I posted a trailer for Demon Lord 2099 a couple years ago when it was first announced but I wasn’t convinced I’d like it. In general, I don’t like comedy in my cyberpunk and this seemed too light-hearted for me so I ignored it when it came out. Now that a couple years have passed, I happened to see it was available on Crunchyroll and only had 12 episodes. So even though Crunchyroll classifies it as a Comedy first and Sci-Fi second, I decided to give it a try. In the end, I don’t recommend this anime but it’s not for the reasons I was expecting.

The show is about a demon lord who gets defeated and dies. 500 years later, one of his worshipers resurrects him. But since 500 years have passed, his medieval fantasy world has now turned into a cyberpunk world. So while he still wants to conquer the world, he’s now a fish out of water in a world he doesn’t understand. His strength is based on how many people have strong emotions towards him (love/hate) so when he initially wakes and no one knows who he is, he’s very weak. In an attempt to gain people’s attention and raise his power… he becomes a Twitch streamer playing Dark Souls.

The premise is so ridiculous, I initially thought it’d be like The Devil is a Part-Timer where Satan gets a job at a McDonald’s and wacky hijinks ensue. Fortunately, this demon lord playing Dark Souls isn’t a main part of the story. It’s just a means to an end for regaining his power and very little of the show is spent on this.

Here’s what I liked about this anime. First of all, it’s cyberpunk. It takes place in a very cyberpunk city and everyone has an augmented reality device implanted in the back of their necks to access the internet and communicate with their personal AIs. Also, one of the main characters is a hacker. So far so good, and I’m interested. Then the main villain is introduced and it’s the CEO of the company that makes these AR devices. Again, I’m here for it. And the comedy isn’t that distracting. Most of the jokes come from the demon lord taking himself too seriously; there aren’t any slapstick jokes or characters overreacting and falling over for laughs.

If that’s all the show was, I’d have a fairly high opinion of it. It’s not perfect by any means and it’s more light-hearted than I want, but the show isn’t obnoxious. Unfortunately, they defeat the evil CEO half-way through this 12 episode season. And that’s where they lose me. The second half of the season is spent with them infiltrating a high school and pretending to be students. At this point in the show, it stops being cyberpunk. The AR devices are never mentioned again, the personal AI assistants never show up, they rarely leave the school, and now the show is about the demon lord trying to acquire three magical items. So there are still quite a few fantasy elements involved, but nothing cyberpunk anymore. And there’s plenty of other anime that have done “high school drama with fantasy elements” better than this.

It’s a shame that if the first story arc had lasted all 12 episodes, I would’ve really enjoyed this show. They introduced some interesting concepts in the first half, like the evil company working on merging magic with technology to make magitech battle suits. And their AR devices were actually a shortcut for casting spells. There was even some hand-wavy talk about how the fantasy realm merged with Earth so there were lots of random elves and orcs walking around in the background. It was all very Shadowrun yet they did nothing with it. I would’ve liked to see a second season expand on this world. I could easily put up with a self-important main character if it meant getting a borderline Shadowrun anime. But instead, it ends on a high school drama storyline and no hope for a second season. Oh well.

If you want to see what I’m talking about, you can watch all 12 episodes on Crunchyroll.