English Dub Review: How Not to Summon a Demon Lord Ω “Storm the Church”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Horn tries to get a power up from a Holy Grail she took from Diablo’s treasure room in order to save her friends, but all that comes out is a snarky girl in a school uniform voiced by Monica Rial, so she’s forced to use the collar that ties her life to Diablo. She’s able to sneak her way into where they’re being held but can’t fight off a guard, needing Diablo to break everyone out himself and making her feel like her efforts were pointless. But Diablo decides to make a public showing against the church, hoping that Lumachina will fight against him to make her look better, but she decides to accept him killing the whole church. Vishos instead decides to fight and summon a giant demon.

OUR TAKE

We’re at the penultimate episode with a golden opportunity to give some long overdue development to Horn and…it all pretty much ends up just being a way to put her in a slave collar like Rem and Shera. Even worse, the collar was supposed to give her a power up, but she still gets her butt kicked easily, meaning her last chance to act as her own character ends up for nothing anyway. And the most we get out of it is that she gets a weird imaginary friend in strangely modern looking clothing. No real power ups, no moments to be a badass, not even some brief insight into her backstory. At the very least you could have given her the opportunity to beat the bunny guy who Diablo has to end up beating for her. This moment in the spotlight really just doesn’t amount to anything. Diablo could have gotten out at any time but was staying in the prison to not make trouble for Lumachina, who also doesn’t get any development by the way. And frankly, the animation looks even cheaper than usual. Just all downgrades for the whole show all around and I can’t imagine that the season finale we’ll get next will be that much better.

I don’t know, I just feel like I’m done with this show. Still one more episode to go, so I know I gotta power through here, but it’s just so demoralizing. The first season was not amazing television by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely better paced, better written, and better animated than all of this. It was also another ecchi Isekai series, so it had plenty of “totally not porn” moments, but they felt a lot easier to tolerate with everything else looking a lot better. It also had a much better balanced cast and not this collection of barely developed weirdos we have here. But yeah, just the finale left, with Diablo going up against another giant monster and a totally unambiguously evil dude. The stakes couldn’t be lower, even if Lumachina would get with the program and just follow the act of trying to fight the Demon Lord in front of her and look better for it. Oh well, looking forward to being totally done with this series, which will hopefully end with this season. I know there are more volumes of the light novel to adapt, but I think it’s best to just stop now.