Review of The Devil is a Part-Timer! Season 2

What in the devil's name happened here... The first season of Hataraku Maou was a pleasant surprise, utilising its premise of reverse isekai to effectively generate comedy from the "fish-out-of-water" situations its characters are being placed in. It was a breath of fresh air and genuinely entertaining to watch because of this. Then Season 2 finally arrives after a 9 year hiatus, and it turns out to be none of the above. Right off the bat, we are introduced to the baby daughter archetype who literally popped out of nowhere, and the two leads must now take care of her, the laziest way for an anime to forcecharacter engagement. But as the show went on, I realised that this was done more out of necessity, because Season 2 has no other plot development to speak of, everything was either trite slice of life BS, or unceremoniously dropped after a couple of episodes with no meaning resolution whatsoever, so the little rut was needed here to trick attachment out of viewers, in the same way how some video games give you a cute animal companion to pet, so you'll overlook how boring and terrible its gameplay loop is. All the intrigue and wit from Season 1 are just gone. The cast are a shadow of their former selves and don't get to do anything of consequence; the comedy devolved into slapstick nonesense; and the story is almost entirely absent. The show is effectively a generic romcom at this point, with its 12 whole episodes telling us less about the characters or the world than a single episode from Season 1, offering next to nothing new in terms of either character development or worldbuilding.

Having slogged through the entire thing, the only highlight for me was the occasion witticism from some of the side characters who haven't completely gone off to the deep end, and everything else was just a misery to look at, from the noticeably inferior production values, to how insubstantial the story is. A sequel to a much beloved classic and 9 years in the making, and what we got was nothing but a pale imitation of its former glory, a cynical product churned out to cash in on the brand name alone. What a shame, and what a waste.