You have to admire Furuichi’s ability to delude himself with how things should be.
What They Say:
Angelica is visiting the Human World for her birthday, and Furuichi is all excited for his big sleepover! But Angelica brought an unexpected gift with her from the Demon World… Yes, they’re back! It’s a Yople Alien! Knowing the grave danger this poses the city, nay, the world, Angelica does the only thing you can do in this situation: Recruit a 5 member squad of pseudo magical girls and partner with a muscled Moyashi-man to defeat the Blue Ears and save the day!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As the series progresses, I continue to find more humor in Furuichi because of how he reacts to things and the way he’s eternally hopeful. This episode has him getting the news that Angelica will be coming for a visit to see her father and the human world and he sees it as pure opportunity to get to know and woo the beautiful young woman. You’d think that after all the things he’s seen and been through, he’d know better than to pin any hopes on otherworldly beings and especially with Andelain’s daughter in particular. Still, he’s hormonally driven and you have to give him that much in that he’s consistent about it all.
Of course, Angelic is definitely her father’s child as she’s happy to bring present for everyone, but things go badly when what pops out of her bag is a Yople that ends up running off. That sets the gang to having to deal with catching it, which Furuichi is all enthused for as well as Oga’s most recently and first true disciple. To make matters worse, Angelica gets inspired to do a magical girl transformation in order to deal with the issues using a wand her father gave her and it’s comically set to 8-bit music as well. Her transformation leads to others doing the same as Hilde has a reputation to protect and even Azusa gets involved. And in a moment that should have Oga truly ashamed, even his mother and sister make an attempt at transformation. Magical girl material can be good, but its inclusion in a show like this is for pure comedy and they do a good job of milking just the transformation scene.
To make things even more numbing, Angelica ends up forming a pink band of magical girls to go after the Yople alien while Oga and Furuichi get dragged along to help out while the alien is enjoying city life, shopping and restaurants. It hits all sort of absurd levels, including a theme park angle that has the alien participating in the show with the team of heroes that’s there to fight them, but it all just has that awkward feeling where it’s going more by inertia than anything else interesting. It has cute moments, but the momentum of events to date are what’s driving it. And with five cute girls in magical girl outfits in the drivers seat, it’s little surprise. Oga and Beel have very, very small roles here and could be written out entirely and it wouldn’t really change much of anything. Which is unfortunate since the two of them could cause a bit of chaos in the midst of all this.
In Summary:
I’m not averse to magical girls and their appearances in shows, but it just didn’t click well here overall for Beelzebub. A large part of the reason why is because it takes the main characters out of the picture for the majority of it and they’re the main draw for me. Angelica is a potentially fun character, but she’s a one-trick pony here which does work well when it comes to Furuichi, who is also one but has found his niche. The show has promise at the start, but once it goes all magical girl, it runs out of steam pretty quickly. And when you keep adding more and more magical girls, it really gets to just dragging along.
Grade: C
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
