This was a terrible, terrible show. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Because HOO BOY HAS IT BEEN A WHILE SINCE I WATCHED A SHOW SO UNINTENTIONALLY STUPID.

Let the Pomeranian Greek Chorus usher you in.

So what the description above, taken straight from Funimation, didn’t tell me was that the devils would be part of a battle between Evil and…Other Evil, fighting to find some Magic MacGuffin tied to our main character (of course).

Look, the story…it’s there. If the show had wanted to focus on the story, it would’ve been fine. But this show is the poster child for guilty pleasures: its focus is Ritsuka, a singularly boring cutout of a character, getting tangled up with extremely pretty magic boys who are determined to use her (or protect her from use), and who sing about it. so much.

Oh? Didn’t I mention? THIS IS A MUSICAL.

And it transformed what would have been an otherwise mediocre show in an extremely entertaining mediocre show.

No wait, come back, I’m not done yet.

Watching because the story sounds interesting? It falls flat.

Watching it, particularly with another person, to see how much more ridiculous and stupid it gets? Fantastic.

As we watched it veered more and more into the realm of absurd entertainment because the characters are so stupid.

Ritsuka’s defining trait as the protagonist is a blind and unrelenting inability to keep herself safe. “Don’t leave my side” a character will tell her, making it clear this is so Ritsuka won’t be killed. “Wait, I need to go do this thing. Better do it and just not tell anyone, especially the person worried about my safety,” Ritsuka will think twenty seconds later. There are multiple episodes where the plot, which this show technically has, I guess, moves forward only because Ritsuka has decided to ignore anything that might keep her safe for the fifth time this week.

(It occurs to me you could easily make a drinking game: take a drink every time Ritsuka willfully endangers her own life. Take a drink every time a male character expresses ~feelings~ for Ritsuka. Take a drink every time Best Friend Azuna, the only character with a brain, tries to bring sense into the equation. Take a drink for every character that bursts into song. For health and safety reasons, I recommend non-alcoholic drinks.)

The main devil, student council president (of course) Rem, has exactly one facial expression (annoyed), one emotion (annoyed), and one way of dealing with everyone or thing that comes up (treating them like an annoyance), which is why it’s frikkin hilarious to me that he’s supposed to be a love interest.

(To be fair, every male character is a potential love interest, the portrayals of which involve less desire than me picking out cheese at the grocery store.)

At the end of the second episode when Ritsuka’s older brother Lindo shows up, I wondered if this was a spinoff of a dating game. You already had 4 pretty devils with tissue-thin personalities and even thinner explanations for any attraction they felt toward our mushy overcooked cauliflower of a heroine, and here was yet another male character who was very prettily designed. Too prettily designed. And he doesn’t look super related to Ritsuka, I wonder if that’s relevant…

(Spoiler alert: it is indeed relevant, which I called before he got his own rock song about how he will protect her as an expression of his love.)

(Worry not, this show isn’t nearly good enough to deal with the implications of this, so it just doesn’t! One-sided pseudo-incest is just thrown in there on the side to ~spice things up~ and give Ritsuka or the audience a pretty boy who’s not ostensibly evil.)

But no, the anime is original! Which makes this all the more befuddling because there wouldn’t have been a built-in audience yet!

Verdict

English Dub? Yes. The voice acting was okay. And that would have been fine without further comments except this show is a MUSICAL. And these poor, poor English voice actors were clearly not chosen for their ability to sing, at least in most of the keys the songs are in. (I suspect in keys better-suited to their voices, and without having to try and put on a character voice, they would be fine. But that’s not what happened here.)

But no, every main character gets at least one song.

I get the distinct impression that the lyrics were translated very close to literal translations, and then they were never adjusted to make those words & syllables in English fit the existing melodies. What probably sounded fine in Japanese (and if you watch songs in Japanese, they do indeed sound melodic) comes off as clunky and awkward in English, and that’s before they try to fit these words and phrases into the melody of the existing songs. Like, there’s a duet at the end with the lines “Two dissimilar worlds, two dissimilar paths,” and they really have to rush to get all the syllables in, when _“two different worlds, two different paths”_ would have worked JUST AS WELL.

For example, have this wonderful song from early in the series:

▶

See what I mean? I spent so, SO much time ranting to my watching companion about how I could’ve easily rewritten this line or that line and made them so, so much better to English ears while keeping the same meaning. I don’t understand why the decision wasn’t made to adjust the English song lyrics but hey: perhaps it meant the English version ran perilously close to having decent audio, which would then put the focus back on how flimsy the story itself is.

Visuals: Nothing standout, not terrible since I literally never thought about them. Too distracted by lines like So helpless and pathetic, like a rabbit controlled by Providence, those melancholic eyes reflect a life so pitiful.

Worth watching? AHAHAHAHA grab a friend and don’t warn them in advance, then inflict this on yourselves with no other preparation. __This is the most fun I’ve had actively watching a show with someone in _months.___