We’ve all heard tales of innocent souls being unexpectedly marooned in strange new worlds, but perhaps none of them are as bizarre as the world called Earth. Reserved at one point for attendees of Camp Nightmare, Earth is a land with no magic, where every day concepts that you and I have grown up with are considered fantasy, and the world instead revolves around technology and an oppressive, predatory society. Thankfully though, after several residents of Ente Isla were transported there one by one, they’ve all had more or less enough time to get accustomed to the strangeness of this world, and have managed to scratch together some halfway comfortable lives there... Lives that have never been peaceful for very long. Sure, dealing with the sudden appearance of a baby, multiple meddlesome entities from both hell and heaven and one presumed dead parent aren't too much to handle, but MgRonalds closing down? How will they survive!

So hey guys, remember the last few times an anime from years ago suddenly got a new season out of nowhere? It rarely ever works out, doesn't it? Reboots tend to do okay, like Trigun and Spice and Wolf, but straight up sequels tend to be disappointments, like Battle Athletes Restart, Berserk 2016, Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino, Big O 2, the list goes on, and spoiler alert, now I have to add a new season of The Devil Is A Part Timer to that list. The first season was by no means a visual masterpiece, but it looked good. The animation studio White Fox gave director Naoto Hosoda enough money to comfortably do the job, and it looked pretty cool. Granted, I haven’t seen it in a really long time, so maybe I can’t make that accurate of a comparison off the top of my head, but I kinda don’t have to, because the first episode of season 2 shows a brief flashback to the first season that’s just lengthy enough to highlight the difference in style and budget, and it does not make for a flattering comparison.

To start with the obvious, there has been a huge aesthetic shift from season one, as this season looks a little brighter, a little softer, and slightly more cartoony, especially in the character designs. This is really fucking jarring at first, but you do get used to it, except for some isolated moments where a character might make their trademarked facial reaction to something, and it looks way off the mark, like Yusa’s angry face or Crestia Bell’s scowl. What’s even more concerning is that this season looks incredibly cheap and ugly, not only in comparison to season one, but on its own merits. There are frozen key frames all over the fucking place, with entire scenes going by that look like they’re just made up of one-to-five second still frames with moving lips animated over them, and if you’re not looking directly at whatever character is talking, it is some creepy uncanney valley shit to have to notice other characters in frame just standing there without moving or even blinking. It’s also a little jarring when you notice that water is often animated, while a sky of clouds in the same damn shot doesn’t move an inch.

Of course there are your typical visual tricks all over the place, but they’re slightly worse than what you might be used to. I’ve complained before about that trick where you bounce a character’s image up and down on screen to give the illusion that they’re walking, and this is used pretty much everywhere in the medium, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done quite as bad as this one shot that happens at the hospital, where four characters are very clearly having their barely animated templates being bounced, still of course not blinking. There’s also little to no actual action... There are a few fight scenes, but they all end as disappointingly as possible, probably because Studio 3HZ couldn’t afford to go all the way with them. That’s a little surprising to me though, because while that studio hasn’t produced many anime, I have seen two of their titles, Flip Flappers and Princess Principal, both of which looked stellar in my opinion. It might be the fault of the director, Daisuke Tsukushi, who seems to have a really impressive resume at first glance, but then you take a closer look and see one to three episodes per show actually credited with him.

As for the english dub, you may recall me saying in the first season that I considered it to be one of Jamie Marchi’s better work, because while she did imbue it with her standard stuffing of slang and over-thought phrasing, she did show a remarkable level of restraint in doing so. Well, dubbing responsibilities have switched from Funimation to Crunchyroll, bringing about an entirely new dubbing team, and I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but it genuinely feels like the new team were trying really hard to replicate Marchi’s writing style, and the result is pure brain rot. Some of the dialogue in this dub is absolutely excruciating to listen to. Hell, some of it’s just inaccurate or confusing. One character posits a villain from season 1 being out of jail, and when it’s revealed this is true, a different character entirely says “I knew it!” Another example is when Gabriel falls on his head, and he claims that he hurt his beautiful butt cheeks. He landed on his fucking head. One character says "Against" when the subtitles and context says "Amongst." There's a lot of cringey slang.

Speaking of Gabriel, I hate his dub performance with a fiery passion. For a quick explanation, remember Tristan’s surfer dude voice from Yugioh, and how Little Kuriboh made fun of this by making him talk like Barney? Ian Sinclair’s performance as Gabriel feels like a perfect representation of the transition point between the two, like a terrible Big Lebowski impression. Thankfully most of the original cast came back, with the exception of one guy who got into some serious legal trouble between seasons, and isn’t likely to get out of it for some time. Unfortunately, not all of these actors have managed to keep up their A-games in the interim. You may remember, for example, me saying that Alex Moore as Crestiabell was my favorite dub performance in the show, but she sounds weirdly like an uninflected AI voice this time. Alexis Tipton has also gotten a lot more shrill as Rika, but I guess the others are doing okay, at least to some point? Sarah Weidenheft tries to not let Alas Ramus be annoying, and it doesn't work, but she tries. Anyway, sometimes there’s a funny joke or two in the dialogue, but they’re few and far between, and they don’t save what is overall a pretty crappy English dub.

Now, I didn’t know about season 2 as it was happening. I tend to stay out of the loop with newly releasing anime out of a combination of general neglect and that not being my style, so when I saw the season for sale for about $5 on Xbox marketplace, I was quick to purchase it... Only for it to go cold in my Movies & TV list for a few years after I saw how poorly received it was. Well, for my January vacation this year, I finally decided to bite the bullet and see why everyone hated it so much, and boy, I was not curious for very long. The downgrade in quality was immediately noticeable, not only from the garbage animation and painful English dub, but oh yeah, they added a fucking baby to the story. Yup. Right off the bat, a little magical baby shows up and declares itself the child of Maou and Yusa, and they in turn decide to face down the forces of heaven to keep it, because it’s a piece of that spiritual thing Sephiroth was named after and they don’t want the surfer dude angel to get her because reasons.

First off, I’m not into this. If I had any tolerance for material where a previously badass character throws everything in their life away to protect a kid they just met, I would have gotten through more than three episodes of The Mandalorian. Second, adding a baby to a series never, ever works out for the better. It made Fairly OddParents worse, it made Rugrats worse, it made Godzilla worse at least three separate times, it made Malcolm in the Middle worse, Lily has always been the worst part of Loud house, etcetera, etcetera. Okay, maybe F is for Family pulled it off, but that’s a really high bar, and the only reason I’m not adding The Flintstones to the list is because I’m young enough that it feels like Pebbles and Bam-Bam have just always been there(Also, they didn’t make their show worse until they became teenagers). The only thing Alus accomplishes is starting a very underwhelming fight and teasing a developing relationship between Maou and Yusa, which thankfully never goes anywhere.

Then again, this show really isn’t about the baby. It’s not really about anything. This season kind of feels like a show where nothing happens, but that’s ironically because there’s actually a ton of plot points floating around willy-nilly, and they just don’t mesh together well into a vohesive narrative. This might be a little bit of a spoiler, but let’s go over just some of the things this season throws at the wall. There’s Gabriel, trying to retrieve the pieces of that Sephiroth thing, and thus trying to steal Alus. There’s MgRonalds shutting down and the cast looking for work. There’s the need to buy things for their apartment. There’s Yusa dealing with revelations about her parents. There’s Rika’s still dangling love confession that gets brought up once. There’s a bear, and some farm thieves. There’s the watcher. There’s Rika being infested with Midichlorians to give birth to the new Daath Vader. There’s Yusa’s friend ‘crushing on’ Alciel. There is little to nothing tying these plot points together, most of them are not resolved in satisfactory ways, and it all comes together into kind of an incoherent mess.

And hang on, what did I just say about MgRonalds? Uh, let’s see, it closes down for months worth of remodeling, so that Maou and co can spend the rest of the season applying for new jobs where he can get tangled up in even more heavenly and/or demonic conflicts that can be resolved with brief spurts of cheap looking action followed by a lot of talking(and I mean a looooooooot of talking), but here’s the problem; Seeing Maou, a fucking demon king, Satan himself, living his best life while working in a fast food joint was the heart and sole of the series, and removing that element from the show was the worst fucking choice they could have made. This isn’t even The Devil is a Part timer anymore, it’s either The Devil is Unemployed or The Devil is a Temp, depending where you are in the series. Fast food work is the fucking identity of this show, and the absolute sincere as fuck gravity that the material treated the war between MgRonalds and Sentucky Fried Chicken with was the best possible kind of ridiculous.

Another issue I couldn’t help but notice is that at least half the cast struggles for relevance through the season... I would honestly say that after a few quick rewrites, only Maou, Yusa and Lucifer REALLY needed to be there for most of the season. Crestia Bell may have been my favorite character last season, but she contributes nothing to this season but a couple of interactions and some lore dump exposition. Rika really doesn’t do anything important until the second half, and Alciel, if I’m being completely honest, is just white noise at this point. He’s the same exact character... No, the same exact joke as he was last season, he could have been written out so easily. But oh wait, if you cut out all of the no longer necessary characters, who would be left to do all the talking? Who would dump all of the exposition about the Demonic, Earthen and Heavenly worlds without them? I don’t remember the first season suddenly getting this boring when it was worldbuilding.

I guess that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy anything... This is bad, but it’s nowhere near the worst anime sequel I’ve ever seen. There were a couple of moments I laughed at, like for real, genuinely funny moments that I liked. Also, after the first two episodes are over, the writing does improve, albeit not by a lot. There’s a ton of boring or just plain unengaging moments, but when something’s actually happening plot wise, the material is watchable enough, and easy enough to follow. There are a couple of mildly effective twists, and one that would have been a LOT more effective if a little birdy hadn’t spoiled it for us. Unfortunately, these few bright spots do not make up for what’s been lost. The first season had an aura about it, a really strong creative energy and a sense that no matter what direction it went in, it still HAD a clear direction in mind. This season feels lost and confused. I loved the fish out of water aspect of the first season, but that only really comes up a couple times here. And again, without MgRonalds, the Devil is no Longer a Part Timer, and just like Maou, the series struggles to work.

Originally available from Funimation, the first and second seasons of Devil is a Part Timer are available physically from Crunchyroll, as well as for streaming on their website and Xbox marketplace. There’s also a third season, referred to as season 3 in some places and Season 2 part 2 in others. The light novel series that it was based on is available stateside from Yen Press, as is the translated manga by Satoshi Wagahara. A Spin-off manga called Devil is a Part-Timer! High School is available just the same.

All in all, you kind of have to temper your expectations when you suddenly receive a new season of a beloved series after a long period of time, even if it was a series that got cut tragically short that people have been demanding a continuation of. Even Firefly’s die-hard fandom stopped asking for more in recent years, or at least the sane ones have. As for the second season of Devil is a Part Timer, the best thing I can say about it is that the people making it did try their best, but they were never able to get in touch with what made the first season work, and thus they were never able to preserve or expound upon it. It’s not the worst sequel I’ve ever seen, and although the first two episodes are borderline atrocious, it does get a little better from episode 3 onwards, even if it never goes beyond the level of ‘okay.’ It’s not a complete trainwreck, but I still can’t recommend it.

I give The Devil is a Part-Timer season 2 a 4/10