There’s a very specific comedic engine at work when a character’s every selfish, morally questionable decision accidentally makes the world better, and Holy Undead runs on that engine at full throttle from its opening minutes. It’s a familiar structure if you’ve read anything in the Eminence in Shadow lineage of self-aware power-fantasy comedy, but the twist here, a hated necromancer waking up as the very saint who should have been his enemy, gives it a sharper hook than most entries in that genre manage.
The game adapts an ongoing light novel series written by Baado and illustrated by Jinten, published under Visual Arts’ own KineticNovel imprint, with the source material already stretching to two volumes and counting by the time this visual novel adaptation arrived.
Frankel, full name Frankel=King of The Abyss=Lienwald, spent his entire first life as an unpopular, socially awkward outcast obsessed with the undead, hated by society and eventually killed by the heroes Cain and Flora. In a last, desperate bid at immortality, he casts a forbidden spell to become King of the Dead. It fails, or at least it fails to do what he intended, and instead he’s reborn as Yuricia, the literal daughter of the two heroes who killed him, carrying every memory of his previous life intact. What follows is a girl blessed with an absurd five saintly Gifts, including extraordinary healing power, using every one of them in service of a single, deeply un-saintly goal: rebuilding her collection of undead and clawing her way back toward necromancer glory.
The comedy leans almost entirely on that gap between Yuricia’s intentions and how everyone around her interprets them. Her healing magic gets used to bulk up her own power rather than help anyone selflessly, she evaluates people based on their “compatibility with the undead” rather than any normal metric of character, and she’s got a standing, only half-joking policy that attractive men should simply die. None of it reads as villainous in practice, because every scheme somehow tips over into accidentally saving someone or fixing a problem she wasn’t trying to solve, and the found-family cast around her just chalks the whole pattern up to endearing eccentricity. It’s a well-worn comedic shape, misunderstanding compounding into misunderstanding until the joke practically writes itself, but the specificity of Yuricia’s particular brand of selfishness keeps individual scenes feeling fresh rather than formulaic.
The supporting cast gives the joke room to breathe, and it’s a larger cast than a quick glance at the premise suggests. Nebula, the King of Twilight in his prior life under the name Nebulos, gets cursed by Yuricia into crossdressing and remains a pitiable, put-upon presence throughout as her maid, less a rival than a long-suffering associate dragged along for the ride despite excelling at intelligence gathering and interpersonal maneuvering when it actually matters. Swordmaster Wolferos Garo, nicknamed Wolfe, carries a heavier backstory than the comedy around him initially lets on, the last surviving member of the Garo tribe, a wolf-eared and tailed former gladiator slave who lost his sister when a neighboring empire destroyed his homeland. The doting, sister-obsessed Alexei rounds out the cluster of young men drawn helplessly toward Yuricia’s beauty, entirely oblivious to the fact that the girl they’re smitten with used to be the monster their world feared most. Pina Cruz enters the story once Yuricia begins attending Libertacolina Academy, a commoner admitted on a special talent slot for her piano playing, self-conscious about a mark on her face she hides behind her hair until Yuricia’s own power erases it entirely. The dramatic irony baked into every one of these relationships is really the engine keeping the comedy running scene to scene.
As a kinetic novel, there’s no branching structure here, and that suits a story built around escalating comedic misunderstanding rather than player-shaped outcomes. The pacing stays brisk, moving from one Yuricia scheme to the next without dwelling too long in any single setup, which works in the story’s favor given how repetitive the “she’s secretly a menace but everyone adores her anyway” premise could become if it slowed down to justify itself. The game is entirely all-ages too, with no adults-only content anywhere in the release, which tracks with how much of its humor depends on innocent misreading rather than anything more explicit.
Visually, art director Koizumi Amane, known for work on Loopers and Hoshi Ori Yume Mirai, gives Yuricia and the cast a clean, expressive style that leans into the story’s comedic energy without undercutting the softer, sincerer beats scattered throughout. Composer Tenkyuu Hisashi’s score, also carrying over experience from Loopers and Lunaria, supports the tonal whiplash between slapstick and genuine warmth competently. The full Japanese voice cast, led by Hasegawa Ikumi as Yuricia and Kuwahara Yuuki as Nebula, sells the character work well, particularly Yuricia’s ability to sound genuinely saintly one line and utterly unhinged the next without the tonal shift feeling jarring. Murakami Yuya voices Frankel specifically during the flashback material covering his past life, Okumura Shou voices Wolferos, and Igoma Yurie voices Pina, with a wider rotating cast including Takako Tanaka, Shuto Yukina, and Hikaru Iida rounding out named side characters. A separate read-aloud voice drama production, cast announced back in April 2023, gave the light novel source material its own audio adaptation well before this visual novel version existed.
Worth noting for anyone trying to track this one down: Holy Undead was originally slated for a worldwide Steam release in English, Japanese, and Chinese on December 20, 2024, only to be delisted from the platform a week before launch. It ended up released through DLsite in Japan and later became available to Western audiences through the JAST Store instead, an unusual distribution hiccup for a title backed by a studio with Visual Arts’ pedigree.
Verdict
Holy Undead takes a well-trodden “secretly a villain, accidentally a hero” comedic premise and gives it real bite by making its protagonist’s selfishness specific and consistent rather than a vague personality quirk. The kinetic structure keeps the jokes moving at a brisk pace, and a strong cast, both written and voiced, carries the dramatic irony at the heart of every scene, from Nebula’s long-suffering maid duties to Wolferos’s buried grief and Pina’s quiet insecurity. It won’t reinvent the genre it’s working in, but it’s a confidently executed, funny entry in it.
