English Dub Review: How Not to Summon a Demon Lord Ω “Pretend God”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Diablo defeats Vishos and clears Lumachina’s name, though now her followers see him as God like she did. Still, he’s able to convince at least her that he’s not. Horn and Babylon (the random little schoolgirl from the chalice) stay behind so Horn can learn magic, while Diablo, Rem, Shera, and Rose return to Faltra.

OUR TAKE

Well, Funimation tried to throw this one out under the radar for some strange reason, but we caught it! They didn’t mention it on Facebook, or their website list of Dubs from Home, or even on Twitter, but we saw it up and damned if we didn’t decide to review it. Better late covering it than never, especially since, for god knows why, these reviews get WEIRDLY high views on our site whenever they go up, so might as well finish things up. So, how did this season finally wrap up? Not well. This three episode arc already felt especially crammed with a lot happening that just felt thrown in or didn’t make any sense. Take, Bablyon, the little imaginary friend got last episode that didn’t give her any power ups? Yeah, we still don’t know what her deal is or why she’s there or why she looks like a modern day human when this is clearly not earth. Maybe that’s gonna be explained in a future arc, but based on how this whole mess of a season went, I doubt we’ll ever get to see it animated. Especially not if it’s this team working on it and not the one that made the first one a surprisingly decent harem isekai.

The best you could say is that at least Horn and Lumachina got to see the end of their character arcs, with Horn taking more initiative in learning to fight for herself and Lumachina…finally understanding that Diablo is not actually god. I think there might have been more, but frankly I’m just glad it’s all done with. And they’re the only ones who even got that much in terms of character development, since Diablo stayed the same, Rem stayed the same, and I think Shera might have actually lost some brain cells somewhere along the way. And Rose was Rose, I suppose. She was not well written and it shows. Maybe it was inevitable given the nature of its story, but How Not to Summon a Demon Lord really did just devolve into the same kind of drec that you would expect from its type of story. I just can’t help but wonder how the first season worked as well as it did when this one just fell back into the same mold. Perhaps we can muse about all of that in a Season Review, but for the time being we’re putting this Demon Lord back in hell until we figure out what to do with him.