Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

The World God Only Knows: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie Review

Do soul catchers experience a sophomore slump?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 4, 2012

Any parent with boys will tell you there is an almost atavistic allure emanating from videogames that seems to speak to some deep level of the adolescent male brain. When I was growing up, the major fascination was girls, now it appears to be videogames and other online gaming franchises. The fear of teenage pregnancy has been replaced by one of severe carpal tunnel syndrome. The attraction of the opposite sex is actually wound up within the world of videogames in the ingratiating if occasionally annoying anime series The World God Only Knows, as the series’ hero, Keima, is more or less addicted to Dating Sims games. While these particular types of games don’t seem to be quite as popular in the United States (perhaps due to the over-sexualized world of pop culture generally in this country), in Japan they’re extremely popular. The player moves through various romance scenarios and is able in some of the games at least to work through various storylines depending on how he (or she, frankly) decides to respond to various questions or plot point forks in the road. As strange as it may sound, you can indeed “win” a Dating Sims game, and Keima creates a lot of his identity and even self-esteem due to his ability to quickly get to the endgame (so to speak) of virtually any Dating Sims environment. This ability has made him something of an internet legend, though as is so often the case, it turns out the “real life” Keima is significantly different than his gaming persona. That difference plays into one of the central plot arcs of The World God Only Knows, for as was discussed in the review of the series’ first season, Keima is contacted by a denizen of Hell named Elsie, who, having assumed that Keima’s online abilities match his real life ones, wants to team up with the nerdy young boy to catch “loose souls”, spectral spirits that are lost in a kind of Earthly purgatory and need to be captured by Elsie to return them to their proper place in the otherwordly hierarchy.

The World God Only Knows goes off on some unexpected tangents in this second season, at least when compared to the first season, where we were pretty much offered a “lost soul of the week” format, where Keima and Elsie would work together to retrieve these errant spirits. The second season still has elements of that same plot formulation, but it tends to emphasize more of the interpersonal relationship between Keima and Elsie, while also developing a couple of side arcs for Keima specifically, which see the videogame addicted boy actually try to interact reasonably well with actual real life girls while at the same time marauding his way through various Bishōnen games.

The second season in fact follows the first season’s lead in letting Keima establish a relationship with a real live girl in order to draw out her “loose soul”, though in this case there’s a nice little twist put on things when Keima and Elsie establish the fact that this particular girl, Kusunoki, seems to be having a positively Freudian breakdown where her masculine and feminine sides can’t quite decide who should dominate her actual being. This arc may infuriate ardent feminisits, but it plays well into the kind of sweet undertone that inhabits most of The World God Only Knows’ episodes, and it’s notable that in this instance there are at least shades of gray in terms of good versus evil, something that rarely was dealt with in the bulk of the first season’s episodes.

The middle set of episodes does in fact tend to mimic the first season’s tendency toward having whatever girl is on Keima’s radar suddenly be infected by a malevolent spirit (something that the series at least attempts to explain in the early going of this second season). There are a number of okay subplots that are introduced here, including Elsie’s own feelings of incompetence in light of other spirit catchers’ more stellar careers. Keima continues to be upset that no matter how many loose souls are put in their rightful place, there seem to be too many still left inhabiting various people to ever make much of a dent in things.

Things start to get a little surreal as the season moves into its final third of episodes, though in this case that actually works to the series’ benefit, adding a layer of weirdness that makes the series’ tendency to tread the same territory over and over more bearable. Keima’s tendency to want to conquer every new Dating Sims game available leads him on a couple of excursions and by the season’s final episode, he has found a bizarre lo-fi game that he expects to be a complete loser. In the meantime, he’s been contacted by a game developer to act as an advisor to help create the supposedly “perfect” Dating Sims game. The line between “reality” and the videogame world is increasingly blurred in this arc, and the series does a fine, and often pretty funny, job of having Keima ping pong back and forth between dealing with Elsie and chasing after whatever virtual girl he is encountering in the Sims environment.

This arc is notable in that the series presents the videogame elements in a letterboxed 2.35:1 aspect ratio in order to differentiate it from the otherwise 1.78:1 presentation. But there are also some really odd, but again quite funny, character design changes that crop up so that, for instance, when Keima is totally ensconced in a game and Elsie interrupts him, he looks like one of the characters in the game rather than his typical self. The line between game and reality is virtually erased as the second season comes to a close, and Keima’s inner struggles become something a videogame unto themselves.

The series actually is more enjoyable in some of these more outré offerings than it often is in its main “loose soul catching” methods, which tend to become pretty repetitive after a while. The series echoes a number of other “soul eater” animes, and is never really overly innovative, but it has the benefit of being good natured and quite sweet most of the time, two things that help it overcome some of its more clichéd elements.

The World God Only Knows: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

While there's no huge difference between this second season's AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1, courtesy of Sentai Filmworks, and that of the first season, there's just enough of an uptick in animation quality to deserve an extra half point in the video score. As with the first season, while the overall look of the series isn't anything incredibly special, there are some very nice graphical elements and good use of CGI which help to elevate the overall appearance of The World God Only Knows. Line detail and color saturation both continue to be very strong, and in fact this second season seems to indulge a bit more in bright, vivid color schemes than the first season did. The kind of bizarre but highly enjoyable "melting" of the worlds between Keima's real life and his videogame existence is also handled very smartly from a design and presentation standpoint, with characters looking completely different in the videogame world and those sequences between presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

The World God Only Knows: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As with the first season of The World God Only Knows, two lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mixes are offered, one in Japanese and the other in English. Even more so than in the first season, the English dub is mixed considerably more aggressively than is the Japanese, with not just greater amplitude but much punchier lows and midrange frequencies. Music and sound effects are also noticeably more vivid in the English dub, and voicework is also considerably more present than in the Japanese language version. The series has some of the goofiest theme music, with the opening theme especially seeming to careen around changes and oddly pronounced English until finally settling down into something at least relatively "normal" sounding, but that only adds to the weird allure of this sometimes quite strange little series.

The World God Only Knows: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animation (HD; 1:33)


• Clean Closing Animation (HD; 6:37) actually contains several versions of the closing credits, despite the supplement being listed as a "singular".


• Japanese TV Spots (HD; 2:02)


• Japanese Release Spots (HD; 1:32)

The World God Only Knows: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The World God Only Knows actually grew on me a bit this season, not due to its rehashing of capturing the seemingly bottomless pit of loose souls, but more because of its totally bizarre wrap up, where the line between reality and the videogame world become blurred to the point where it's virtually erased. As I mentioned in my review of the first season, there's really nothing new or very exciting here, but at least this second season occasionally goes off into unexpected tangents which add a little spice to the proceedings. The video quality is also just a tad better in this second season, while the English dub continues to provide a considerably more boisterous sonic experience than the Japanese language track does. Only the supplemental features continue to be on the slight side with this otherwise enjoyable release. Recommended.