection go awry. It seems to be playing in a similar pool as The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, except the current world is a cyberpunk fusion of modern Japan and Vetol's magic-fueled origin world.

To enjoy Demon Lord 2099 properly, you have to realize that it is not taking itself seriously. In one beat, the villain can monologue about betraying Vetol to become the de facto "Demon Lord" of this world, and in the next, his assistant proposes merchandising opportunities for their rabbit-like magitech mascot. While Vetol has barely gotten his wits about him in his new world, the key art suggests he will eventually adopt more of the "culture" (video games, UNIQLO t-shirts) as the series progresses. If the "plot" takes a backseat for more fish-out-of-water shenanigans, I'm not complaining.

The key factor holding back Demon Lord 2099 is its workmanlike animation from J.C. Staff. Mid-shots of the complicated character designs can look only a few steps above rudimentary, and more exaggerated facial expressions could really sell the comedy better. The CG assets are worse, wherein one shot of a sci-fi skyscraper of stacked cubes looks like something out of Minecraft. Nothing is actively falling apart, but there are obvious places where the presentation could be improved.

I'll stick this one out for a few more episodes to see if it can sell the humor consistently, and hopefully, the animation can stay functional enough.