Review of Mob Psycho 100 II
*Covers both seasons* As someone who quite liked One Punch Man (the creator's other work), I had high hopes for Mob Psycho 100, especially considering its popularity. Honestly though, I feel like the main thing I got out of the experience was the lesson of tempering your expectations based on mass opinion. Mob Psycho 100 is about a reserved and lonely middle school student, Mob, who possesses incredible psychic powers which he uses to help out a local self-proclaimed psychic, Arataka Reigen, perform exorcisms while trying to change himself for the better and get more enjoyment out of his relatively dull life. It's an honestly brilliant premise,as even though the main character is ridiculously overpowered, his personality prevents him from ever wanting to use his powers, with more focus being placed on characters and development rather than the progression of an overarching plot. It sounds great on paper, but I really don't think it ended up doing enough with it to truly set itself apart from other shonens.
The problem with Mob Psycho is that it tries to do way too many things with this premise with relatively poor execution, leading to a lack of focus and shoddy pacing. It jumps from being an incredibly slow paced slice-of-life to a character drama to an off-the-wall action show multiple times throughout, and it somewhat fails to do any of these particularly well.
The slice of life sections suffer from slow pacing and don't contribute much to the main plot, and can honestly feel like quite a chore to sit through. You could describe most of them in one sentence and immediately move on to the next episode without any impact to the overall experience. The action sections, while visually appealing and technically impressive, are flashy without substance and unengaging. How? Fights are simply a matter of power level and who can hit harder. There is absolutely no strategy to any of them. You never really have to worry about the outcome of most of them because most fights involve Mob, who is ridiculously overpowered and can take care of any enemy quite easily. If he does poorly in a fight, it's because he "holds back." However, Mob doesn't like to hurt other people, so he tries to fight as little as possible, instead trying to talk to most of his enemies. That sounds more interesting than it actually is. Most of these conversations go like this:
Mob: "Hey, you can't do bad things! Bad things are bad!"
Enemy: "No, I'm justified because I'm cool and society is lame."
Mob: "Nuh-uh, you're the one who's lame!"
Enemy: "Wow, you're right!" *changes their entire life philosophy*
It just felt really lame and forced most of the time. There was one interesting section where this didn't work and his naive morals were challenged, but it was immediately solved by "the power of friendship," so yeah.
Onto what was probably the best part: the character drama. I think that Mob Psycho's characters are quite good for the most part (minus the villains, they're pretty much just evil for the sake of being evil). They're pretty varied and have interesting qualities, so most people could probably find something to relate to among them, and a lot of them do undergo genuine character development. There was one plotline with Reigen that was particularly great. However, quite a lot of characters got sidelined or simply existed for quick gags.
Mob Psycho is a bit more deep than your particular shonen, but I also feel that that is a bit sullied by the overall presentation of the show itself. I'm probably being just a bit too nitpicky here, but I feel that Mob Psycho is honestly a bit too juvenile for its own good. It felt like I was watching a show for little kids most of the time. The art style is simple and goofy, the jokes, which I really didn't find funny most of the time, are something that I would laugh at if I were in fourth grade, and the themes/overall message is stuff like "just be yourself, don't change yourself for other people, you can rely on friends," etc., which are good themes, but they're shown pretty directly and without the nuance of, say, Re:Zero, which makes it feel a bit kiddy. I really just couldn't take it that seriously, even when it tried to be more mature.
That's not to say that Mob Psycho is flat-out bad. It's enjoyable enough most of the time, with good characters, solid animation, some nuanced themes, and a lot of unique aspects that set it apart, but overall, in my opinion, it's really just a basic shonen that isn't particularly special.