It may be tempting to dismiss Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells. The wordy title alone promises a series that offers little originality, considering how many isekai and non-isekai LitRPG series operate on an almost identical premise. Watching the first episode also does little to separate it from other revenge isekai series like Arifureta. With the glut of similar stories coming out these days, how could Failure Frame set itself apart enough to attract anyone but the kind of fans who consume the genre indiscriminately? As it turns out, it can by having a nose for systems of oppression, and a cool leopard-headed warrior lady.

The thing is, Mimori Touka isn't simply bullied. He grew up in a physically abusive household, illustrated by multiple flashbacks to him as a child, ragged and cowering away from his father. He learned to hide in plain sight by eliminating his personality, and now his classmates consider himself below even paying enough attention to torment. When his class gets summoned to another world and drafted into being heroes fighting for a cause that the goddess Vicius can't or won't explain, their skills get ranked from S-class to E-class. Touka, as an E-class summon with a special skill inflicting status effects that Vicius insists hardly ever works, is consigned to the ominously-named Ruins of Disposal so he wouldn't drag his classmates down.

The odds of Touka's survival seem slim, but survive he does, rapidly leveling up by paralyzing and poisoning the monsters of the ruins one after another. Once he escapes, he embarks on a quest of revenge against Vicius. On his way, he encounters a slime being picked on by bigger slimes that he dubs Piggymaru; Seras, an elf warrior maiden who must hide her identity because the king was so maddened by her beauty that he's sending attackers after her to kill her before someone else can take her beauty; Eve Speed, a leopard-woman consigned to fight in the gladiatorial arena; and Lisbeth, a dark elf child who Eve is fighting to protect.

It shouldn't set Failure Frame apart that Touka doesn't take any of these characters as his slave, but it does. Rather than coming up with reasons for characters to be magically bound to him, even willingly, the narrative offers a much simpler explanation: Touka's life experiences have created in him a profound sense of justice and desire to protect others who face institutional oppression. That inspires loyalty in those he assists. Despite the rest of his party being female, it doesn't stink of harem dynamics; neither Eve nor Lis seem remotely interested in Touka that way, nor are they treated as sexual objects by the camera. Once again, the fact that Touka doesn't indulge a fantasy of becoming an oppressor in this new world, even an enlightened one, shouldn't be unique, but it is! Meanwhile, his classmates are trapped in the same old patterns of vying for power, made even worse by the fact that now they're being exploited to fight and die. It's an unusually thoughtful approach that made the experience of watching it much more tolerable than I initially anticipated.

Does that make Failure Frame a good show? Heck no! Not even close!

Like most series where a character is assigned a supposedly weak or useless skill, Touka's status effect skill is ludicrously powerful. Vicius tells him that status effect magic rarely works, yet he walks effortlessly through scores of enemies, paralyzing and poisoning them. His spells never miss once, not even against powerful foes. The action turns laughable, completely free of tension as over and over he holds up his hand and shouts, “Paralyze! Poison!” ad nauseam, his level ticking up into the thousands as his classmates have yet to even break into the triple digits.

And I do mean “to the point of nausea” because it is simply awful to look at. Some scenes are so dark that if there's even the slightest bit of glare on the screen, it's impossible to see what's happening; just watching the episode triggered a migraine for my friend. For the first half of the series, about half the cuts were in awkward CG – anything more demanding than characters standing still and talking is animated using poorly-integrated CG models. It starts to hit the point of being so bad it's funny, watching the hand-drawn characters switch over to PS2 sprites to gesture, sit down, stand… anything.

This also seems to take place in one of those settings where everyone except the protagonist and his allies are mean and stupid for no good reason other than to make the hero look better by comparison. Every man they meet other than Touka wants nothing more than to rape Seras and, despite her ostensibly being one of the strongest swordswomen in the country, many of them come close. Whenever Touka fells one with his supposedly-ineffective spells, the camera lingers on their faces as they stare up at him, their eyes turning red as they are unable to move, no matter how he gloats over their bodies and the poison slowly drains their lives away. If Seras didn't have her sword, the villains would still be at risk of cutting themselves on the oh-so-edgy storytelling.

Things do improve a bit in the second half. The CG becomes much rarer, reserved mostly for monsters and action scenes rather than every little mundane moment. Eve and Lis joining the cast makes things more tolerable as well, because Touka and Seras' dynamic is borderline intolerable. Rarely have I seen such a chemistry-free excuse for a romance, as Seras has only two modes: cool warrior maiden and blushing, bashful maiden. While Eve isn't exactly complex, she's undeniably cool, and having a major female character who isn't aggressively sexualized is positively novel in stories of this genre.

Still, it can never fully escape its visual and storytelling sins. The backgrounds are downright awful, photographs with filters slapped over them that the characters never mesh with. They don't even try to disguise that the arena Eve fights in is the Colosseum – one of the most famous architectural structures in the world. The costume design is no better; Touka's take on the requisite black trenchcoat is ill-fitted, which combined with the poor fabric physics of the CG models, makes him look like he's wearing a trashbag. Seras looks like she's wearing sanitary pads over nipples. Once again, the only one spared is Eve, who dons practical, well-designed armor.

As one final “screw you,” the world also seethes with homophobia. Just as every male villain is a rapist, every female villain is a lesbian. Vicius' disciple Nyantan kneels and licks her foot; Touka's only friend in his class, Kobato, gets her breast grabbed by her manipulative, predatory classmate Asagi. There is, as far as I can tell, little reason for these scenes to be included except perhaps to give women a chance to be sexual predators as well. It adds nothing, portraying gay women as evil perverts preying on innocent heterosexuals. Considering how vulnerable LGBT people are across the world and the growing tide of homophobia, it flies in the face of how the story wants to be about defending those who have been abandoned by society.

There are good things about Failure Frame: the lack of harem dynamics or slavery apologism, and a genuine interest in defending the oppressed. However, its fatal flaws, including boring action, ugly and overused CG, a nonsensical victim mentality, the typical LitRPG isekai framing, and entrenched homophobia, make it a failure.