Review of Dropkick On My Devil!

I'm using this to review all the seasons and OVAs since I'm not about that "um actually the second season is a different show" BS because "um actually it's all the same show" With that out of the way, I love this show and it's super entertaining, but also in the awkward spot of being a kind of janky adaptation of the manga, to the point where it works better as a compliment to it than a straight adaptation, so maybe read the source material first. Episode one is actually around chapter 58 or so of the manga and they skip almost every character introduction andeven the inciting incident that kicks things off in the first place which means viewers who haven't read the manga will feel a bit lost. The basic premise is sort of "Ultra-violent Tom & Jerry crossed with Seinfeld but with demons and angels" and granted, it isn't really plot driven so you can kind of pick up the archetypes in media res, but even as far as the third season the effects of skipping so much are still felt to the point where they make meta jokes out of it and point out which volume of the manga the skipped plot-point is in.

That said though, it makes a fantastic companion piece to the manga if you have read it. Unlike a lot of shows that are 1 to 1 shot for shot retellings of the source material, but in a different medium, the Jashin-Chan anime is more like a remix. You'll get scenes, stories and gags from the original, but small gags from the manga will be expanded into their own little storylines and there's a lot of new glue holding things together. Sometimes when I read a manga or watch an anime after consuming the source, it kind of feels like going through the motions because I know what happens, but Jashin-Chan actually keeps things fresh even if you've read every page. My favorite character ended up being the Baphomet Devil Narrator who doesn't even have any lines in the manga, but fills in the scene transitions of the anime with all kinds of wacky gags and strange trivia. The voice actors are all perfect and almost exactly match how I imagined them reading the manga, the artwork is constantly gorgeous (especially for a gag series), and the characters are as lively and fun as ever.

The real charm of the Jashin-verse is how the more you consume it, the more it feels like a living world. It's not just Jashin-Chan and her battles with Yurine, but all the characters around her have their own lives that just happen to intersect with Jashin's antics, and even the smaller background characters like the three otakus who follow the angels everywhere or Pekora's part-time manager kind of have their own rhythms and gags that develop over time. There are some gags that just straight up wouldn't be doable in a manga (like Jashin-chan's impressive but insane song she works on over the course of the series) so they know how to take advantage of the medium. Most of all I think it's the tone that I really appreciate about this series. When doing a dark comedy it can be tempting to make everyone unrelentingly awful or just have cruel things happen for the sake of laughs, but while Jashin-Chan is a very violent series, it also has a ton of sincerity and knows when to let the characters be nice, have a good moment, or even grow as people without pulling the rug out from under it as a joke. Most of the cast is deranged, evil, or insane to some degree and there's maybe 4 characters total you could call "well-adjusted" but somehow they all generally get along at the end of the day and you want to tune in to see what else they're doing next.

While I do think this series is best-served after reading the original manga, the anime version still grows into something complex and beautiful with a lot of original material, and the fun thing about this type of comedy series is that anything extra isn't really "filler" so much as it's more hilarious chaos with characters you already love. I eagerly await whatever comes next.