Anime Summer 2024: FAILURE FRAME: I BECAME THE STRONGEST AND ANNIHILATED EVERYTHING WITH LOW-LEVEL SPELLS, Evil vs Evil vs Evil

There's something unsettling, even disturbing, in this series.

Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells
The first two episodes are now streaming on Crunchyroll. Subsequent episodes will debut every Thursday.

Debuting last week, the first half of the first episode briskly sets up the central premise of the show, which is that Touka suffered domestic abuse as a child and has grown up into his teens as "air," a term for the lowest form of high-school life.

Traveling together on a bus one day, an entire class is summoned by the goddess Vicius to another world, where they are needed to help her defeat the periodic uprising of the Great Demon Emperor. The entire class is tested, and Touka, who we just saw getting bullied on the bus, is dismayed to see that everyone tests out to be good to excellent in their 'inner skills' and worthy of being heroes in this strange new world.

Everyone except him, of course. To avoid discouraging her new heroes and comrades in arms, the haughty Vicius cruelly banishes Touka to a lower region, where certain death awaits. As nearly all of his former classmates jeer him savagely, Touka swears revenge as he is banished forever.

Arriving in the so-called "ruins," which looks like a region of hell with no humans but many deadly monsters, Touka figures out how to use his low-level skills, which were useless against the goddess in the world above, so that he can 'level up' his skills and find a way to escape the "ruins" and somehow take down the goddess Vicius.

The first two episodes are rather bleak and disturbing. As Touka puts it at one point, after he's been able to defeat some monsters, it's really a battle of "evil versus evil versus evil," which is not enough of its own merit to make me want to watch more. But the second episode gives a glimpse of a possible ally, somewhere, which is confirmed in the trailer below.

Since we have the prospect of those allies banding together with Touka, it holds promise of an exciting adventure, which is better than watching something that could be called How to Make a Mass Murderer. The animation is very good, and the show maintains the brisk pace, which makes up for the solo adventure so far.

I'm willing to keep watching, even though the basic premise is troubling, in the hope that Touka's single-minded determination to wreck furious vengeance is mollified to some extent.

Summary: Recommended, with reservations.