It's season two of Porn With Plot! Well, if you're watching the Blu-ray versions, anyway. The TV versions are tamer, although still hardly family-friendly. I'm tempted to recommend the latter, actually, since the show's storyline is actually very strong and it's a shame that's it's going out of its way to put off ordinary viewers.

The story involves heroes, demons, gods and the potential for horrors when the different realms overlap. They're not messing about. Season 1 had the good guys torturing someone to death... and that was a fairly modest response to what the guy had done to them first. The demon world's council regards the death of the entire population as good practice. At one point, our lovable sex maniac heroine Maria cuts off a baddie's hand and throws it at him. Then she does it again with the other one.

Thus the battles matter. The emotional stakes are high, with demon lords targeting Mio for being her late father's daughter. There's forgiveness for despairing former enemies. Mind you, there's one bit that's less extreme than I thought at first. In ep.3, we learn that a teacher would regularly rape his pupils and that another teacher "overlooked it out of consideration for a colleague". What's more, the overlooker is a sympathetic character. Fortunately, though, she means a different colleague (i.e. a fellow god) and the act she "overlooked out of consideration" was the brutal murder of the rapist. So that's okay, then. (One still wonders how long the sympathetic character knew about the rapist's actions without doing anything about them, though.)

It's a strong show. This can be demonstrated by comparing the main show (good) with its almost unwatchable OVA episode (bad). The latter's trying to play the show's disturbing sexual content for laughs. It has no drama, of course. It fails hard.

I can't not discuss the sex.

It's a light novel adaptation. You can tell because the hero, Basara, is cursed with armageddon-level superpowers that might make him the strongest being on the planet, forcing him to wear limiters to keep himself under control. Yeah, he's got it tough. It's not easy being awesome. Basara also has a harem of hot, busty women who'd die for him and they all have group sex together about once an episode. (The harem grows from three to five during this season. It's for magical reasons to make the girls stronger. Uh huh. Right.) Admittedly we never see any penetration and in the OVA episode Maria even says that Mio's a virgin, but the lengthy, detailed group sex scenes are indistinguishable from pornography. Oh, and later episodes show Basara regularly having one-on-one sex on the sly, not for magical power boosting reasons but simply because the two of them love each other. This doesn't interrupt the group sex. No one even gets jealous.

I don't mind light novel adaptations and I've enjoyed lots of them, but this fictional universe does revolve very obviously around Basara.

The sex scenes don't always even belong. One early episode shows us a lewd incident in lengthy detail before revealing that it was just Maria fantasising. Then we have some worrying aspects. The show's playing with incest, with Basara and Mio calling each other brother and sister even as he's doing X-rated things to her. They're not related by blood, of course. They're step-siblings. However Liala and Leohart are nearly as bad. The prologue of vol.7 of the light novels apparently makes them step-siblings too, but all I've seen is the anime. Meanwhile Maria's usual form is of a very underage schoolgirl (although she has others), but she's by far the show's most filthy-minded character. I also still dislike the dominance angle in the master-servant contracts Basara seals with his harem. His job is supposedly to make the girls "submit" to him.

Oh, and the art's basically okay, but I have a slight problem with how the characters' eyes are drawn. They can seem dead and insect-like. I think it's the pointy black outlines.

I like this show, but I also find it problematic. The porn scenes are distracting and the show can give you tonal whiplash, e.g. the OVA episode. Maybe I should have watched the TV version, but then I'd have just got annoyed by censor light beams and icons bouncing around the screen to hide the naughty bits. In its favour, though, this is a show you won't sleep through. One way or another, it'll grab your attention. Besides, I genuinely find the melodrama strong. Our heroes are capable of getting battered into the ground and really have to earn their victories. There are some pretty terrifying people in this universe. Zest's character arc is emotional (if you're coming into this from Season One). Yuki's degenerated into a bit of a joke character, but I basically like the characters and want them to be happy. In their fetish-fuelled way.