The ongoing unethical experiment that is Dropkick on My Devil's animated existence is shifting in real-time. When it was still the prestige exclusive that Amazon hoped to sell its anime-streaming catalog on, the series would include its bonus episodes with its seasonal run. The second season, Dropkick on My Devil!! Dash even brazenly extended its run with a clip-show and an OVA tacked on. But it's now the era of simulcasting, and the all-devouring Crunchyroll beast reigns. Jashin-chan wrapped up her third, crowdfunded season last year, and this Apocalypse Day interlude is a separate entity. I half-sarcastically asked my editor if she even wanted a stand-alone review for this, only to have her immediately, enthusiastically affirm my assignment. As I am unto Jashin-chan, truly, the joke is on me.

The fact is, even with only 23 brain-bleeding minutes to work with, Dropkick is still Dropkick. It's screwing with the innocent audience watching it as much as it's spitting in the face of those that paid for and produced this thing. It's been a year, so it's natural to presume that the meteor strike that devastates humble Jinbōchō in this OVA's introduction is a reference to the disaster that Jashin (naturally) failed to foil at the end of Dropkick on My Devil!! X. But no, that season-ending event was the sun exploding, not a meteor, so that inconsequential cliffhanger remains expectedly unresolved. Instead, a new apocalypse is wrought in the opening entirely out of the desire to make a half-assed Fist of the North Star parody whenever this special needs to fill time. Not that any attempt at continuity matters when you're dealing with a special that ends with its title character being brutally prepared and eaten by her cohorts. Spoilers, I guess. It's all like free-form jazz with slightly more dismemberment jokes.

I'm not sure what else could be expected from an anime that is, at this point, less an ongoing story and more a meta-aware commentary on the pitfalls of a continuing gag series and city tax and funding systems. This is the series that's still soldiering on even after the season about Jashin stealing crowdfund money was actually denied some of its funding from Furano due to casting the city in a bad light. That was probably the most Jashin-core thing that could have happened to a Jashin-chan anime. This OVA's response? A collaboration with the town of Takamori instead which kicks off with a scene of Jashin being denied hometown tax funding for the exact same reason Furano quashed her payment. So long as Dropkick is jumping genres from screwball comedy to high-concept metatext to edutainment, it might as well become a documentary while it's at it, too.

Should viewers even have any expectations then, apart from an extra half-hour of watching Jashin wreak havoc? Even the peculiarities of production are at the mercy of the show taking the piss out of itself; Jashin makes an aside reference to the animation seeming different (on account of being produced by studio Makaria instead of Nomad this go-around), yet by the end the whole thing still devolves into the same loose, endearingly janky character designs tussling in a nondescript field. Or perhaps this really is a famous Takamori landmark, but my ability to discern landscapes is as underdeveloped as Jashin's hair-color-based perception of all her ostensible friends.

Alongside the nigh-imperceptible studio switch, the cavalcade of characters might be the most notable feature of this apocalypse diary. I noted in my review of Dropkick on My Devil!! X that Jashin's increasing entourage was starting to crowd each other out. Apocalypse Day, seemingly took that criticism very personally. It pulled a Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie and featured every single one of its characters in one installment. Mostly, anyway, as some minor players might be unaccounted for and the famous Hatsune Miku has her guest spot taken up by the one and only Kenshiro instead. This is arguably Dropkick back to its most standard shitpost comedy against the largely ignored backdrop of Yurine's tyranny. Minos is red for some inexplicable reason. Pino speedballs a bunch of drugs before the big battle. Pekola is seen in a setting of decorated trees for what might be the most oblique belated Christmas special of all time. This is not an anime to be watched for conventional narrative, and this single episode sure as shit is not one conducive to the facilitation of a full-form written review.

So why the hell am I here then, boss? The obvious answer would be for the sake of completionism. As Apocalypse Day represents a holding pattern for Dropkick on My Devil!! as they prepare for the full fourth season they somehow conned a crowd into funding again, a review of it fills the chronological encyclopedia gap between all things Jashin-chan. I'd concede that this askance indulgence in side-story chaos is hardly an optimal starting point for some hypothetical wide-eyed newcomer to this franchise, but then that could arguably have been said about the very first season. No one can truly ever be prepared for the Dropkick on My Devill!! experience, be they anime viewers with 23 minutes to kill or a wholly unsuspecting city council. If this anime series can be credibly accused of being a money-funneling scam at this point, well, at least it's a pretty funny one that's still unlike anything else out there.