Kaminaki Sekai no Kamisama Katsudou

This anime takes a bit of time to really get going, but ultimately the main plot is about the protagonist, Yukito, creating a new religion in a world without religion. Yukito was originally the son of the head of a cult and died during one of their rituals. This gave him a strong dislike of gods and religion, and thus his last wish was to be reincarnated into a world without religion. His wish essentially comes true and at first he’s enjoying his new life in a godless small village. However, there are some really dark aspects to the world he’s been reincarnated into, andthe only reason he survives is due to the god of the cult from his old world, Mitama, coming to save him. Unfortunately, gods draw powers from followers, and seeing as Mitama doesn’t have any followers in the world they’re in, she quickly runs out of power. Thus, in order to protect the village that took him in and the friends he’s made, Yukito begins creating a new religion to power up Mitama while using every dirty trick he learned while heir apparent to a cult. Things get more complicated when powerful being known as Archons catch onto his plan and start implementing their own schemes to gain followers and ascend to godhood. The writing here is overall really interesting and the world building centered around how the world ended up in a godless state is fleshed out well. The central plot regarding expanding the religion is well paced and develops nicely over the course of the season. Throughout that, the anime details various tools and tricks that have been used to create and spread religions as well as providing some insight into how religion works in general. It’s nothing too deep or complicated, but it does give the writing more weight than if it it was entirely made up. With all that said, I would like to make it clear that is absolutely in no way at all a serious anime. It is primarily a comedy with a lot of the comedy arising from how ridiculously the serious plot matters are dealt with. It is one wild ride from beginning to end. Things escalate to absurd degrees completely unexpectedly. The writing doesn’t really fall into typical tropes or cliches because things too crazy for other anime are constantly happening. That and due to all the highly visual sexual humor. Yukito is a really fun protagonist. He’s a terrible person, but in a good way. His first instinct when interacting with anyone is to evaluate how useful they are and try to manipulate them. This is a part of himself that he hates due to it being a result of his cult heir upbringing. He doesn’t have much of a character arc, but he does get some character development in that he starts to accept being a terrible person because it’s necessary for the sake of protecting the village and his friends. With that said, the anime still hams it up in regards to him and tries to make him seem as dastardly as possible, which is usually pretty hilarious. The rest of the cast are also pretty much just a bunch of lunatics. There’s an attempt at giving some of them serious backstories, mainly the antagonists, but overall I didn’t feel it was all that well written. They still have depth in terms of unique personalities and their bonds with each other. That plays incredibly well into the comedy and is enough to make quite a few of them likable and the group overall worth getting invested in. This season only has a small part of a much longer story so the ending to this season definitely doesn’t feel complete, but the final stretch of the final episode emphasizes the cast in such a way that I’m satisfied with it. This anime is also very unique in terms of it’s production values. To put it lightly, it’s low budget. However, it seems the anime studio knew what they were dealing with and planned around it very well. They do all sorts of crazy things that may not work for most anime, but fit very well with the absurd nature of this anime. The 3DCG is so bad its actually funny. There’s even a scene where they just took real life footage and pasted anime characters heads over it. A lot of scenes are also randomly pixel art instead of traditional animation. There may not have been a lot of money put into this anime, but there was clearly a lot of heart, and it definitely shines through. With that said, passion is not enough to overcome all of the anime’s shortcomings, and the bad animation is often very pronounced. Still, I really like the artistic decisions and character designs so overall I really like how the anime looks. The OP and ED are pretty solid too in terms of visuals and music. I really liked how the visuals changed from episode to episode. The songs I wasn’t particularly fond of at first but they really grew on me. The soundtrack was decent enough but not particularly memorable other than the great use of insert songs. tl;dr: A very messy but interesting and amusing anime.