Anime: Mob Psycho 100 4274t

Mob Psycho 100 gained most of its fame thanks to the success of One Punch Man. Very few would know and even fewer would care about it, if it wasn’t piggybacking on a completely different series by the same mangaka. It was essentially selling on name, just like Aldnoah Zero became famous simply for slapping Urobutcher in the production team.

Just like One Punch Man, it’s making fun of typical stories about superpowers by throwing in some drama to make it seem smarter than it actually is. And just like One Punch Man, it’s not doing much with it as it’s almost entirely a satire of the power creep stereotype instead of a deconstruction or a character study.

The premise of “being the strongest in existence from the first episode not being enough to make you happy” is a nice catch, but it’s treated in a silly way and thus has no gravity. Saitama is too bored to prove how powerful he is, Mob is a coward. Both of them can achieve anything they want in a few seconds, but constantly procrastinate for the sake of satire masking as psychological issues.

I mean, there is nothing wrong in characters wanting to improve themselves and helping their society in the process. It’s just that the bad guys are constantly presented as omnipotent and impossible to tell if they can be defeated, only for the hero to kick the crap out of them without even trying. It’s fake tension in its purest form. Holding back all the time for the sake of letting the villains gloat about their crappy ideology while laughing like maniacs, is only making it disappointing when you know they would have never won because they never posed a threat from the very beginning.

And I get the logic behind all this. Your fears are your worst enemy, not some external conflict you can solve with violence. In a way even the villains defeat themselves when they realize their ideology is not as awesome as they thought. Delaying the obvious outcome is only done for the sake of giving the viewer enough time to see the mentality of every character. It’s not about the fighting, it’s not about whose powers are the most broken, it’s about who doesn’t give up. Making the protagonist predictably unbeatable, does not matter.

The theory is fine; the problem lies in the execution. The message of the show comes off as very hypocritical when you have the hero doing everything from a point of authority. If power is not everything and he doesn’t want to be defined by his psychic abilities, why is he solving all his problems with the thing he doesn’t want to be defined by? It’s like watching a movie with a clear message of “guns are bad” and all the hero is doing in that movie is gunning down anyone holding a pistol. How is fighting fire with fire while insisting fire is bad, not hypocritical?

Furthermore, the method the hero is using in the show will not fix his issues. Just like Saitama ing the hero association did not fix his laziness, Mob ing the fitness club for buffing his body will not fix his insecurities. Yes, the irony is part of the joke and what makes it tragic at the same time. But it doesn’t make it deep or meaningful; especially when the hero doesn’t eventually realize it. Everyone else gives up and s his cause when he kicks the crap out of them, but not him. Thus the only character without any character development in a story about self-improvement is the protagonist. Get it? That’s the joke.

Furthermore, what’s the point of self-improvement in a setting where superpowers can have any effect you like? Mob can do anything he likes, so why is he training at all? If he wants muscles for impressing girls at his school, he can use his powers and poof, now he has muscles. Also, it’s impossible to believe he can’t impress the chicks with all the crap he can do. He can become a body builder and no girl will talk to him if he doesn’t even have the guts to look at them. Aka, he’s mentally challenged. And so is everybody else in the show if not a single person bothers to tell him something so simple.

And I might as well point the obvious. What’s the point of self-improvement when abilities can be gained and lost at the drop of a hat? Mob can give his powers to someone else and any normal person can become a psychic by permanently keeping some of those powers. That’s exactly what happened with Reigen at the end of the show. First they make it seem like he’s dead although he is not, which means fake suspense. Then he comes back super powerful and talks down on the villains because he can by being super powerful, thus more hypocrisy on part of the theme. And even when the powers go away he can now see spirits although he is not a psychic, thus disproving the importance of training and self-improvement. There goes the big message of the show.

Also, it’s impossible to take anything seriously when there are no physical repercussions for whatever they are doing. I mean, many characters have the power to blow up city blocks but it doesn’t matter. At one point Mob blows up the entire school and a few seconds later, he rebuilds it as it was before. Nobody ever dies and heavy injuries are magically healed in a second. It’s like nothing really happens in the real world and it’s all in their minds, like delusional chuunis.

In conclusion, Mob Psycho 100 is just a superficial satire that procrastinates as much as it can while babbling about a message that means very little. It’s an ok time waster if you have low expectations and you really care about pretty colors which don’t mean anything besides being pretty.

Meet the spiritual successor (or rather precursor) of One Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100. Mob Psycho was also hyped to infinity after the overwhelming popularity One Punch Man achieved during its run because they are both written by the same author.

The story is set in the modern day where some people have psychic powers; Kageyama Shigeo, commonly known as Mob, is one of these psychic people and is an eighth grader. Just like the people of his age, Mob is trying to find purpose in his life and wants to fork a girl in his class, Tsubomi. The first half of the show is spent with Mob ing a fitness club so that he can impress his waifu. The objective of the protagonist felt boring because it is something that he can easily achieve using his psychic powers; some people might defend this by saying “No, Mob wants to impress Tsubomi on his own as she is only interested in hot guys and he doesn’t want to cheat his way to her heart” Strange, since the psychic powers are treated as just another human characteristic; Mob is wasting his time on training his body when he could just show her an amazing psychic feat, or better yet use his psychic powers to buff up his muscles. Since the objective of the protagonist is boring, the story decides to focus on the antagonists of the story during the second half, Claw’s 7th Division, where Mob and his allies must save his brother, Ritsu. The second half was also boring since it was a rescue mission that had no tension because all the villains were being one shotted! All in all, the story felt weak.

The characters are not interesting nor were they anything special. Mob is an emotionless teen who relies on emotional angst to achieve 100% of his full power; yeah… that is really his only defining feature. Reigen is Mob’s mentor but in reality he is actually a fraud. There wasn’t anything special about him either; I was getting annoyed by his “special moves” as they didn’t provide any comedy relief. Ritsu is Mob’s brother who doesn’t have any psychic powers and needs to use his brains and work hard. I actually liked Ritsu more than Mob since he had a bit more of a personality and used his smarts…until Ritsu gained psychic powers. The only character who got some development was Hanazawa Teruki; he believed that he was special and the world revolved around him until Mob showed him the error of his ways which made him more modest. Unfortunately, Teruki wasn’t special personality wise. There are other characters but they are one dimensional, bland background decorations that didn’t provide anything to the story nor did they make the world colorful. The villains of the show were terrible; they were nothing more than cartoony Saturday villains who just wanted to rule the world…so boring. Overall, the characters were garbage…except for Teruki and maybe Ritsu but even they didn’t provide anything to the table.

As for the production values, I personally didn’t like the art; it constantly changed from being normal to serious to being cartoony. The art style didn’t appeal to me either; I disliked the overly simplistic eyes of the characters. On the other hand, animation felt fluid and ended up being quite decent. The music wasn’t great nor were there any memorable tracks; only the opening was somewhat catchy. I can at least praise the production values for being consistent throughout the show without dripping in quality, so the production values were good even if the art and art style didn’t appeal to me.

The main meat of any battle anime is its battles. I thought that even though the story and characters sucked, I could chew on some flashy battles thanks to the better than average art and good animation…but the show even messed them up. The battles were short and meaningless; all the villains were getting one shot while the heroes had uncanny durability all the time. What’s even worse is that there is no power scaling; Mob was being overwhelmed by one of the villains during the battle in the alley, but during the next battle Mob one shots him! Nonsense.

The psychic powers were also nonsensical and there were no rules that prevented them from being abused and overpowered. Earlier on in my review, I said Mob could use his psychic powers to buff up his muscles. Why did I say that? Because psychic s can mimic other psychic powers!; Teruki was able to create psychic whips because he copied the power from another who used psychic whips, meaning Mob could just copy one of the villain’s muscle buffing power to impress Tsubomi. Let’s not forget about Mob’s “100” power; I don’t care about what anyone says, it was a convenient plot device through and through. And the bullshit doesn’t end there; Ritsu, a normal teenager, managed to obtain psychic powers even though he wasn’t born with them! Which means anyone can have psychic powers! Don’t you dare say that “Ritsu is the protagonist’s brother so he is an exception” if he wasn’t born with psychic powers in the first place, then it is impossible for him to obtain them later in life! Even worse is that psychic powers can be transferred, as shown when Mob transferred his psychic power to Reigen, allowing the supposed "fraud" to use them; although this was temporary, Reigen can still see spirits after losing them! Holy shit, psychic powers in this world are broken beyond belief. So yeah, the battles were terrible and psychic powers are bullshit.

Whatever theme the show had was also ruined; the social order of those who are special and those who aren’t. Since anyone can obtain psychic powers, whether through artificial means or through willpower as shown with Ritsu or through magical transference as shown with Reigen, made this social order theme pointless because everyone can be equal.

Mob Psycho 100 is a terrible anime; the story and objective was weak, the characters were badly written, the theme was meaningless, the battles were garbage and psychic powers are nonsensical. Well, at least the production values were consistently decent enough to pay attention but pretty colors doesn’t help since Mob Psycho can’t back it up with a decent story and fleshed out characters.