KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World

Episode 9

Throughout the whole arc with Dakini's cult, I've argued that KamiKatsu has totally lost its ability to shock, and that's very true. What I failed to register was why the shock value wore off so quickly, and the reason is pretty self-evident in this episode. Simply put, this show is out of ideas, so all it can really do is recycle character gags to fill time, plodding along until it's filled enough runtime to make the audience think that something of consequence has happened.

It's frankly astonishing how much of this episode is just recycled bits from the past, crammed next to one another in a way that resembles the structure of an episode, but accomplishes next to nothing until the final few minutes. First we've got another poorly edited, oddly censored BDSM joke that drags on way too long considering it's the fifth or sixth one of those we've seen since the sex cult was introduced. The entire thing is, of course, a ruse by Yukito to gain followers because it always is. Then Mitama gets cocky about her follower count only to be humbled by Atar's. Interspersed in all this are gags about Roy being a “comical” rapist. Throw in some pixel art whenever there's no time to properly illustrate a scene, some copy-pasted CG monsters, and you're basically done. Congratulations, everyone, we've successfully constructed nearly an entire episode out of spare parts and reused gags.

Well, “successfully” may be a generous descriptor, considering this episode is probably the most patched-together of the entire season. If last week was tearing at the seams trying to hold together the animation staff's ambitious choices, this one has fully fallen apart after the fabric glue completely gave in. The pixel art is back, taping over holes in the episode like it's a pair of cheap shoes, and all of KamiKatsu's signature broken editing is back in full form. A special quirk of this episode is how many times multiple characters are all talking over one another, which seems to have made the subtitlers give up too. There were several scenes that I had to actively decipher who was talking, because two separate lines of dialogue from different characters were right on top of one another.

None of that is really new to this show—it's just that this episode is particularly slipshod in its construction, and so repetitious in its content, that it makes the steady drop in quality all the more noticeable. Hell, even the new elements we get here feel redundant. Like, wow, new Archon Gaia likes to sexually assault women? Well, that's obviously completely different from Roy, since she's got tig ol' biddies and they flash images of a lily flower when she shoves her demigod tongue down Atar's throat. Such innovation. By the end of the episode we've even brought back Bertrand and reintroduced Loki as the big bad, so it's almost like nothing has changed in the last month's worth of episodes. Now that's some riveting storytelling right there. As if to prove that it has nowhere left to take its own premise, we're getting a random parody of idol anime next week, and I'm almost morbidly curious as to how bad that dancing is going to look.

After running on fumes since its big reveal, it feels like KamiKatsu has well and truly run out of ideas. What few unique elements it did have were driven so far into the ground that it will take archaeologists decades to bring them back to the light of day. This is now a series fully on autopilot, recycling the same handful of character gimmicks until its eventual conclusion—provided the production doesn't totally flatline before then.

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