WARNING: The following article contains SPOILERS for Denki-Gai Episode 2. If you don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading. You have been warned. Also, this article is a bit on the NSFW side.
Okay Denki-Gai, you officially have me impressed.
I am surprised at just how much the level of humor has increased within one episode. Despite the first episode only being mildly amusing, the second episode was just downright hysterical. This episode had a very absurd and creative vibe that reminded me a lot of Gintama, which is always a good sign when talking about comedic anime. The only concern is whether or not this episode will be indicative of the overall quality of the series, or if this episode was just an outlier.
Perhaps one of the things that has me concerned that this episode may have been a fluke is because it already used up every anime comedy series’s ace in the hole: the fanservice episode. One of the reasons that I tend to always gravitate towards a lot of ecchi series is due to the fact that the Japanese always seem to make them hilarious in some way. While I am unsure if Denki-Gai is inherently an ecchi series, I can safely say that this episode definitely has some shades of it.
This episode’s plot involves the Umanohone staff competing in a competition at the late summer greeting festival for a $10,000 prize. Another observation of mine is that anime series always tend to make competitions hilarious as well. This has even been the case in some series that I otherwise disliked. One common element that they seem to share is that the games themselves are often very absurd in premise. I actually ended up doing a double take when I saw that the first game was a “pantsu eating race.” From that point on, the episode just continued to escalate in sheer ridiculousness.
There are still a few downsides to this episode despite the hilarity. I think that it would make sense to say that we did NOT need a close up of a man’s crotch. Seriously, that was just ridiculous. Also the whole, “whoever wins this game will win the prize regardless of the results of the previous games” plot revelation, while funny, was a bit of an ass pull. Really, that is all I can say that was negative here, and I really needed to grasp at straws to find something.
As stated earlier, I am really hoping that Denki-Gai manages to keep this up. Despite having positive impressions based on the first episode, I did not expect it to improve this fast. However, it is this sudden shift in quality that makes me concerned that the entire series will have these random shifts and that there will not be any consistency. Granted, even if most episodes are like the first one, it still would not be a bad series, although I am just hopeful for more after getting a taste of what this series is capable of.
Denki-Gai is available to watch on Crunchyroll with new episodes coming out on Thursdays at 10:30AM EDT/7:30AM PDT. Non-premium users will be able to watch episodes for free one week after it first airs.
