A Dark and Gorey Psychological Fantasy Story of Revenge
I don’t know what I was looking for when I started the Kingdoms of Ruin but I was looking for something different than the standard isekai that everything seems to be today. Promising to be a drama about witches and science, revenge and bloodshed, I figured this would be a great epic between magic and the world of technology…and boy was I wrong.
Meet Adonis, the titular character known as the witch’s apprentice, whom upon witnessing his teacher and adoptive mother get popped in the head by a Glock, decides he’s going to murder the entire fucking world. Whether they be humans or witches Adonis holds more hate in his heart than any other character I think I have ever seen in an anime; and for most of the show drags along a pink haired air head of a witch whose relationship with him can be called less of a friendship and more of an abusive and traumatic attachment.
Adonis is out to kill…and he’s going to do it by any way possible. He can wield magic, he has superhuman skills, and he’s emotionless to the point where he makes a sociopath look friendly. At least, unless he gets angry. His anger is rather explosive. His carnage is documented across the series in full gore with no censorship at all. Those who cannot handle psychological themes, blood, and gore in anime should stay back. It gets bloody.
Of course, Adonis is not the only character with problems. From a genocidal emperor who carries out a mass murder of witches, to a witch who carries out a coup and destroys anyone in her path, to cybernetic assassins one can say this world is not a peaceful one. And of course Doroka, the naive pink haired witch that ends up following Adonis is a pity case all to herself reminding the viewer of a voluntary case of Stockholm syndrome.
This carefully constructed flow of hate, anger, and violence is carried on right until the middle of the season until our main characters are finally able to escape the empire and its one city. At this point for whatever reason the entire equation of the show changes and the writers throw us into an entirely different sort of world and theme. The world outside the city is a dystopian wasteland, complete with western styled ghost towns, and vagabond motorcycle gangs straight out of the sci-fi novel Dune. This sharp contrast makes no sense and even up to the end of the show it’s not clear what Adonis and Doroka are doing.
Where are they going? What is their objective? What is the point of their new journey since escaping the eyes of the empire? The show doesn’t tell and we’re quickly shuttled from western styled ghost downs to desolate cities overrun with homicidal corpse fucking sex dolls. All of this leads up to an epic multi-episodic battle between a cybernetic assassin who just so happens to have killed some Naruto style ninjas before showing up. The show never does tell us why these characters are introduced, then killed, almost immediately, and for no apparent reason. I guess our deranged killer needed props for his entrance.
While all of this is happening Adonis and Doroka seem to be falling in love…somehow. I mean, he killed all of her witch friends and it’s comically stupid to begin with that she’s continuing to follow him and not holding a grudge for it but he seems to be softening too. There’s at least one living being he doesn’t seem to want to genocide and it happens to be Doroka! True love! The relationship is quickly sealed when Doroka gets her eyes ripped out and Adonois goes all Van Gogh and rips out and gifts her one of his eyes. All in all their relationship is toxic, abusive, and just comes out of nowhere for no reason.
By the end, through the power of love (of course, because this incredibly violent show has been about love), Adonis finds power through Doroka to become a badass witch with damn near unlimited power. He freezes an entire city, puts a continent into a icy hurricane storm, freezes his enemy, and then promises to restore Doroka’s vision. Here’s to new goals, I guess? Luckily, the evil witch/queen who started the series’s events seems to have a happy ending. Doroka and Adonis end on a loving relationship…somehow. I still don’t get it.
All in all the Kingdoms of Ruin is a wild ride up until the 5th episode and a real buzzkill after that until the end. It’s first season is rated 6.22/10 on My Anime List (MAL) and it was generally panned as part of the Fall 2023 Anime Season. Personally, I found it cool and interesting until they left the city. After that I struggled with it finding it boring, convoluted, plot-less, and incessantly stupid. It felt like after the mid season the studio stopped trying, the story gave up, and the puzzle pieces were just being forced together. I highly doubt it will receive a second season and to be honest I don’t think it deserves one.
Story & Plot: 🍣
The story stems from a light novel and one would think there would have been enough material to create a complete story but this anime is convoluted, confusing, and there really is no plot or story. The framework is there but there’s no real character development, there’s very little point to anything any of the characters do, and it’s dragged out too long. The entire tone and style of the show shifts by mid-season and does not expand well.
Animation Style: 🍣🍣🍣🍣
The animation is good and what I would expect from an anime. There’s no lazy use of CGI which is a pleasant surprise given how much studios like to use it these days. All the gore and bloody scenes are meticulously done and the studio certainly did well with it’s art style.
Voice Acting: 🍣🍣🍣🍣
The English voice actors did a great job on this one. There was a lot of emotion, a lot of screaming, a lot of tone inflections, I can’t see this one being easy on the voice talent.
Musical Score: 🍣🍣
Frankly, the musical score is not memorable. Neither the intro nor the outro is something worth watching more than once. There is some nice piano music during the ending scenes with Doroka and Adonis but the entire show wasn’t about music and didn’t try to use it.
