The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated!

Episode 3

Episode 3, “The Great Jahy Can't Brag,” opens with our once noble, beautiful, and great Jahy in her prime… then it kicks us right into the present with this pitiful overlord at her izakaya job: a job which she's really starting to question because it hinders her ability to find more mana crystals. It doesn't help that Druj is just swimming in crystals: thankfully, she's so loyal to Jahy that she's more than willing to offer them up to her. It helps her cope with trying to be an adult in this mysterious, distant world. And that's the meat of the episode: Jahy trying to adult while also searching for another mana crystal, which is shaping up to be The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated!'s “monster of the week”-esque structure moving forward. Yet there are some good nuggets of character-building tucked into episode 3, even though most of this episode is about Jahy's foibles.

In the premiere, Jahy came off as a screaming child, and while she still gets a bit screechy when she's angry, the show's humor is leaning less on her child form and more on just how much of an actual disaster Jahy really is. This, specifically, is what made me like episode 3: the dissonance that comes from watching a once-powerful demon struggling to make it as a functioning member of a very mundane society. It makes for really funny, faux dramatic moments where Druj assumes something magical has happened, Jahy riffs on that, and reveals that, of course, it was something absolutely mundane. This change is immediately endearing, and really has me in Jahy's corner. She's so utterly pitiful that I kinda can't help but root for her.

It helps that Jahy's continuing to put on this facade of being secretly in control of everything, to the extent that she lies about owning the izakaya. It's one more layer to Jahy that moves her further away from the petulant child we saw in the premiere to a more relatable character who is barely holding it all together. This is a pretty darn good bit of character development, and Druj's overprotectiveness of Jahy is just the icing on the cake. 10 points for Jahy!

If episode 2 was an improvement over the premiere, then episode 3 is honestly just as funny, even if it doesn't do much plot-wise. I continue to really enjoy her back and forth with Druj, who is absolutely this series' best girl. I hope that we get plenty of Druj and Jahy scenes, though I fully expect the show to grow into an ensemble cast, especially since it's two-cour. I'm still here for this nice mashup of Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle meets The Devil Is a Part-Timer! with a healthy dose of Gabriel DropOut, the latter of which I haven't engaged with much, but can see the comparison.

And there's really not much else to say about this episode because it didn't really go anywhere. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it was bad: episode 3 is my favorite by far, and makes me eager for future episodes. Still, I'm just not fully convinced that this show is going to be more than what we've seen thus far. I just want a bit more from the show, though since it's two-cour, it kinda has to take its time otherwise Jahy will burn out, and I don't just mean our favorite demon girl. My hope is we'll get introduced to some new faces; I'm really curious about some of the characters we keep seeing into the OP and ED.

One thing that made this week's episode so good was the BGM, which feels like the Wii e-Shop music in its peaceful moments. This isn't the first time that this kind of sound design has been used, but it really stuck out to me this week, and made sure the episode was Good Vibes Only as I watched Jahy stumbled and struggled through another day in the life of a fallen demon girl. Credit goes to Kōji Fujimoto and Osamu Sasaki, who are giving me all of the late 2000s vibes that I crave.

It's still too early to tell if I really like the vibe of this series and the direction it's going, only because I keep thinking about the fact that it's a two-cour series. I think you can probably predict which way I'm already leaning. (It's towards Jahy good, not Jahy bad, which is always nice. I like to review things that I'll like far more than things that feel like a struggle.) Here's to episode 4 being another good entry to the series. Consider me… a bit of a fan.

Rating:

The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Mercedez is a JP-EN localization editor & proofreader/QA, pop culture critic, and a journalist who also writes for Anime Feminist, where she's a staff editor, and But Why Tho?. She's also a frequent guest on the AniFem Podcast, Chatty AF. When she's not writing, you can find her on her Twitter or on her Instagram where she's always up to something.