I briefly considered burying the lede at the beginning of this review as a joke by acting like Immoral Guild was some decently distinctive little fantasy sitcom if not for just one little caveat that I forgot to mention. But that's disingenuous. It does put "Immoral" right there in the title, after all, and makes no secret what it's all about from the first second of its first episode. So here it is: Immoral Guild is a horny anime. How horny? I have a section of this review dedicated to discussing the extent of the broadcast censorship deployed for this release. That's the kind of show this is.

The particular kind of content being discussed here also merits a heads-up. That is, Immoral Guild's primary draw for fantasy fanservice comes in the form of its characters being sexually used and abused following defeat by any given entry in this messed-up monster manual. Honestly, I don't see a point in attempting to take this to task, as non-consensual monster molestation is one of the oldest fetishes ever committed to Japanese art, a strain of content considered classic or downright vanilla compared to the sorts of things the modern stable of H-artists get up to. As such, my highlighting of it here, and the show itself throwing it at you first-thing serves to not waste the audience's time: Unless you are interested, or at the very least unbothered, by seeing anime adventurers strung up by tentacles, slathered by slimes, or ganged up on by oddly enterprising little rabbits, anything else Immoral Guild has to offer won't really work for you.

The unabashed approach to this cacophony of lurid content might not be that surprising, given that director Takuya Asaoka's last team-up with studio TNK was the similarly illicitly infamous Redo of Healer. Of course, the similarities end beyond the staff and the raw presence of perverse content. Immoral Guild is a comedy, and so in my always preferred parlance, its shenanigans swing towards the cheeky and fun end of the spectrum, versus Redo of Healer, whose shenanigans favored the cruel and tragic. Whereas sexual assault in Redo of Healer was a grave act perpetuated as a component of the cycle of vengeance, in Immoral Guild, it's but a mildly embarrassing inconvenience.

Again, you've just got to roll with it, something you'll find easy enough to do if you're already on board with Immoral Guild's breezy brand of battling this bad-touch bestiary. It is of that breed of explicit ecchi comedy, where each sequence of growling groping or tentacle torture serves as the punch-line to a given setup. These aren't framed like "scenes," as in straight-up pornography. It rarely lasts that long or is otherwise intercut with other dialogue, which plays off the series' goofy tone. And credit where it's due, the show sometimes stumbles ass and/or tits first into something that works. Maybe you're not especially aroused watching white mage Maidena get strung up by salacious bird tentacles. But the bit immediately before when she attempts to signal Hitamuki for help, only for the latter to obliviously wave it off with a "looks like she's having fun," provoked a genuine, nearly guilt-free laugh from me.

That's the trick with Immoral Guild, that even with the in-your-face inclusion of fanservice, it's still primarily a comedy through and through. It's dedicated to that with how each of its characters embodies different jokes. Hitamuki is the clumsy, ineffectual one who most commonly stumbles into the creature discomforts. But then you've got Hanabata, the super-strong warrior whose "Berserker" skill turns her into a drunken doofus all too eager to use her strength to put leading man Kikuru in some hurtful hugs. On that note, the series seems to attempt to be a little more equal opportunity in its horny humiliation. Kikuru is on the receiving end of those spine-shattering shows of affection from Hanabata, and the show later introduces Noma, the soft-boy red mage who discovers that anime tentacles do, in fact, take on all comers.

So not only is there a variety of ecchi content (more so than in something like Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World, for instance), but it's sandwiched between a selection of "regular" comedy, which comes off slightly better because it's not playing off angles of anguish. The series genuinely works well when pitching for more "good-natured" bawdiness, like Guild receptionist Enome's daughter Esyne trying to get her mom and Kikuru to hook up. Other characters let their competing levels of competence play off each other. Even the occasional escalation of magical fanservice between some of them fits with those ribald sensibilities the show made clear from frame one. Still, there's plenty of dissonance in Immoral Guild's inability to not take glee in its more discomforting dalliances. We'll happily follow Kikuru and Hitamuki on a lightly goofy date that is supposed to communicate a genuinely appreciative bond, only to stop short so we can watch the dog girl get tied up and sexually humiliated by grade schoolers. And if that's the sort of fictional fixation you're okay with, you probably weren't waiting for a review to take the plunge on this show, were you?

Yes, some decently effectual comedy is nestled into Immoral Guild's folds, and other parts of how it's put together can be surprisingly high-effort. The world-building isn't bad, for one, eschewing virtually any of the modern-era "fantasy world that functions like an in-universe RPG complete with stat sheets" presentation save for some old-school game menu flourishes. Instead, you get a genuinely unique setup of a fantasy land further evolved into a "future" where RPG archetypes have smartphones and video games. Much of it seems in service of comedic convenience, alongside some detailing of mana systems which exhaustively explain why the monsters seem so keen on sexing up adventurers in the first place. But even then, it still smacks of trying more than you might expect from something in either the modern fantasy anime or ecchi comedy frameworks, embodied in main character Kikuru having, like, an actual character design, rather than defaulting to the bog-standard isekai/harem protagonist template. You know the one.

But all that doubles back to the show's apparent catch-22. The decently drawn aspects of the story, characters, and concepts that might prove amusing to general audiences will see them shunned by the show's opening trivializations of sexual assault for titillation. The irony is that the enterprising perverts tuning in specifically for that, who might even welcome the series gatekeeping its content from more casual viewers, will be left wanting by the version rolled out here. That's right. I told you we'd be talking about censorship. I'm not sure what terms Sentai and HIDIVE negotiated for getting this particular broadcast version of Immoral Guild months after it aired, and it's far from the most obscured of this brand of Buy Our Blu-rays Brigade. I daresay, approaching it purely academically, I assure you, some of the fanservice still works even with those big ol' blockers barricading all the brazen bits. But it remains a sub-optimal experience for those who know they're here for this content. Sure, you all know where to look up uncut versions of those critical clips, but it honestly feels disingenuous to discuss cutting out the other 75% of the show since those parts aren't all bad!

From a critical standpoint, Immoral Guild could have turned out much worse. Yes, its heart is in absolutely the wrong place with its flippant depictions of random encounters gone wrong. It's quickly confirmed as skippable for anyone who doesn't saddle in for that flavor of fanservice. For those on board with the simple premise of "Laugh at stupid adventurers, see some boobs," you've probably already contended with HIDIVE's oddly edging release schedule for this thing and come away frustrated that you didn't even get to see all of the boobs! It's stupid in a way that makes a general streaming release for something like this arguably disposable but at least inoffensive. I mean, for a given value of inoffensive. Maybe catch a couple of episodes to see if it blows your particular skirt up, then decide to wait for the Blu-ray release. And if you end up being down with it entirely for the comedic content, well, lucky you.