ANIME: Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! // KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World! (2016) - Quick Review

  Disclaimer: All of this is just my opinion based on my experiences watching KonoSuba. I hope you enjoy!

• Studio: Deen
• Source: Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! (light novel by Mishima Kurone and Akatsuki Natsume)
• Episodes: 11
• Genres: Adventure, Comedy, Parody, Supernatural, Fantasy

Summary: After dying a laughable and pathetic death on his way back from buying a game, high school student and recluse Kazuma Satou finds himself sitting before a beautiful but obnoxious goddess named Aqua. She provides the NEET with two options: continue on to heaven or reincarnate in every gamer's dream—a real fantasy world! Choosing to start a new life, Kazuma is quickly tasked with defeating a Demon King who is terrorizing villages. But before he goes, he can choose one item of any kind to aid him in his quest, and the future hero selects Aqua. But Kazuma has made a grave mistake—Aqua is completely useless!

Unfortunately, their troubles don't end here; it turns out that living in such a world is far different from how it plays out in a game. Instead of going on a thrilling adventure, the duo must first work to pay for their living expenses. Indeed, their misfortunes have only just begun!

(From MyAnimeList) 

My thoughts (spoilers towards the end)

God, why do I do this with myself. I have a good sixth sense about things that are going to disappoint me. I've never seen a good isekai before. The characters were way too overhyped. It's one of the favorite anime of a specific person I know, which should be a huge red flag. And still I subjected myself to watch this godawful anime even though I have so many others to choose from. At least now I can say that I've watched the famous KonoSuba and that I do have reasons to hate it.

Alright, alright, maybe hate is a bit too strong. The emotion I feel is better described as apathy pending towards distaste. But still, there are reasons why this anime was so popular, so I will try to be good for once and start with the positive things about KonoSuba. 

The character design of the main four is pretty solid and easily recognizable, so much that I already knew two of the protagonists just from cosplay pics circulating the internet. They are colorful and say a lot about the archetypes of each individual, keeping the unnecessary detail to a minimum while also remaining visually interesting. The subversion of expectations regarding the common tropes of isekai was also very clever at first, and I enjoyed the irony of the powerful allies of Kazuma in reality disturbing more than helping. This, combined with cute girls and cute personalities made the protagonists easily likeable.

...And that's pretty much it. Now I can be back to being mean. 

KonoSuba started as a nice concept, and stayed as a nice concept only because in practice things quickly went downhill. The characters were one-sided and never changed, and most of the jokes made at their expense were repeated so much that they stopped being funny by episode four. The rest of the "fun parts" was delegated to perverted jokes and scenarios that, as always, were more fanservice than actual comedy. 

And if there's something that I hate more than bad worldbuilding, more than infodumps, is unnecessary ecchi. I won't even enter the topic of male gaze, the objectifying of women in media and the consequences of all of that to real problems in Japan. But it's just disgusting. And there's two whole episodes in which the entirety of the plot were sexual themes, which of course painted the whole situation as nothing serious just for shits and giggles instead of the sexual harassment that it would be in real life. I don't even need to say that I skipped basically all of those two episodes. 

This trope, which is really common in isekai, is completely overused and was never funny in the first place, specially to people who have braincells and actually interacted with any woman except their mothers during their life. And the truth is, besides weak comedy, cute girls and creepy situations involving Kazuma, KonoSuba doesn't have anything else to sell.

The plot, if you can even call it that, is forgotten most of the time and revived quickly in random moments just to remind us that the show is not just about fanservice and is, in fact, trying to go somewhere. I mostly ignored it because I know it will take too long for it to get to the demon king, if it gets there at all, and consequently the more serious action scenes became very boring. I skipped all of it because there were never real stakes, it's a comedy anime for fuck's sake, so if anything happens it will either be solved in a dumb way or have no real consequences at all.

There could've been an attempt to develop the characters, specially when Kazuma died that one episode, but instead all it happened was a weird monologue Kazuma had about that goddess feeling grief by his death that was never touched upon again and that was it. There was also the reveal that Darkness was from a noble family, I guess, but I don't even remember the point of that so let's keep going.

Besides the main four, the secondary characters are even more one-dimensional and boring. I hated that some of them were introduced by Kazuma as "oh yeah, this is a person we met some days ago when we did something", so the fun of seeing the characters interact for the first time is completely lost. There's nothing wrong in keeping one or two first meetings off screen, but doing this to every single character that ended up being important for the episode just made me think "alright, why the fuck should I care?".

There's not much else to acknowledge here, because nothing happens in the whole ten episodes of KonoSuba. I skipped the whole ending after the battle against that big machine because it was boring, and then went to vent off my frustrations on twitter and read Tokyo Revengers to purge the poison out of my system. The most fun I had in the whole thing were the first few episodes, mostly because there was still the allure of characters yet to meet and those first interactions. 

KonoSuba is shallow and a bad comedy at worst and mediocre at best. I honestly have no idea how the creators still have content to continue this series, seeing as there was empty space in a 10 episode anime, but for some reason people still watch this shit. I get it, the girls are cute and people consider them their waifus I guess, which is kind of cringe if you ask me but I'll not kinkshame anyone. But it's still the kind of thing that you have to turn off your brain in order to watch it without skipping or I don't know, sleeping through. 

KonoSuba gets a 3/10 from me. I'm out.