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canvaswolfdoll · 5 years

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CanvasWatches: KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World!

You know what was a surprisingly nice discovery? Crunchyroll has the english dub of the first… season? Cour? First ten episodes of KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World! (also known and henceforth referred to as KonoSuba) with the english dub. How magnanimous of the Dub-unfriendly service.

Konosuba was a pleasant follow-up to Kill la Kill (the review of which I’d been struggling with as I write this essay, so we’ll see if anything from that materializes). The network of Youtube Anime Reviewers had decided this was real good and funny and is worth the time. And, hey, I did have that free month courtesy of Twitch Prime, I might as well![1]

I thought it was fine! But the massive hype might’ve dragged it down. Comedy’s difficult. A lot relies on the unexpected, so if you prime viewers with “It’s really funny,” you raise critical expectations, which can undercut the weaker material.

Or maybe I’m too much of a comedic writer to get the full effect. Learned to read set-ups and such.

But I can recommend it if you have access and are interested. You won’t be disappointed.

Possibly another hurdle to my enjoyment is I went in intending to mine ideas for my own works. Spoofing RPGs and such is something I’ve long been wanting to set my skills towards, and it’s not always clear the best way to interpret mechanics.

Anyways, Konosuba has decided to parody the increasingly popular isekai[3] genre.

First ingredient: an average loser everyman for the viewer to project on. Filling the role is Kazuma Sato.[5] He goes out to buy a video game, decides to save a girl’s life from a perceived threat, and dies.

So, he needs to be reincarnated. As part of the typical Isekai set-up, he’s allowed to ask for whatever he needs to make himself massively overpowered.

So he takes Aqua, the sassy goddess offering him the choice.

This is the point where the typical formula breaks down. Kazuma has no notable advantages, and Aqua isn’t actually competent. Thus, we spend the 10 episodes stuck in the starting town of the pseudo-video game world.

So, when you throw someone into a video game or (less commonly) TRPG world, there’s the question of how to depict the actual GUI and game mechanics.

There’s the Sword Art Online and Log Horizon method, where the mechanics and their relationship with the world is unchanged, including the “players” being able to pull up a system menu to do… system menu things.

On the other end, we have Overlord, where the menu and other visuals vanish, and the tasks they accomplished must either be intuited by those translated into the world, or become part of their innate knowledge.

KonoSuba has everyone talk about the mechanics and such freely (in a tutorial NPC sort of way), but the menu has been replaced by an Adventurers ID, which shows stats and allows the adventurers to swipe and learn skills. Functional and easy for the viewer to accept.[6]

From this starting point, we have Aqua as the healer, and Kazuma as… an unclear role. He learns a Steal skill early, but he then starts learning magic, so he’s a bit of a Jack-of-all-Trades. The show’s not shy about the Master of None side of that, because the only decent stat our protagonist has is Luck, which counts just enough for him not to die and get the crucial things to fall in his lap.

Such crucial things include a Mage (who refuses to cast any spell except an excessive explosion spell) named Megumin, and a Tank-Fighter (who is… rather excited to take damage) named Darkness. Not the ideal companions, but functional.

But that also means we don’t have a straight Rouge, so I’m required to be salty about that.

Kazuma attempts to build a sustainable and fulfilling life, but the quests available are either above his capabilities or menial labor. Because life is more funny whenever things don’t go well for the hero.

The first three episodes are dedicated to establishing the setting and the characters, and aren’t actually that funny. Yes, there are things I can identify as attempts at comedy, but they’re modest attempts that don’t really build to a satisfying laugh. Kazuma’s attempt at straight-manning the shenanigans of his allies is restricted to complaining and feeling put upon, which flattens the funny moment by drawing attention to how wacky it’s meant to be.

Episode four, however, finally introduces a desperately needed element: a victim. In the form of a Dullahan who is up to his nonexistent neck with annoyance at Megumin casting a daily explosion spell on his castle.

His attempts at intimidation fall flat due to the apathy of our main party, and then Darkness steps in with her masochism, which bewilders him. He casts a death curse on Darkness, to her delight, and rides off to await Megumin to fight him in his castle.

Aqua then casually removes the curse, and our party forgets about the encounter.

A character desperately trying to do his job in spite of the ideocentricies of the main cast is much funnier than a character that just complains.

Comedy works better when it builds off what is established in narrative than over-relying on meta-knowledge and lampshade hanging. Those things have their place, but they work better as augmenting jokes or to speed up delivery, not as whole jokes themselves.

The next episode does a better job in that respect by introducing another guy with the same deal as Kazuma, except he’s a more traditional Isekai protagonist, and thus kind of a loser NEET. He also chose a massively overpowered sword instead of Aqua, and is doing better because of it.

Kazuma easily outwits him, steals the sword, and fences it. This sets a stronger character base for Kazuma: a genre savvy jerk willing to exploit the world around him for a quick buck. It turns him from a put-upon everyman into a jerk able to cause the same sort of chaos as the rest of his party.

Unfortunately, such moments are few and far between, as the rest of the season has Kazuma back to being a useless whiner. We do get closure with the Dullahan, which showcases Kazuma is actually pretty good at analytical thinking and tactics, but lacks the personal capabilities to actually fight.

The show then introduces an important character (a lich named Wiz) in a manner that clearly cut segments from the source material that, if shown in full, probably would’ve strengthened the rest of the story.

Instead, that time is used for an episode where Kazuma patronizes a succubus business that offers customized dreams. We watch an extended Q&A segment that raises uneasy implications about Kazuma’s predilections, then an uncomfortable encounter between him and Darkness which I don’t know how to fairly judge, since Kazuma is forcing Darkness into foreplay and intends to go further, but he thinks it’s a dream while Darkness doesn’t know that and thinks he’s being forceful, but she also could very easily overpower him and the show’s established…

Look, episode 9 should’ve been cut and I don’t wish to dwell on it any further.[7]

Anyways, the fall-out of that adventure is suddenly ignored as Howl’s Moving Castle (Dark Edition) lurches towards the town. Deary dear.

It belongs to the Dark Lord, though the exact nature of it and it’s controller is rather ambiguous. But it’s scary, powerful, and has immense defense. What will the town do?

Fortunately, Kazuma’s surprisingly powerful party and his tactical scheming allows them to stop it. However, in true villain lair fashion, the moving fortress starts a self destruct sequence. So now that needs to be addressed.

While searching the place to figure out how to deactivate it, Kazuma finds the corpse of the builder/driver with his diary.

Turns out, the guy was hired to build it, but thought the requirements were excessive and he didn’t really want to do the job. So he told his employers he needed a rare relic to power it, thinking it’d never get supplied.

The relic gets supplied.

So he builds the fortress, turns it on, and immediately loses control. The fortress goes on an unstoppable rampage as the builder is stuck inside. Oops. So he just kind of kept bluffing his way along.

Which tells us something crucial about this world: it runs on a narrativium fueled by malicious luck. Kazuma’s form of luck is not unique, wherein he is only fortunate enough for the next inconvenience to come along. He gets a rent-free manor not because he particularly deserves it, but because fate demands he be able to survive the winter. His companions are just competent enough to excuse their quirks. Even a second isekai protagonist finds success for only long enough to become a punchline.

It is a universe with a cruel sense of humor, and the greatest success goes to those who stumble uphill while trying to avoid detection.

It’s a world that rewards not the Aragorns, but the Rincewinds. So that’s fun.

This is best exemplified when Kazuma’s rousing success in saving the town results in him being arrested for at least property damage if not regicide.[8] And that is where the first 10 episodes end.

Now to wait for the season 2 and OVA dubs…

It’s a fine anime, but I think it’s been oversold. The premise is strong, the characters are fun, but the storytelling felt more like an attempt to hit the Greatest Hits beats. It might be worth the effort to read the Light Novel, as I suspect that might be the superior version in this case.[9]

Still, there are strong ideas, and a few things I’d aim to emulate. Especially the distinct leads. I do struggle with making a cast of diverse personalities.

If you enjoyed reading this review, please consider paying me. I have a patreon, a Ko-fi, and a burning desire to branch out into other projects but require investment to make it worth it.

We can’t all reincarnate into a fantasy world. Some of us need support to create them for ourselves.

Kataal kataal.

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[1] My brother, meanwhile, has been binging Deltora Quest for… some reason… I know the books were pretty good for elementary school Canvas, while the succeeding series made less of an impression.[2] [2] Which is to say, bother Vulpin if you think it deserves a review. [3] Isekai (Japanese: 異世界, transl. "different world") is a subgenre of Japanese fantasy light novels, manga, anime, and video games revolving around a normal person from Earth being transported to, reborn, or trapped in a parallel universe. (Wikipedia)[4] [4] Yes, I actually used a footnote to cite a source and provide further information. Don’t get used to it. [5] I desperately want to make a Yakuza joke, but I got nothing. [6] The solution I devised for Penn & Pauper puts the Stats read-out on smartphones, with everything else being as it is in the normal world. IE, you have to manually equip weapons and armor and such. [7] Not just because my Mom is my only patreon patron. [8] They don’t specify if anyone was in the manor that got exploded. [9] Not that the Light Novels I’ve read thus far have been particularly strong. The writing of Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Spice & Wolf felt very stiff on the other end of the translation process. Log Horizon, meanwhile, has meandering Light Novels with a poor sense of rhythm for page breaks.[10] [10] Also, the Mighty Santa Clara Library System refused to accept my Spice & Wolf books, so now I don’t know what to do with them.

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