The new season is sort of a question mark for me. I don’t see any obviously great shows but there are several that have had a promising start and could end up being pretty good. Or they could end up being big disappointments if they run out of ideas or flub the ending.

For about 5 minutes The Devil is a Part-Timer! (Hataraku Maou-sama!) (Funimation) looks like a fairly conventional dark shounen fighting fantasy. Then it gets wierdly hilarious. By the end of the third episode it seems to be getting more serious again, but that may just be a setup for more goofiness.


To begin with Satan the Lord of Demons (Maou Satan), ruler of the land of Ente Isla, wants to conquer the rest of the world.

He sends his demonic hordes to invade the neighboring human lands under the command of his generals Adramelech, Lucifer, Asiel and Malacoda.

At first they sweep all before them. But then a human hero arises, gifted with holy powers and armed with a divine sword. The demon armies are driven back until finally the humans storm Satan’s palace. Of his generals only Asiel survives.

Vowing to return someday and take vengeance on them all, the Demon Lord and Asiel escape though a dimensional portal.

Much to their horror they find themselves in present-day Tokyo. Magic doesn’t seem to work here and they now look like human teenagers.

But the Demon Lord is nothing if not resourceful. He still has a bit of magic left though he has to use it very sparingly. Once he uses up his magical energy there is no obvious way to get more. They establish human identities using the names “Sadao Maou” and “Shirou Ashiya”.

They are able to obtain a small run-down apartment thanks to a strange landlady who specifically wants to rent to suspicious characters.

But they will need money to live. Sadou gets a job working at a hamburger chain called MgRonald. This is all part of his grand plan. With his superior abilities he should be able to work his way to the top at MgRonald. Once he is in control of MgRonald it will be a small step to take control of Earth. They can then use Earth as a base to reconquer their homeworld.

Asiel isn’t sure that a job at MgRonald is really an effective path to world domination but he remains loyal. Anyway Sadou has a task for him. Noting that Earth people know about the concept of magic, Sadou reasons that there must be a way to acquire it here. Every morning Asiel goes to the library to research magic. Then he comes home to cook and clean.


Sadou enthusiastically sets out to become the best employee MgRonald ever had. He makes a great impression on his coworker Chiho Sasaki, a naive high school student. She’s a sweet little airhead and he treats her like a younger sister, though perhaps she wants more than that.

But things will not be that easy for Satan and Asiel. It seems that when they escaped through the dimensional portal their arch-nemisis Emiya the Hero (Yuusha Emiya) followed them through. She found herself in the same boat they are in, unable to use her holy powers and forced to pass as an Earth person. She adopted the name “Emi Yusa” and got a job at a tech support call center.

She still intends to kill Satan but of course she will only do that in honorable combat. In the meantime she is determined not to let anyone else kill him first.

But they may have to work together since mysterious shadowy forces are trying to kill them both.

The Hero and the Demon Lord seem to have fallen into a tsundere relationship. She hates him of course, but in some ways he doesn’t seem that bad. He’s naive and overly literal with crazy ideas, but fundamentally honorable.

Maybe he just did all those evil things back in Ente Isla because he was trying to be the best possible Demon Lord. In Japan after all what you do is less important than whether you work hard at it and give it your all.