Reviews for Mob Psycho 100 (4.58) 633v5y

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.