The greatest praise I can come up with for Demon Lord 2099 is that it's solid. Every aspect of it is competently executed, without any one part that really stands out from the others for better or for worse. The peaks are more like gently sloping knolls, and the valleys are slight dips. It is, to be honest, like trying to write a review of a wood block. You know, the kind you find in preschool classrooms: sturdy, useful, but not a lot of features worth noting. And yet, I want to encourage people to give the series a shot, and thus I shall write a review.

Demon Lord 2099 is yet another play on the question of what comes after the Hero defeats the Demon Lord in a Dragon Quest-esque setting. It works largely within the tropes of the subgenre: the Demon Lord revives after some time by one of his loyal followers and finds the world transformed. He's a fish out of water and must learn to survive this brave new world. He encounters the Hero, who himself is transformed by the world in some way… or left behind by it. Eventually, the two must work together to bring down some kind of threat that relates to their shared past. And yes, in case you were wondering, my use of cliches there is intentional; why should I find new turns of phrase when the creators of the story didn't?

In this case, the Demon Lord is named Veltol Velvet Velsvalt (say that five times fast), the Hero is named Gram, and his loyal follower is Machina. The transformed world is Shinjuku, a cyberpunk city-state that melds magic and technology. Veltol learns to survive by becoming a video game streamer. It really does feel a bit like fill-in-the-blank to describe, but the execution is solid enough, with sufficient surprises here and there, that it kept my attention consistently throughout. Hung around the skeleton of established genre tropes is an engaging cyberpunk mystery.

Well, that's what the story is about for seven episodes. The first arc resolves and the back fifth switches gears to the second novel, which takes place in Akihabara, reimagined as a city-state where magic dominates one half and technology reigns in the other. Veltol, Machina, and Takahashi enroll in school in an attempt to track down one of the remaining generals. It's weaker than the first arc, though buoyed by the main cast's chemistry and some entertaining secondary characters. I can only assume that the novel pacing left the adaptation team in a hard place: either pad out the first arc to stretch it into twelve episodes, or condense the first two arcs down and leave some content out. I do wish they'd gone with the former instead of the latter – the characters were fun enough that I wouldn't have minded spending some time just hanging out with them. Instead, it feels like some character beats were just left out.

Which is too bad, because the characters and their dynamic is definitely the strength of the series. Like the story, they function mostly within archetypes, but with just enough of a shift to keep them from feeling stolid. Demon Lord 2099 identifies points of inherent melancholy to the situation, like Machina living in poverty after Veltol's downfall, and uses them to imbue the story with just enough pathos that feels right for the situation. Still, there were places I felt like it could have pushed on it more, such as Gram's life for the intervening centuries from his confrontation with Veltol to the present day. I get the feeling that was part of the cut content.

Not that this is a tragedy; not in the least. Veltol, Machina, and Takahashi's dynamic as a trio brings life to the proceedings. Veltol himself is a fun protagonist, with his mix of arrogance, charisma, compassion, self-servingness, and ignorance of the modern world; alone he would be fine, but with the script as written, he bounces off of Machina's hardy pragmatism and devotion; and Takahashi's brash savviness. The script mixes goofiness and pensiveness in nearly-equal measure in a way that allows each one to bolster the other rather than undercut each other. The voice cast is equally strong in English and Japanese, albeit with different standouts; Daisuke Namikawa brought the necessary pathos to make Gram as a character work in Japanese, and Ian Sinclair's has just the right balance of silliness and swagger in his performance as Veltol.

The design work also pulls its weight when it comes to visual storytelling. Shinjuku teems with shifting bodies in the neon darkness, as every good cyberpunk setting should. Akihabara had less visual personality, but was still believable as a city split in twain. The character designs are attractive – I appreciated that just as much effort went into making Veltol and Gram beautiful as Machina and Takahashi – and do a solid job using signifiers to convey what kind of person each character is, but they're also a bit over-detailed. As a result, the animation suffers, even if strong direction and storyboarding keeps the visual style from floundering. Fluidity is sacrificed in order to keep characters on-model often enough that the production would have been well-served with some streamlining. In the most egregious case, the entire climax of the Shinjuku arc is characters talking at each other, when some action would have injected some much-needed energy into the proceedings.

My final criterion for judging an anime is a question I can't be sure of the answer of until months or even years after the fact: once I upload my review, will I ever think of it again? If I come across it later, will I have an emotion about it beyond, “Oh yeah, I watched that, didn't I?” For all that I thoroughly enjoyed Demon Lord 2099 while watching it, I don't know if it's one that will stick in memory. It's a bit too tidy, with neither the emotional power of a masterpiece nor the immediacy of raw sincerity. It's simply better-than-average: a basic blueprint solidly constructed out of decent quality materials.