Overall Review: Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai Megami-hen

It wasn't perfect by any means, but I wish we would get more Kaminomi some day.

For all my misgivings as a manga reader, and my anxieties about the ability of this finale to live up to the quality of the Goddess Arc, I’m more or less smugly pleased with the end result. I don’t think it was possible for Manglobe to ever pull this arc off perfectly considering how little time they gave themselves to work with so much material, and it’s certainly true that the final episode is plagued by the same issues that the rest of the season gave us. Yet despite that, despite the rushing and very limited focus on certain aspects of the narrative, I can’t help but want to applaud the studio a little for how they worked things through. Sometimes when you’re given something that’s really difficult to work with, the result depends entirely on how well you worked around those limitations; this is one of those times that I can definitely award a “you did your best and it didn’t suck” sticker. In fact, when it comes to this episode specifically, I find the execution to be quite admirable and heavily emotional, flawed though it is.

In general though, I do wish we’d had more time for this arc, and I still heavily lament the fact that so much pre-Goddess material was skipped. Can you really enjoy Yui, Tsukiyo, Akari, and all the other skipped girls when you’ve never been exposed to their original arcs? As I mentioned at the beginning of the season, most anime only viewers were probably prompted into reading the manga at some point, which is always a good thing, but as its own medium, it is fairly disappointing to see an adaptation with so much potential meet with so many limitations. The pacing could be especially jarring in some episodes and strangely fine in others, and certain details were definitely skipped when it comes to the manga. But in the end, I do have to come back to my original conclusion: you have to be grateful for what you get, and what we got is hardly the worst adaptation I’ve ever seen. The fact that I ended this post in tears and feels goes to say how good the material still is, even when condensed into twelve short weeks.

We have reached the ending, my friends, and it is time to return to the Real. Excuse me while I grab a tissue and huddle somewhere with a pillow.