I'm not exactly sure why I stuck around with this series for 20 whole chapters when everyone else was wise enough to drop it sooner. I was anticipating a miraculous change in quality, but no, Redo of Healer stays the exact same throughout, showing nary a single sign of narrative or artistic progress. Considering the outrage around it I expected it to be another tame outrage-bait ecchi series like Uzaki-chan or Nagatoro with some sexual assault thrown in to draw a crowd. Everyone and their mother was hyping up Redo as "THE EDGIEST MANGA EVER!" which certainly got my attention. Some people were questioning how it even got an anime adaptation considering the controversial synopsis. I'll admit I was intrigued and gave it a look. I love graphic, controversial materials as I am a morbid and self-torturing person. But what it elicited from me wasn't trepidation or disgust, instead it was irritation and boredom.

From the very first chapters the author makes it clear how much they want to shock and disturb the audience in order to draw their attention, throwing our hero Keyaru into a gauntlet of rape and torture as he braves his way through mistreatment and abuse from a variety of indistinguishable antagonists. And when he formulates his plan he has to go through all of it ALL OVER AGAIN so he can get his revenge! From then on he begins to turn the tables and dish out karmic retribution through rape. But the problem with turning rape into a gimmick is how much it becomes trivialized when used by terrible writers. So much rape happens in Redo that it stops being shocking and starts being annoying after the fourth or fifth time. Keyaru gets raped over and over and over in increasingly depraved ways by increasingly despicable characters for introductory portions of the manga. At first it's horrifying to see him be a target of such acts, but the way the author uses it as a crutch to pad out a chapter instead of developing characters makes it lose the narrative potency they were going for. And when Keyaru enacts his revenge by having his enemies raped or by raping them himself it just stops being shocking at all and dives head-first into unintentional comedy territory. There's no self-awareness or introspection here at all. It goes without saying that rape is an immoral action and a serious topic for many writers, but it gets overused and worth thin within the first 10 chapters of the series. Characters rape as frequently as one would take a dump. It's just a thing that happens, without any weight or consequence after the beginning of the story. In fact, Keyaru gets stronger when he rapes or gets raped due to one of his convenient magical powers. It comes across as insulting and asinine more than anything else. I can understand why it might've been so provocative at first for a lot of people, but I doubt many people read past the first few chapters.

The unfortunate fact is that rape is all the author really has as a selling point for this series. Examining Redo of Healer at a glance while discarding the controversial aspects shows how painfully mediocre and hackneyed the series actually is. The art is substandard and never shows much progress. Even in some of the later chapters, the character designs and backgrounds look lazily thrown together and unfinished outside of fight scenes. Background characters would be drawn without faces or limbs or as abstract shapes half the time. Do you like weightless violence and bland, censored sex scenes? Because that's all you get with Redo. and However, because I am an idealistic man, I would never go as far as to call the author's artistic talents outright terrible. There's some potential for growth. Even with the bland fight choreography, the illustration quality noticeably improves during major events. The characters are quite emotive and expressive too, you can see the repulsion and shame on Keyaru's victims' faces whenever he rapes them.

From a story standpoint Redo is frustratingly bad. The worldbuilding is brushed aside in favor of unengaging fight scenes and more rape. Right off the bat we don't get a feel for the setting. There is nothing distinguishing it from, say any random fantasy anime setting from even the past 2 or 3 years. On the topic of unoriginality, every plot point and character has been done to death by the legions of uninspired isekai and fantasy series released in the past few years. Shield Hero, another Godawful self-insert power fantasy anime, did the revenge plot in more interesting and shocking ways despite being an embarrassing dumpster fire in and of itself. In Redo's case said revenge story is all but dropped by the 20th chapter as it morphs into a bland, childish harem melodrama with hardly a single likeable character to root for. Speaking of, the chapters should've been shorter. They drag on and on as Redo progresses, to the point the author fills pages with exposition about stuff that we already know about to reach the page quota. With the way the story jumps around erratically, there could've been more time to focus on a variety of different characters of aspects of the setting, but rape and angst are the main priorities on display.

Keyaru was compelling for all of 3 chapters before he became a generic sociopath who only succeeds because of his asspull powers. He's what happens when you take all the worst traits from every "overpowered mastermind" type of protagonist and combined it all into one smug, poorly written dipshit. He's basically a hybrid of Shield Hero (forgot his name idc) and Lelouch but if you removed every likeable trait from him and intensified his "I'm so crazy I'm putting my hand on my face and doing an insane face" qualities. His female orbiters aren't much better. The main girl starts out as an unlikeable self-righteous bitch who enslaves and exploits Keyaru until he rapes and brainwashes her into being a submissive waifu without a shred of personality. Her main trait after becoming his tool is that she really sucks at everything and cries at the slightest agitation, because tee-hee, she's a FEMALE, guys!. Keyaru's next harem member Setsuna the wolf girl is undoubtedly the best character in the series because she's good-hearted, badass and competent, and she's got a clear character arc about wanting to be stronger for noble reasons. If the series revolved around her I wouldn't even complain, she's extremely cool in general. I can't even name a single thing I liked about the demon chick, she's just so fucking boring and annoying. I don't remember her name at all, but she went from a brooding loner to a blubbering melodrama generator in the span of a single chapter as soon as Keyaru kickstarted her character arc. And the villains are hardly characters at all. They all boil down to being irredeemable sociopaths who put on a generic hero act in public but rape and murder behind the scenes so much you'd think they were auditioning for a role in Berserk. And of course it can't be a bottom of the barrel fantasy manga without the random evil Church that's relevant for all of 2 chapters. Did Garth Ennis ghostwrite this shit? (It would explain a lot, actually.)

The main selling point of Redo of Healer is the rape and violence, but the amateurish art and pathetic characterization holds it back from evoking any lasting feelings or standing amongst the most well-known shock manga. The entire reason people like me frequently engage with series like this is for the depraved, grotesque and offensive content. Redo's cavalcade of gore and sex is frustratingly tame, undetailed, and lacks any visceral quality. The best thing I can say about Redo is that the anime adaptation is significantly better than the manga. As of this review it's still airing but I'm actually enjoying the experience of watching the series over the monotonous trudge through the 20 chapters I read. The staff behind the anime is actually doing well to make Redo of Healer a bearable experience and I commend them highly for making the most of such a banal, amateurish source material.

Story - 1
Art - 4
Character - 3
Enjoyment - 2
Overall - 2