By Dustin Cabeal

There was a time that I found these really long ass titles funny, but then I started reviewing them, and I now hate these long ass titles, so I will only say this title once… God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! 2, is the full and proper title. The show’s shorthand is KonoSuba, and it’s returning for its second season. Despite making my “Best of 2016” list I’ll admit, I was surprised it did well enough. It’s hard to gauge how well these shows do because you have the biggest factor of Japanese ratings which I’m too stupid to understand or are just poorly explained. The next factor is simulcast streaming and of course illegal downloading. From what I saw, it seemed like everyone kind of hated this show when it was first one, but then by the end of the year loved it. Whatever I guess, I’m just happy it’s back.

Until I watched the episode.

No, I kid. It’s an okay episode. I find it interesting the studio put themselves in a corner with the story. Which is all explained in this first episode. That I will say is quite brilliant. Essentially Kazuma finds himself on trial, and the trail is used as a clip show to establish everything that happened in the first season.

The way it ends leaves a lot of questions. We have a new character introduced who I’m sure will somehow continue to interact with our merry band of idiots, but we also see one of the four main characters leave for an unknown duration. That and Kazuma’s sentencing is still up in the air even after being found innocent three times over the course of the episode.

I’m curious to see how it goes in future episodes. The humor in this episode was fantastic and had me laughing a lot. If it can continue to do that, it might not matter to me as much what the story does, but it would be a damn shame to happen after the tremendous first season.

Speaking of which, as much as this episode was humorous, it did partially rely on the humor from the first season because of the addition of those clips. The new jokes, though, were quite funny. Especially since Kazuma was the character to make the jokes and not simply be the butt of the jokes. In particular, his interrogation was the funniest part of the episode.

The animation looks a little different. I saw others online that noticed that as well. I can’t decide if it’s a cheaper budget this time around or a better budget and so they smoothed everything over. It’s not bad, but I did keep looking at the character’s faces and get the feeling that something was off. I’m curious to see how this plays out over the course of the season.

It’s an okay episode. I can see why the studio chose this path for the episode, but it’s not a very interesting episode for people that did watch the first season. It’s a solid start, and hopefully, the show is just working out the kinks and will get back to the level it was at toward the end of its first season.

Score: 3/5

 Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! 2 E.0