Review of Redo of Healer

Controversy, trashy writing and an incel power fantasy. That was the brief description the Internet gave me before I started watching Redo Of Healer. In my experience, controversy is usually well deserved or completely overblown. Well, this does live up to the controversy (the uncut version at least) but it actually begins as a fairly interesting dark fantasy show. It reminded a of one those late night Cable TV shows from HBO or Starz where adults are clearly the target audience. Personally, I don't mind explicit scenes if the story is decent and they're justifiable by the context. Throughout the first few episodes I was fairlyinvolved and thought the show had gotten a reputation it didn't deserve. I actually respected the show for being both graphic and having a main character that wasn't a black and white hero/villain. Even if it did become tasteless or over the top at times you could at least look at it in a similar way as one of those trashy, low budget action films where it still had entertainment value. However, around episode 7 the show started to lose focus and the episodes became formulaic. My suspicion is that because the season only had twelve episodes they had to wrap up story lines early, so they messed with the pacing by cutting a lot of content so they could wind everything up by the last episode.

Here are my main issues with the show, besides the aforementioned pacing problems and 'offensive' content that's already been discussed to death:
1. Keyaru is so overpowered that it was entertaining at the start, but gradually just became annoying. The best comparison I can give to illustrate this is Steven Seagal. Ever seen one of his action films from the 90's? You watch the bad guys commit their evil deeds but they are presented as a legitimate threat to the audience. Then Seagal comes in and once they fight he demolishes them. Its presented as an even fight at the start and maybe they cut him once with a knife (avoiding all major organs) or land one or two punches, but the tables turn quick and it ends up being completely one sided. That's almost every battle in this show. Keyaru has to 'overcome the odds' which usually involves him ending the fight using some magic spell that we've never seen before. It gets old quick, at least the fight scenes are well animated and somewhat fun to watch.

2. The characters and world-building. The world is very generic with the usual demons and magical humans fantasy tropes, not very interesting. We're only given glimpses of something 'bigger' going on behind the scenes. We do get some background on the main characters but there's minimal character development, even the MC shows barely any development after the first few episodes (outside of his revenge fantasy).

3. Sex scenes. I'm not usually bothered by them but it these were just pointless. I guess they have to appeal to a *certain* demographic but there was so many over the course of the series that it was plain boring. I ended up just crossing my arms waiting for them to finish (heh) and sighing in relief when the actual story started up again. It was jarring going from a scene where Keyaru is making a business deal to his harem suddenly crying in unison 'LETS HAVE SEX MASTER', followed by the sex god himself self-inser- *cough* Keyaru showing his elite love-making skills for two minutes. The last episode alone was literally 10 minutes of sex scenes; when the show is already hurting for time it becomes ridiculous, like just cut that nonsense down.

If the sex scenes were toned down, and more focus was put on the actual characters and story lines this would have been far better received. I'd say 2/3rds of Redo of Healer is fine as is, and the other third is just trashy garbage that wouldn't impact it in any meaningful way if it was removed.