In a world that’s full of magic, powering our appliances and enhancing our daily lives, there are few callings for an ambitious young soul to pursue... But that’s okay, because there’s only one calling that matters, and that’s the call of heroism! Driven by a desire to make something of themselves and a compulsion to improve the world around them and protect the souls who depend on them, heroes train day and night to battle it out against the Demon King! But what happens when it’s over? Where is a prospective hero to go, what are they to do, how are they to live, once the Demon King’s been killed and the call for heroes has ended? Well, for a hero in training named Raul, there really isn’t anything left that puts a sparkle in his heart, so he gets a dead end no-skill retail job. He’s doing okay, but he's not challenging himself, he’s content to just tread water... Until Fino comes along. Will this former aspiring hero be able to put aside his differences and work alongside the princess of hell?
I Couldn’t Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get A Job is a very long title, so it’s good news that the Japanese gave it a mercifully short subtitle, Yuushibuu, which I’ll be using for the rest of this review. However, the production side of things for this anime is somewhat less merciful, as it’s just unfortunate news all around. Yuushibuu was produced by Asread, a company that got their start by producing Shuffle, but don’t worry, it gets worse. They also produced Future Diary and Corpse Party, two shows I really like that are not especially known for their dazzling visuals, as well as Arifureta, which I did not like, and I genuinely don’t remember how it looked. Aside from production assistance and in-between animation for countless anime over the years, none of their primary production output has ever looked great, and while I guess Ga Rei Zero may have been an exception to this, they didn’t produce that one alone.
Things get even worse when you look at the resume of the director, who is primarily known for titles like End of Summer, Legend of Lemnear, Plastic Little, the Queen’s Blade franchise, basically the kind of anime that I wouldn’t quite call soft core hentai, although they are mainly only sought out for the nudity contained within. Oh, and of course there’s a bunch of actual hentai on his resume, the tamest of which is probably two episodes of the four episode Kekko Kamen OVA. His most legit works are Arifureta, which might be the only anime in his resume that doesn’t contain any uncensored fanservice; Unbreakable Machine doll, which contained a little; And Yuushibuu, which is somewhere between the two. If I didn’t know all of this, and you told me Yuushibuu was directed by a guy who mostly worked on spank bank material with only brief tastes of mainstream success, I would believe you, honestly, because that is exactly the vibe I get from Yuushibuu.
Okay, most of the time, Yuushibuu is not a bad looking anime. There’s some action... I mean fighting action, at least for now... And it’s usually pretty cool looking, really fast paced and fun swords and sorcery type stuff. It relies a little on the same kind of broken frame runny egg animation that shows like Sword Art Online made famous, but not to as egregious a degree. CG effects are well handled and smoothly integrated, especially when it comes to magic effects and the occasional monster asset, but this is mostly a slice of life anime, and it’s very clear that the budget was not managed very well, because when the animation gets cheap, it’s noticeable as hell. There are extended conversations where characters who aren’t talking just stand there awkwardly in suspended animation, neither blinking nor breathing, until it’s their turn to speak. Weird looking physical interactions, cheap close-ups on walking cycles, just about every budget saving trick is here, all so the animators could splurge where they wanted to and neglect the rest.
The design work is okay, but a little on the generic side. There are multiple characters who look way too similar to each other, and I think the only character who really manages to stand out visually in any kind of memorable way is the mechanic character, Loa. The nudity looks good... It’s an improvement over Future Diary, at least... But with the exception of the OVA finale episode, at least sixty percent of the fanservice is censored in some way, and the remaining forty percent revolves entirely around only one character. The world the story takes place in isn’t worth writing home about either. It mostly just looks like modern day Japan, which I know was the intention, but just because it was on purpose doesn’t make it look any less boring or generic. The magical appliances still look like normal, basic appliances, and while I applaud the commitment to accuracy, there’s still nothing really exciting about it. Sure, the demon world looks really cool, but we don’t really spend all that much time there.
Speaking of the Demon World, before I go any further, there is one question I have to find an answer for; Is Yuushibuu an isekai? That’s complicated. An isekai is defined as a story where the main character gets transported to a new world, right? Well, the main character doesn’t get transported anywhere, except for some fighting in the demon world in the beginning. Fino is from that world, so I guess you could call it a reverse isekai, like Dragon Maid and The Devil is a Part Timer? But that also really isn’t the same thing, because Fino doesn’t get transported to OUR world, in fact, both of the worlds in this show are fantasy worlds... The magical world and the demon world, which are kind of implied to have been familiar with each other for an undisclosed amount of time. Is it an isekai if the real human world isn’t part of the occasion? Does Fino running away to the magic human world count? I don’t fucking know, so I’m just going to call it an isekai for the sake of familiarity. If you don’t like that, well, I apologize to the six people who get to read this before it gets bumped off of the front page.
All that aside, this is an isekai anime, and it’s a really interesting one, too. Is it interesting in a good way, or a bad way? Yes. It’s both, kind of. I already went over the core concept of this series in the plot synopsis, but basically, this world has all the comforts and conveniences of our world, except it all runs on magic instead of electricity. That’s a pretty out there concept, and since the main characters all work in a magical appliance store, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re going to get a front row seat to all of the wacky ideas the creators had for this concept, and they had... Some. They certainly had some ideas. I can’t fault them for that. When a product breaks, you don’t fix it by tinkering with it physically(although it does physically look like its real world counterpart), they fix it with magic spells and transmutation circles. When a product is defective, it basically just becomes a magical death trap that has to be manually deactivated to save the customer and whoever else is nearby.
As part of the warranty on some higher end products, employees of the store will regularly visit you to recharge the magic in your device, and I’ll be honest, when this concept is introduced, it leads to the two best episodes in the series, where Raul, Fino and Loa have to go out and perform customer service for a family that just cancelled a purchase, leading to such a fun, exciting and heartwarming series of events that, I’m not going to lie, even if this overall concept is presented in underwhelming fashion the rest of the time, it’s worth it for these two episodes. If it wasn’t for these two episodes, I would be sitting here saying that this show would have been better in the long run if they had just scrapped the magical appliances idea and just set the story in the real world, with electricity and stuff. That’s not to say that this was a bad idea, hell it wasn’t even an uninspired idea, but it was an idea with a very clear ceiling, and the writing never really manages to find a way to break through that ceiling. If it wasn’t for those two episodes, I would question whether or not it was worth it, and if just having Fino react to our real world would be better.
Going beyond that concept, and looking at the wider plot, I’m sorry, but this show is actually pretty dumb... You could probably already guess as much from the fact that nobody guesses Fino is a demon at first glance despite her long pointy ears, but believe it or not, it gets dumber than that. So what we’re supposed to believe is that the heroism industry relied entirely on the war with the Demon King to be a feasible career, and once the Demon King was defeated, that industry collapsed. There was no more need for heroes, so once the immediate fighting stopped, all the heroes had to go their separate ways and get jobs, and I’m sorry, what? What sense does that make? Think about it, even during peace times, most developed nations still have militaries. Are there no more conflicts that heroes can fix? Are there no wars brewing among the humans in their world? Especially now that there’s no war with the Demon King to unite them all?
There are clearly monsters in the human world, so why not have the heroes become guardians to protect people from them? Adventurers to explore their own world? The other half of the plot involves Fino refusing to take her father’s place as the new Demon King, which creates a conflict with some of the retired heroes, who want her to take over so they can be useful again... I’m sorry, who’s to say she can’t become king and then strike peace with the humans? Even then, maybe the Demon World would have use of heroes. Maybe Fino could hire heroes to battle other demons in the demon world who threaten the transition of power. Hell, what’s stopping another demon from becoming king? With Fino in the human world playing retail, wouldn’t that just create a power vacuum back home? Power vacuums do not remain empty for long. They tend to get filled by those who are ambitious and opportunistic enough to seize and consolidate power. But overall, I just find it bafflingly idiotic that the hero industry would dissolve overnight just because the Demon King was defeated, when a new Demon King and a new Demon Army could establish itself at any moment. What the fuck, you guys.
I try not to think about all of this and not take the implications of the plot too seriously, but it’s kind of hard when it plays such a major role in the story, and you’re constantly being forced to think about it. I like the series when it’s not dwelling on all of this. For one thing, I work retail myself, and I do feel a significant bias towards stories about retail workers in general... Shows where a cast of characters from all walks of life put aside their hopes and dreams to coexist together in a dead end 9 to 5(or 9 to 6, if you get regular hour-long lunch breaks, which you should) and this show does that really well. As fish out of water characters go, Fino is a really likeable and charming ball of chaos, who is somehow(surprisingly) never annoying. Raul is a fairly well balanced straight man acting as her foil/victim. I like Loa, she works well as the specialized veteran worker who knows exactly how to do what she does. The manager has a really fun way of affecting the plot, and her support manager is appropriately direct and responsible, but less threatening. Again, I work retail.
Then again, not all of it works. There’s some pretty mixed messaging about sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace. When it comes to grabbing the butts of female employees in revealing uniforms, it’s apparently okay for old men to do it as long as they get a light, semi-flirtacious scolding, but a drunk middle aged man must be told off for it. I’d like to think that all of this was coincidental, and the writer didn’t mean anything by it, because that would honestly be the best case scenario here. There’s a lot about the Demon World and monsters in general that is left frustratingly unexplored, and some related plot points get dropped and never resolved. The biggest problem, though, is that there really isn’t anything here that you couldn’t find better anywhere else. As an isekai, the concept is definitely interesting, but I’ve seen way more interesting ideas get explored and fleshed out to a much larger degree. As a show where a royal Demonic Figure escapes to the human world to work a normal job, you know where I’m going with this, The Devil is a Part Timer is basically the much better version of Yuushibuu.
That’s not to say you can’t watch both shows, but if you had to choose, yeah, I’d recommend a trip to MgRonalds.
I Couldn’t Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job is available from Sentai Filmworks. A thirteenth OVA episode is included in all physical releases. The original light novel by Jun Sakyou and a pair of manga adaptation are not available stateside.
I like this show, I honestly do. It’s pretty funny, to the point that I laughed at least a couple of times while watching most of the episodes, and there are at least two episodes that I genuinely loved. There’s a lot of fanservice, which I get can turn some viewers off, but it’s at least somewhat self-aware, and it isn’t just constantly being thrown in your face without restraint. On the other hand, the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, the unique concept it’s built upon falls short in a lot of areas, and the visual quality is inconsistent at best. The characters are mostly likeable, but the circumstances that brought them together are hard to swallow and kind of ring hollow. Overall, this show isn’t good enough or bad enough to really stand out or warrant much of a recommendation, leaving it with the unfortunate designation of just being kind of mid. Still, I’d say it’s far enough on the positive side of mid that I don’t regret watching it, even a second time.
I give I Couldn’t Become a Hero, so I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job a 6/10
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