Review of Ya Boy Kongming!

If Ya Boy Kongming! can give us one insight about the business world, it’s that it is competitive and ruthless. This can be applied not just to the music industry, but also to the anime one, where producers employ their various stratagems to entice the populace. Of these, the most significant one in the show is frontloading; by allocating more technical and creative resources to the premiere episode, the show can stand out among the others and attract a sizable audience efficiently. However, this stratagem comes with a fatal flaw, and it is not too difficult to discern what it is: the quality sharply drops asthe show progresses. After the (must I say almost perfect) premiere, cracks start forming. The second episode contains numerous still shots. The comedy starts tiring in the third, with the strongest element of the show, Kongming’s absurdist genius, becoming overused. After the third, the show rightfully attempts to solve this by shifting focus towards the other characters, but the show never replaces Kongming’s striking presence with anything, instead choosing to delve into several generic and uninspired side plots.

So what went wrong? After all, multiple shows have created a great premiere while still maintaining the quality of the later episodes. The mistakes made in this show can be attributed to several factors.

The first, and certainly the most understandable one, is that Ya Boy Kongming! is P.A. Works’s first anime based on a manga, as opposed to a novel or an original work. Manga is unique in that it provides the outline for the anime’s scenes; although this relieves the pressure of storyboarding substantially, scenes that might be slightly challenging to draw become nightmarishly difficult to animate. Crowd scenes are extremely taxing, and it seems like an excessive importance was placed on its faithful adaptation instead of drawing the line somewhere and moving on, a flaw above all caused by inexperience.

The second is that the show’s comedy goes all-out in the first episode. Granted, this does not mean that the first episode was bad; I had a blast watching it. But good comedy is not an infinite resource. Good comedy is rooted in the nature of the characters, and thus a joke needs to reveal a little more about the character to be fresh. For anime adaptations, adding in new and creative jokes becomes unreasonable after a certain point in production, as the character needs to be slightly changed to accommodate it, wasting time that can be spent elsewhere. Therefore, by expending all of its quality jokes early on, the show leaves its later episodes devoid of fresh comedy and fresh character development.

Lastly, the show’s solutions to the characters’ problems are all but shallow in the last few episodes, further widening the gap in quality. The characters these episodes focus on are Eiko, Kabetaijin, and Nanami. Their goals are all made clear early on: Eiko needs to find her voice, Kabetaijin needs to find a motivation to rap, and Nanami is stuck between her desire to be herself and her desire to progress in the music industry. Although all three dilemmas are quite interesting and complex, the solutions that the characters eventually take are all surface-level. What makes the screen better than online forums at answering questions is that the screen not only provides examples or scenarios of these solutions, but it also captures the essence of these characters more than words or descriptions of scenarios could ever achieve, allowing us to understand the solution intuitively. The solutions in Ya Boy Kongming! never reach this level, as it focuses too much on the situation instead of the spirit of the characters.

All this is not to say Ya Boy Kongming! was a terrible show. As stated before, the first episode was extremely fun to watch, with Kongming’s remark about the blockchain and his Wiki page cracking me up. The OP is groovy and full of personality, and while I am not fond of chibi style, I found the music in the ED to be catchy. The OST fits the tone and is never intrusive, and the artstyle, especially for scenes related to Eiko, is vivid. And by focusing on music production, the show breathes new life into the stale music genre. However, the show’s aggressive frontloading and its consequences are too evident to ignore. As Sun Tzu said in his Art of War, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” Ya Boy Kongming, by going all-out on its first few episodes, has neglected its purpose and production, and so like the defeated warriors, cannot convert its initial momentum into any long-term goal. And while ending a review with a quote is corny, I could find no more fitting way to sum up my disappointment with this show’s wasted opportunity.