The World God Only Knows: Season 2 Blu-ray Review
Do soul catchers experience a sophomore slump?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 4, 2012
Any parent with boys will tell you there is an almost atavistic allure emanating from videogames that seems to speak to
some deep level of the adolescent male brain. When I was growing up, the major fascination was girls, now it appears
to be videogames and other online gaming franchises. The fear of teenage pregnancy has been replaced by one of
severe carpal tunnel syndrome. The attraction of the opposite sex is actually wound up within the world of videogames
in the ingratiating if occasionally annoying anime series
The World God Only Knows, as the series' hero, Keima,
is more or less addicted to Dating Sims games. While these particular types of games don't seem to be quite as
popular in the United States (perhaps due to the over-sexualized world of pop culture generally in this country), in
Japan they're extremely popular. The player moves through various romance scenarios and is able in some of the
games at least to work through various storylines depending on how he (or she, frankly) decides to respond to various
questions or plot point forks in the road. As strange as it may sound, you can indeed "win" a Dating Sims game, and
Keima creates a lot of his identity and even self-esteem due to his ability to quickly get to the endgame (so to speak) of
virtually any Dating Sims environment. This ability has made him something of an internet legend, though as is so often
the case, it turns out the "real life" Keima is significantly different than his gaming persona. That difference plays into
one of the central plot arcs of
The World God Only Knows, for as was discussed in the
review of the
series' first season, Keima is contacted by a denizen of Hell named Elsie, who, having assumed that Keima's online
abilities match his real life ones, wants to team up with the nerdy young boy to catch "loose souls", spectral spirits that
are lost in a kind of Earthly purgatory and need to be captured by Elsie to return them to their proper place in the
otherwordly hierarchy.
The World God Only Knows goes off on some unexpected tangents in this second season, at least when
compared
to the first season, where we were pretty much offered a "lost soul of the week" format, where Keima and Elsie would
work together to retrieve these errant spirits. The second season still has elements of that same plot formulation, but
it
tends to emphasize more of the interpersonal relationship between Keima and Elsie, while also developing a couple of
side arcs for Keima specifically, which see the videogame addicted boy actually try to interact reasonably well with
actual
real life girls while at the same time marauding his way through various Bishōnen games.
The second season in fact follows the first season's lead in letting Keima establish a relationship with a real live girl in
order to draw out her "loose soul", though in this case there's a nice little twist put on things when Keima and Elsie
establish the fact that this particular girl, Kusunoki, seems to be having a positively Freudian breakdown where her
masculine and feminine sides can't quite decide who should dominate her actual being. This arc may infuriate ardent
feminisits, but it plays well into the kind of sweet undertone that inhabits most of
The World God Only Knows'
episodes, and it's notable that in this instance there are at least shades of gray in terms of good versus evil, something
that rarely was dealt with in the bulk of the first season's episodes.
The middle set of episodes does in fact tend to mimic the first season's tendency toward having whatever girl is on
Keima's radar suddenly be infected by a malevolent spirit (something that the series at least attempts to explain in the
early going of this second season). There are a number of okay subplots that are introduced here, including Elsie's own
feelings of incompetence in light of other spirit catchers' more stellar careers. Keima continues to be upset that no
matter how many loose souls are put in their rightful place, there seem to be too many still left inhabiting various
people to ever make much of a dent in things.
Things start to get a little surreal as the season moves into its final third of episodes, though in this case that actually
works to the series' benefit, adding a layer of weirdness that makes the series' tendency to tread the same territory
over and over more bearable. Keima's tendency to want to conquer every new Dating Sims game available leads him
on a couple of excursions and by the season's final episode, he has found a bizarre lo-fi game that he expects to be a
complete loser. In the meantime, he's been contacted by a game developer to act as an advisor to help create the
supposedly "perfect" Dating Sims game. The line between "reality" and the videogame world is increasingly blurred in
this arc, and the series does a fine, and often pretty funny, job of having Keima ping pong back and forth between
dealing with Elsie and chasing after whatever virtual girl he is encountering in the Sims environment.
This arc is notable in that the series presents the videogame elements in a letterboxed 2.35:1 aspect ratio in order to
differentiate it from the otherwise 1.78:1 presentation. But there are also some really odd, but again quite funny,
character design changes that crop up so that, for instance, when Keima is totally ensconced in a game and Elsie
interrupts him, he looks like one of the characters in the game rather than his typical self. The line between game and
reality is virtually erased as the second season comes to a close, and Keima's inner struggles become something a
videogame unto themselves.
The series actually is more enjoyable in some of these more outré offerings than it often is in its main "loose soul
catching" methods, which tend to become pretty repetitive after a while. The series echoes a number of other "soul
eater" animes, and is never really overly innovative, but it has the benefit of being good natured and quite sweet most
of the time, two things that help it overcome some of its more clichéd elements.
The World God Only Knows: Season 2 Blu-ray, Video Quality
While there's no huge difference between this second season's AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1, courtesy of Sentai
Filmworks, and that of the
first season, there's just enough of an uptick in animation quality to deserve an extra
half point in the video score. As with the first season, while the overall look of the series isn't anything incredibly special,
there are some very nice graphical elements and good use of CGI which help to elevate the overall appearance of
The
World God Only Knows. Line detail and color saturation both continue to be very strong, and in fact this second season
seems to indulge a bit more in bright, vivid color schemes than the first season did. The kind of bizarre but highly enjoyable
"melting" of the worlds between Keima's real life and his videogame existence is also handled very smartly from a design
and presentation standpoint, with characters looking completely different in the videogame world and those sequences
between presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
