Otome Game Sekai wa Mob ni Kibishii Sekai desu – 02

「そこの彼女　お茶してかない？」 (Soko no Kanojo Ocha Shitekanai?)
“Hey, Girl. Wanna Get Some Tea?”

Alright, I admit: I’m sold. Cannot even say what’s really doing it. Maybe it’s the humour. Maybe it’s characters. Maybe it’s the absolutely batshit insane melding of sci-fi and isekai fantasy in a way which promises sheer (and hilarious) crazy as time goes by. Mobseka has many things going on, and I know I’m thoroughly enjoying them all.

After last episode’s opening into the world of one too many drugs while writing, we got the more personal side of the coin this week with character introductions all around. At face value there’ll be no major surprises here: we’ve got your usual bishounen clique, the rich and affluent princess class, and everyone’s favourite cutie pies with radiance set to kill. The three key (female) members to focus on are Angelica, Marie, and Olivia. Angelica for one is Prince Julius’ fiancé, the high born noble with a chip on her shoulder and clear attitude to match, yet a girl who’s also clearly met her match in Marie, a cute as a button commoner who for all the innocent antics clearly knows what she’s doing and how it’s affecting everyone in the prince’s orbit. And then there’s Olivia who’s supposed to be the competition to Angelica (which Marie is fulfilling) but winds up getting caught up in Leon’s shenanigans. I dare say we have a situation on our hands.

While this setup bears good similarity to how Hamefura originally structured itself – i.e. game plot not playing out as expected – the key difference is that Leon isn’t the driver of change, at least right now. Unlike Bakarina doing Bakarina things and yielding change, in Mobseka Marie is the unknown, a character who should not be in either action or existence, and yet is, even going as far as coopting Angelica’s story role to Leon’s eternal chagrin. Plus unlike the Bakarina too it’s not easy to guess just where Marie came from or what her intentions are. For all the face value humour-based simplicity of Mobseka there’s a surprisingly good bit of mystery under the hood, something which really helps fill in the gaps between learning to love tea parties and striving for that life in the countryside. It’s anyone’s guess right now whether it’ll be enough to sustain this series in the long run (I don’t pin Marie’s backstory as something that will take all season to figure out), but there’s enough here to certainly warrant sticking around some more and seeing where it all leads.

After all, Mobseka has yet to unleash the real crazy and I’m quite looking forward to seeing it happen.