KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World

Episode 5

It's funny. Last week I expressed concern that KamiKatsu shifting into a serious storyline wouldn't work because our entire cast is a bunch of one-dimensional, wholly unlikable punchlines that couldn't carry dramatic weight even with poorly filtered footage of a dump truck. What I failed to anticipate was how goddamn boring “Serious KamiKatsu” could be.

It really should be interesting. This whole episode is stuffed with wild, world-altering twists, and by the end of it, the entire status quo of the story has been turned on its head. Not only that, but the reveals here – that this isn't an alternate dimension, but a post-apocalyptic Earth that has been run by computers for centuries, tasked with eliminating war through population control and erasing religion – should be fertile ground for some commentary. That wouldn't necessarily be intelligible or coherent commentary, but even reading the cliff notes version in this review probably made some of you wonder what the show is trying to say with that premise. This would be a mind-blowing, game-changing episode in any other anime.

However, this is an anime thrown together with spare change and a medically inadvisable amount of energy drinks, so instead, we get something that is both incoherent and terminally dull. I never thought I'd get tired of hearing Megumi Ogata vamp, but after 15 straight minutes of Loki info-dumping, I was out of patience, and there was still another quarter of the episode to go. It also turns out that the show's trademark awful editing is really bad when you have long dialogue scenes. The camera cannot keep still or focus on the people talking, constantly sliding away from the action and cutting to others' reactions mid-sentence. Characters keep talking over each other's inner monologue, which makes it hard to figure out which set of subtitles to read. All those issues pile up to make for an episode-long slog of theoretically exciting information, but in practice is a chore to decipher.

See, the other problem is that, for these big twists to mean anything, you'd need to actually be attached to the world and characters before all this. The empire being a sham, this world being Earth, it only matters if you thought the isekai stuff beforehand was interesting, but the actual worldbuilding has been so sparse that none of this is surprising. We had never seen a single frame of the Emperor, so finding out he's an illusion isn't shocking. We had no real clue of why or how this mandatory suicide rule was justified, so learning “a computer did it because, uh….science?” doesn't change anything. We have never met the other Archons, so setting them up as enemies who want to usurp Mitama's godhood is just replacing one nebulous threat with another. Only now, the threat is a much more generic group of anime villains instead of the theoretically compelling battle against society we had going before.

So congrats, KamiKatsu. You managed to bury the one interesting part of your own premise through incompetent production, less-than-half-baked writing, and total tonal inconsistency. Heck, you even proved that last week's memeable tractor footage wasn't an intentional gag but just the only way you could animate farm equipment. Nothing of value was lost, but we've got another seven weeks to go, and I'd rather not tempt fate.

Rating:

KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.