English Dub Review: Konosuba Season Two

Our Take:

I had heard of Konosuba being good because it parodies isekai, and I do think it manages to accomplish that well.

It’s hard to say that there really is a plot– there is, but it feels disconnected, but that’s fine. While the general premise is on the main character avoiding prison and paying off his exorbitant debts, it’s also involving a lot of hijinks. Still, I’d be hard pressed to say that there’s any character development, as people don’t really seem to get closer or further together over the course of the season. The cast learns things, but it’s more like learning facts as opposed to learning things that changes how they see the world or see something important. Despite that, it keeps each episode relatively self-contained while still pushing what vague plot they have forward.

Even though the cast doesn’t necessarily get along well, they do all play off each other humorously. Everyone is over the top, nobody has any ounce of common sense, and it all makes for a wild experience. None of the characters in the main cast really overlap, since they are all out there in completely different ways. This makes every interaction memorable, because they all stand out so much.

Another thing I really enjoyed is that the animations are very dynamic. Not necessarily in action per se, but because not many fight scenes happen overall, but the characters are all very expressive. There is a general animation standard in anime that most characters have to look pretty or cool, and so most cells usually aim for that. In Konosuba, the characters focus more on their over the top reactions, and so their expressions all end up being incredibly wild. This is really nice to see in anime, because here the girls are allowed to be expressive. It isn’t just in the fanservice scenes, but they’re allowed to look disgusted, look bored, look silly. They don’t have to look pretty all the time, and I really appreciate how they allow this to happen. It really helps with the humor, a lot of the expressions are top tier. It’s fun to see people be goofy.

Unfortunately, in parodying isekai, it also falls into a lot of the traps of isekai without challenging them (the main character is pretty skeevy and generally creepy around women), but it does manage to take the premise and make it funny. There’s a lot of really generally funny moments in the series (Darkness’ moments definitely take the cake) that made me laugh out loud. Slimes actually being incredibly powerful? Great! This show has really, really good comedic timing, even if not all the jokes land. It’s hard to make a comedy engaging, and I will say that it is excellent at making people laugh. Kudos to the voice actresses too, it’s hard to keep that high tone for a long period of time.

Altogether, I think that isekai isn’t really my genre, so I can’t really say that this series gripped me. Other comedic series tended to work better with me. At the same time, what kind of humor they are going for is executed very well, so I can’t be too unfavorable. If they try to do something and succeed, then it can’t be a failure. It just isn’t something that I personally enjoy.

The evil lich and his wife are probably the best things in this series, not going to lie. I wish they stuck around for longer.