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Review

by Christopher Farris,

Dropkick on My Devil! X

Episodes 1-12 Streaming

Synopsis:
Dropkick on My Devil! X
Standard production-funding methods and the town of Jinbocho itself can no longer contain Jashin-chan. She is real, she stole all our money, and she is coming for you…so long as 'you' are someone who lives in a particular array of Hokkaido hot-spots. In her heartless wake are all her eternally put-upon fellow devils and angels, and some new faces, less interested in helping or reining in Jashin-chan, and more concerned with passively dealing with her terrorizing turns while also taking in the sights on this absurd little road-trip. Will anyone ever learn any kind of lesson, or is the curse of this vicious viper-devil truly an immortal one?
Review:

What is Dropkick on My Devil! X? Why is Dropkick on My Devil! X? We have on our hands the just-wrapped third season of a series whose irreverence has always positioned it as pointedly pointless to approach from a critical angle, able only to be evaluated as an askance, witness-report warning for anyone who might be too repelled by its particular approach. What does anyone coming back for this continuation even expect from that? We're talking about a season whose promotions specifically insinuated that the always-contentious 'X' in its anime title would be pronounced 'Cross' in this case, only for the show proper to start and have everyone saying it as 'Ex' instead. It's representative of the genesis of this one, bought and paid for, sight-unseen, by a crowd and thus not needing to justify its existence with success upon airing. But it runs deeper and broader than that, as Drop Kick on my Devil! has become an anime so defined in conversation with its genre, its source material, its audience, and even itself as an ongoing series that trying to continue evaluating it as a simple adaptation or continuation is a fool's errand.

Drop Kick on my Devil! the anime can scarcely be called an 'adaptation' as of X. The series' early-2010's approach to humor always necessitated an amount of fourth-wall-breaking, but this season sees fit to demolish the remaining three walls as well. Characters regularly whip out volumes of the original manga to cite events the anime couldn't be assed to cover. An impromptu game of Karuta obliquely references backstory and lore that the show never got around to yet frequently mentions. New character Lierre's previous appearance in the preceding season's OVA episode is remarked upon with dubious canonicity as characters gaslight Jashin regarding whether it even happened or not. That second season toyed with the idea of development for some of the characters over its course, but Dropkick on My Devil! X knows they no longer need to spend any of that kind of downtime drawing the audience in. They got over thirty million yen handed to them, they can basically go wherever they want now!

To what critical credit can even be afforded a show like Dropkick, the season uses the conditions of its crowdfunded continuation to make this a much more distinguishing follow-up than the previous Dropkick on My Devil!! Dash. Yes, the absurdity, the irreverence, the big dial controlling the shitpost energy has swapped out with a new one that goes up to 12 and then pushed past even that, but it still abides by the appeal that personally-paying audience would expect. It never quite hits the avant-garde levels of something like Pop Team Epic's calculated crappiness, as Dropkick does still feel as if it's striving to be Good On Purpose. That's for a given value of good, of course, as the most major 'plot' points propelling it are borne out of its very genesis, creating a whole anime story out of its terrible titular character stealing its crowdfund money, losing it all on gambling debts, then going on the run through Hokkaido.

It's this crowd-mandated collaboration with various areas of that island which form the most defining, distinctive feature of Dropkick on My Devil! X. The backdrop of Jinbocho had felt enough like home for those previous two seasons, but here the rotating roles of Hakkaido's various areas infuse some truly unique setpieces for the characters to perform their psychotic sketch routines in front of. It's one part a somewhat-expected structure of a road-trip-chase sitcom story, and another part Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, as Jashin's new avenues for comeuppance are plotted alongside regional trivia for places like Kushiro or Minami Shimabara. It defies the argument that this franchise is merely stupid-ass comedy. Here, four years and three seasons deep, Drop Kick on my Devil! has become edutainment.

That raucous road-trip is the most memorable, most recommendable component of Dropkick on My Devil! X, but does it elevate every other element of this season? Does it need to? The escalations present in this show's antics feel more extreme in their violence and frequency even compared to the dialed-up hills and valleys of the second season, yet paradoxically, the actual quality of the humor feels more at the baseline chuckle-worthiness of the freshman Dropkick. Is this a result of spending so much time with these characters now? Is it simply less affecting now, after being conditioned to Jashin's awful treatment of a friend like Medusa, to revel in the latter finally getting fed up with horrible snake-devil's bullshit and holding her responsible for her actions?

Some priorities are necessarily going to be at odds with particular audience tastes: I still loathe the antics of predatory police officer Mei, yet her role feels more frequent and integral than ever here, irritatingly so. Yet how counter does that run to my preferences when I recognize that Mei still gets at least a couple of the most laugh-out-loud jokes of the whole season, when the show knows how to deploy them? Drop Kick on my Devil! had previously prompted questions from me on the nature of criticism, and continued engagement with successive seasons of a show you aren't necessarily a 'fan' of, and yet now, this far in, it forces me to reckon with my own personal interiority. To attempt to judge Jashin-chan is to understand that you will never know your own self as truly as Jashin-chan knows hers.

That said, there is some calculable cost to this conditioned craziness. As is often the case with these kinds of ensemble comedies, Dropkick on My Devil! X sees fit to introduce continually more characters into its cast. Some, like the aforementioned Lierre, make for strong additions, providing new vectors for horrible behavior from the likes of Jashin, or helpfully corralling the collective efforts of the angelic side of the cast. It gives that bunch that much more to do, distinctive from simply watching Pekola suffer in new and creative ways, though we still get a few moments of that old kind of mistreatment. But others, like the integration of Jashin's old teacher Persephone, come off like nought but setup for a few scattered sketches.

Similarly, the dramatic introduction of a pair of vampires in the final two episodes feels less like a major addition and more like what it actually plays out as: A briefly-interacted-with plot device introduced for the barest dramatic possibilities powering a 'Season Finale' whose stakes are all but forgotten by the end of it. Appropriate to the overall stylings of Dropkick, sure, but those efforts do mean all these extra players can start to crowd each other out as the season goes on, supplemented by crowdfund-contributed cameos and recurring guest spots from the famous Miku Hatsune. Though there's something to be said for your big 'celebrity' inclusion being a piece of synthesized voice software in service of viciously bullying this kind of brand-name character in every other appearance she has.

I cannot tell you if you will like Dropkick on My Devil! X more, less, or the same as the other Drop Kick on my Devil!s. Only you have that frame of reference for yourself, for a series whose own frame of reference for itself lies in questioning what it needs to be for anybody. Whether that be its original creator, its production committee, the fans who funded it, or the fine people of Hokkaido, none of us can say we didn't know the sort of thing we would be getting into coming back for a third round. I can tell you that I probably found this season less extremely overall funny than the second season, but I still came away more impressed, more entertained by what it got up to, seemingly on account of it finding several more fucks to not give than I thought it even had left. And I have a healthy respect for it reaching the sort of high-meta, self-reflective heights its style always indicated it could, truly moving past simply adapting manga comedy bits and turning the very act of adaptational existence into a comedy unto itself. Perhaps that pretense will miss you, and this all will simply come across as a crowded cavalcade of characters and tourism trivia. This too is an understandable acceptance of its existence. As opinion on her resides in her own story, you cannot love Jashin-chan, but you cannot truly hate Jashin-chan either. You must only know that she is out there, sustained on the will, and funds, of the crowd.

Grade:
Overall (sub) : B
Story : B+
Animation : B-
Art : B+
Music : B

+ Comedy gets more outlandishly high-concept, Crowd-funding and Hokkaido-collaboration elements make this season strongly stand out from the previous ones, Overall looks nice on account of that
High-concept can still be plenty low-brow, Its levels of absurdity are just as likely to miss a lot of people, Cast of characters is getting crowded

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Production Info:
Chief Director: Hikaru Sato
Director: Taku Yamada
Series Composition: Kazuyuki Fudeyasu
Script:
Kazuyuki Fudeyasu
Momoko Murakami
Storyboard:
Takuya Asaoka
Yūdai Hanaoka
Toshihiro Kikuchi
Kazuto Komatsu
Shinpei Nagai
Naomi Nakayama
Akira Nishimori
Ken Takahashi
Yūichi Tanaka
Taku Yamada
Episode Director:
Yūdai Hanaoka
Yoshihiko Iwata
Toshihiro Kikuchi
Tatsuya Kyōgoku
Satoshi Nakagawa
Ryō Ōkubo
Yūsuke Onoda
Taku Yamada
Takanori Yano
Unit Director:
Taku Yamada
Takanori Yano
Music: SUPA LOVE
Original creator: Yukiwo
Character Design: Makoto Koga
Art Director:
Natsuko Nakanishi
Masahiro Satō
Chief Animation Director:
Yumi Fushimi
Makoto Koga
Animation Director:
Atsushi Aono
Mariko Fujita
Masayuki Fujita
Yū Fukuoka
Miyuki Hanawa
Taro Hirano
Hua Huang
Kazuyuki Ikai
Akihiro Ino
Akira Kano
Ayako Karatani
Haruka Katsutani
Yūsuke Kawabe
Mutsuki Kawanishi
Alberto Kie
Su Ho Kim
Tadahito Kiyosawa
Makoto Koga
Akira Koshiishi
Katsuji Matsumoto
Moeko Mitsuki
Daichi Nakajima
Kyoko Niimura
Hiroyuki Ōkaji
Rikiya Okano
Takurō Sakurai
Yūya Sawaguchi
Tsutomu Shibutani
Naoki Sugiyama
Shiori Tanaka
Yumenosuke Tokuda
Shintaro Tsubota
Yukiko Watabe
Nana Yamaguchi
Shinji Yamamoto
Tong Zheng Yang
Jing Zhou
Sound Director: Yuichi Imaizumi
Director of Photography: Satoshi Yamamoto

Full encyclopedia details about
Dropkick on My Devil! X (TV 3)

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