Konosuba – Season 1 Review

It has been a very long time since I actually reviewed an anime, let alone talked about anime at all, but I just sort of stumbled into watching Konosuba finally after a long time of never getting around to it so I figured I’d write a little about it!

Konosuba is one of those shows I avoided when it first aired because it looked like harem shit and was also another fucking isekai, not that long after I saw enough people saying/showing otherwise to finally get interested. It isn’t really a harem on any level and as far as isekai goes it barely uses that to any meaningful effect even in terms of humor which barely ever brings that up. Still, I never got around to it until just now when a friend happened to want to watch something in a VRChat world that has anime and he picked this out so I finally got a real taste for what it is which is a full on comedy set in a fantasy world with a little bit of ecchi thrown in for good measure but not that much at all. I watched the first 3 episodes there but then burned through the rest a few days later.

At this point everyone knows Konosuba, plus comedy is really hard to review in any detail. It’s a whole lot of fun, the jokes have a good range of completely fresh to just really well done versions of humorous things you’ve seen in the past, and I didn’t really dislike a single moment in the entire thing. Every episode is enjoyable, every cast member is lovable – even supporting and background characters, and the art is nice on the eyes both in terms of being this simple vibrant thing as well as all the bouncy tits and tight asses. Really, I’d describe it as a relaxing, comfortable, comedy.

The biggest surprise I had from watching this finally came in the form of one of the main cast though. It astounds me just how much people pretend this has 2 girls and the main guy – just Aqua and Megumin – yet the best character is someone I had no clue even existed somehow: Darkness.

Seriously, I’ve never experienced a situation where one of the main fucking cast in something so popular is someone I didn’t even know about at all, let alone when it’s such a great character. She’s completely overshadowed in all promotional stuff that I’ve seen and by every fan by Megumin almost entirely followed by Aqua.

Honestly, also surprising to me, Megumin is kind of the weakest character of the three main girls. She’s definitely cute but she has nothing stand-out about her, she’s a very by-the-book character and the comedy around her is very simple too and relies a little too heavily on chuuni bullshit which is never funny, just retarded. She’s cute, especially whenever she plops face first after using her explosion, but most of my appreciation for her came from seeing Animegataris first and loving the role the seiyuu had there and the joke about her voicing a “very similar character” to Megumin drawn horribly for a school thing. She’s great but just OF THE THREE specifically she’s on the bottom.

Aqua is second, she can be pretty funny and her retardation helps make her very endearing. She’s not even 1% my type but she just plays her part really well. It makes sense why she’s sort of the “main” one of the trio, she’s fairly average but has plenty of on-screen presence and does a good job of being the main thing propelling the story forward.

Darkness is my absolute favorite though, from the moment she shows up to the very last bits of the season she is just non-stop fun as fuck. Sure, she’s pretty one-note, but she does that one note perfectly – think of Sacchan from Gintama but somehow even more of a masochist and even more of an idiot. I also really love her overall look and her big breasts as well as the way they balance her out a lot like a Bofuri character, wherein she basically takes no damage aside just enough to get her off but also since she’s basically unkillable she can’t hit a single goddamn thing even if it’s standing still; sort of like she put all her stats into Def/Vit and the rest are at 0. She’s just so much fun every second she’s around and it still blows my mind she’s so pushed back by fans I had absolutely no clue she was a character in the first place. She was a fantastic surprise.

The main character, Kazuma, is also pretty alright. People seem to push him as being perverted as a huge character trait but it really isn’t the case. There are very few scenes that he shows any interest in women beyond a few short jokes and it keeps him from being obnoxious and allows those moments to be funny, helping it maintain being a comedy “with some ecchi” instead of turning this into some ecchi-comedy. Other than that he’s alright and has a lot of good comebacks and also his response any time someone says his name is a fun thing every time.

Aside the four of them, there are also a lot of fun one-off or episodic characters, most notable of them has to be the guild lady with her big bouncy titties which seem to have more jiggle than any other pair in the show and probably the Dullahan who comes in later in the show who has a lot of really funny bits with Megumin and Darkness. There’s also a really cute thief girl but she’s only really around once.

Again, it’s a comedy, I can’t really say much about it. It’s really fun and I totally see why it became so popular – it’s not some 10/10 but I’d say about an 8.5/10 for the first season; hopefully the second holds up but I haven’t gotten to it yet. Really recommend it if you’re looking for a comedy, especially with how few purely focused on humor comedies are made these days.