Review of The World God Only Knows

Do you know what hides behind those anime avatars? Narcissism. Such is the condition of many otaku. Our hero is a bona fide galge expert, to the exclusion of anything except his newfound demon friend he doesn't care about. The hero spends his days slamming the buttons of a handheld called a PFP, styled after the PSP Go N1000, a system not known for eroge outside of the homebrew scene. That means our boy probably plays galge without even the enticement of anime tiddy. When I was in high school, I played Doukyuusei 2 on ZSNES. I played dating sims without the tiddy. I was a narcissist.If I were a true connoisseur, I surely would have explored the genre's vast benippled history, from the landmark PC-98 games of Alice Soft to the early modern classics of Clockup, and maybe some Illusion titles. Instead I played what was easiest to get a copy of, and that laziness is held against otaku kind as if everything they do in life is half-assed.

Despite the hero's apparent laziness, he seems to be the world's foremost expert on all-ages moe galge (the only flavor of galge we see him playing). In that respect, the hero seems unprepared for the psychological inferno of real girls, yet somehow his interactions with them are on point. Are the girls in his life just that shallow? Is he just that shallow? Is the show just that shallow?

For the most part, the tone is pure satire. The last couple of episodes assume a more serious tone, and at that point it becomes clear that the animators would rather be working on something like Evangelion than a Dokuro-chan successor. The protagonist's total apathy and lack of depth make him unrelatable, and that's fine for a certain kind of anime. It's not bad, it just doesn't stand out either.

After watching all 12 episodes, my only question is: "Why is there more?" Why make more of this nonchalant, apathetic, inoffensive, and sometimes boring anime that tells the same couple of jokes repeatedly? I don't feel anything. It's good, but it's sexless and repetitive and ultimately not quite my thing.