Konosuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World!

Episode 4

KONOSUBA Explosion edition episode 4 offers up an interesting character focus this week. I'm not sure it's a complete winner, though it still has a lot of enjoyable moments and it's clear the leads are very strong.

Megumin and YunYun are once again in the spotlight, and I don't think that's ever going to be a bad call on the creators' part. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking they are the most interesting members of the cast and that their interactions are the heart of the show. Their evolving friendship (or perhaps more?) is very charming to see. There's a nice mix of earnest awkwardness, nervous surprise, and goofy antics between the two of them. Megumin and YunYun have sort of a straight-man and foil dynamic, though the expression is often more along the lines of anxious mess and crime goblin. Their interactions are engaging enough that even when I don't particularly care about what they are involved in I still want to see how they approach the situation or what shenanigans they get into along the way. That's a mark of good character writing I think.

Sadly, what actually happens in the episode isn't terribly riveting. There are some fun bits here and there, like Megumin's obsession with the Duxions. But I don't think the “do friends ask for money” thread was very interesting. Furthermore, the rest of the classmates feel very perfunctory at this stage. Even the girl that was nominally being set up as Megumin's rival doesn't get to do much in this episode. The general lack of personality and few unique interactions is further hampered by the lack of visual identifiers. They all sort of look the same in a group due to the limits of the animation, their uniforms, etc, and we don't spend enough time with them to know much about who they are. I think I'd like to see more variations in dress or hairstyles to help tell everyone apart, like the big red eyepatch on the rival girl for example. But even just some more time spent with them would be nice.

Rating:

Grant is the cohost on the Blade Licking Thieves podcast and Super Senpai Podcast.

Konosuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.