Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!

After dying a laughable and pathetic death on his way back from buying a game, high school student and recluse Kazuma Satou finds himself sitting before a beautiful but obnoxious goddess named Aqua. She provides the NEET with two options: continue on to heaven or reincarnate in every gamer's dream—a real fantasy world! Choosing to start a new life, Kazuma is quickly tasked with defeating a Demon King who is terrorizing villages. But before he goes, he can choose one item of any kind to aid him in his quest, and the future hero selects Aqua. But Kazuma has made a grave mistake—Aqua is completely useless!

Unfortunately, their troubles don't end here; it turns out that living in such a world is far different from how it plays out in a game. Instead of going on a thrilling adventure, the duo must first work to pay for their living expenses. Indeed, their misfortunes have only just begun!

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Megumin Main

Takahashi, Rie Japanese

Satou, Kazuma Main

Fukushima, Jun Japanese

Aqua Main

Amamiya, Sora Japanese

Dustiness, Lalatina Ford Main

Kayano, Ai Japanese

Wiz Supporting

Horie, Yui Japanese

Eris Supporting

Suwa, Ayaka Japanese

Chris Supporting

Suwa, Ayaka Japanese

Luna Supporting

Hara, Sayuri Japanese

Arakuremono Supporting

Inada, Tetsu Japanese

Beldia Supporting

Yasumoto, Hiroki Japanese

Ogura, Rie Producer

Urasaki, Nobumitsu Producer

Nakata, Yoshifumi Assistant Producer

Kanasaki, Takaomi Director, Episode Director, Storyboard, Key Animation

Reviews

Mar 16, 2025

didazic

Recommended

I’m a little late on writing a review, but Konosuba has been one of the most enjoyable series I’ve ever watched. With season 4 coming up, I wanted to let anyone wondering if they should start the series know that they definitely should. The story isn’t something that will blow your mind, its just an isekai with some comedy mixed in. The plot can be predictable at times, but the funny moments, character dynamics, and the art style is what really makes it enjoyable to watch. The characters are also a main highlight. Kazuma, Aqua, Megumin, and Darkness are some people you cant forget after ... giving it a watch, each with unique flaws and strengths that set them apart. Even though they may not be deeply developed, their interactions and growth throughout the series are what make it so good.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jan 16, 2025

RemanTheArchean

Mixed Feelings

I came to this series from the recommendation of a friend when I asked him for a solid comedy anime. I hadn't really been jiving with the comedic bits of other anime like FMA:B and Steins;Gate, and I wanted to test whether this was just a fluke of a few shows, or whether Japanese comedy as a whole simply doesn't translate well to English. After watching Konosuba, I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the latter interpretation is correct. I've heard that Japanese comedy can be big on wordplay which I'm sure would get absolutely mangled by translation issues. Some turbo-weeaboos might claim this means ... I'm unable to properly judge the genre, as I'm not really getting the full experience unless I've learned the language. I understand their position, but I'm going to ignore those people and consistently judge anime purely by the end result of its English-language attempt.

The jokes in anime mostly consist of the following: 1) characters overreacting to things, 2) lewd cringe comedy, and 3) a handful of gags that are repeated ad nauseum (often involving characters overreacting to things, or lewd cringe comedy). Maybe 12-year-olds would find this stuff hilarious, but I'd reckon that most adults wouldn't find this list to be a particularly fertile field for laughs. There are 4 primary characters in Konosuba: Kozuma, who is the Joe Average protagonist, and his 3 female companions. Each of these 3 companions has a single gag that's repeated over and over. For Aqua, it's that she's technically a goddess but she acts like a toddler. For Megamin, it's that she can only cast one big spell before flopping over and being useless for the rest of the battle. For Darkness, it's that she's a horny masochist (of the meme variety) who becomes *blushy crushy* whenever she's physically or emotionally attacked. None of these gags are funny. Very few of the other jokes were funny either. A few made me smirk, and a tiny percentage made me do a light chuckle (e.g. the result of Kozuma's "steal" spell, which is just quintessentially Japanese), but nothing really beyond this. I don't think laughter is the *only* metric that comedy ought to be judged by, but it's undoubtedly a pretty big portion. As such, "it's not that funny" is pretty damning cricism of a show that spends a plurality of its time trying to tell jokes.

If there's anything that salvages the show, it's that it slowly morphs into a halfway decent character drama. Season 1 is practically a sitcom with each episode being mostly self-contained, and only a handful of details mattering from episode to episode. The show is at its worst here, as the characters are mostly static and the show only has its comedy to carry it. By season 2 the creators started playing with longer narratives and character development, and then by season 3 they had fully embraced both. I'll be darned if I didn't start to care about the characters by the end, even though many of these overarching developments were quite silly, like "will the loli form a relationship with the protagonist given that she clearly wants to gargle his dick" and "will the muscley armored girl be forced to submit to the life of a servile housewife". However, the show was still uneven in some places, with Aqua in particular being almost forgotten relative to Megamin and Darkness.

If the show keeps following the trajectory it's been on, then I *might* be convinced to watch future seasons if they're ever made.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Sep 1, 2024

SCLFI

Not Recommended

According to an old saying, "the times change, and we too change with them." Excluded from this 'we', however, are isekai authors, a peculiar group with a soldierly manifest in their refusal to change anything, so that they can retell the same story in exactitude for as long as the light novel industry and the recognisability of the video game RPG will allow them to sidestep having to engage with any form of creativity. But, rather than address the entire genre that it belongs to, my only purpose is to speak only and specifically about Konosuba. To open with, its setting is, as with all ... its genre contemporaries, deliberately generic, offering very little for a viewer to be immersed with or engage with, it is antithetical to those made by the likes of Tolkien or Martin which implore a sense of wonder and curiosity, Konosuba’s world doesn’t want you to peer through the curtain to see what you’ll find, because there is nothing there. A vaguely European, vaguely medieval village, where people still eat onigiri, characters will show up in an office lady/flight attendant outfit for one scene without explanation, and others will be dressed like Japanese delinquents with pompadour haircuts. But despite the aforementioned, there’s also a scene in which the main character has to explain what football is, which only points towards a real lack of commitment, there is the incidental line in which the characters reveal that they are aware they are in a video game, but for the most part, it is just the facade of a medieval setting, an author taking a medieval setting, and rather than thinking about how this would affect or change things understood from a modern perspective, they simply and carelessly add those modern elements without any consideration of how it actually impacts the world they have created.

Although Konosuba would like to produce a setting in which some isolated village seemingly in the middle of nowhere is the only place that matters (with that said, if they ever travelled to a separate one, I don’t think anyone would notice), there is no escaping from the interconnected nature of the world at large, and it is in this area that the issues with the writing reveal themselves. For one thing, it becomes obvious early on how much they rely on the same basic principles, basic in the sense that they do not allow for any real sense of expansion or development. The most prominently featured of these is the fact that a character's level of confidence is directly disproportionate to the likelihood of them actually being correct – when the knight says "a low-level adventurer like you will never be able to even hurt me", that is when you know he will be defeated immediately. Elsewhere, this lack of creativity is evident, as while the level of narration is kept to a minimum, an exception to this is made, when the main character will invoke the classic isekai moment of Aristotelian anagnorisis, only for a fake-out, i.e. "I thought I wanted my old life back, but I’m actually glad to have my friends and I care about them, except not really this shit sucks and I hate them." I counted 3 instances of them reusing this same exact setup, and considering the fact this sort of character realisation can’t occur until a few episodes have passed, that’s basically once every other episode, which really points to the lack of imagination. There’s a way of writing subversive comedy, and this isn't even a resemblance of what that looks like. Across the rest of its runtime, it is similarly uninspired, taking the approach of making sure all of its characters, rather than just one minor one, are gag characters, people with only one trait to their credit (as it so happens, all three of them share the same unifying trait of stupidity), as though they are working backwards, to create a flanderised non-entity, and then slowly try and incidentally add some moments of them displaying competence, before of course reversing that course to return to the standard sitcom baseline. Among these, Darkness manages to set herself apart as having some of the most egregious dialogue, either she directly announces and reminds the viewer of her one trait in her speech, or if not, her vocal performance is enunciated in such a way that it is obviously there to only invoke and again remind them of that fact. Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei was able to balance a whole classroom of trait-based characters, by turning them into people whose personalities were reflected by their traits, not defined by them. How Konosuba failed to even manage with a mere 3 is a testament to its overwhelming lack of care, but of course, the dialogue doesn't matter – watching any episode makes it apparent that the actual words spoken are not the point of attention, that would be the reaction shots. Thomas LaMarre spoke of how anime typically produces an aesthetic of stillness, a sense of movement even when there is none, through clever framing and shot techniques, something Konosuba chooses not to do and instead depict extras in the shot with full prominence, so the viewer is able to view their complete lack of movement via the refusal to animate more than one character at a time. It’s all in the reaction shots, the dialogue is only there to facilitate them, and every other aspect of design and production isn't there to facilitate anything, but that doesn't matter either, because nobody cares about having an interesting setting or good dialogue, or anything. If they can add viral-worthy reaction shots, then that’s all they need.

To summarise, I believe this quotation from Christopher Bolton perfectly encapsulates Konosuba's framework: "While Lyotard hoped that modernity's received grand narratives would give way to a more conscious (more critical) choice between the numberless little narratives of postmodernity, Blood+ is arguably the worst of both worlds: the same trivial script replayed endlessly without any room for self-awareness or choice. This seems to be a risk inherent in television anime. Even as the extended time frame allows for more involved plots, the formulaic quality that often characterises television can quickly undermine any sense of critical perspective." Bolton may be talking about another series in another genre, but I would not be able to contest a word of its poignancy as concerns this particular series. Konosuba include incidental moments of Brechtian self-awareness, but critically, it is only the appearance of being as such. It is not an exercise in anti-intellectualism, but rather, something arguably worse – a series that demonstrates a conceptual ignorance of intellectualism, not understanding why poetics, aesthetics, or anything at all manifests itself within the arts. It turns a skull back to look upon itself, but without the eyes to assess any of what it has created.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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