You're Contracted For Eternity - Musings on Yondemasu Yo Azazel-san

It was an uphill struggle to get myself to do this review, especially with so many interesting anime picking up around the time that this finished. As a fair warning, I really just didn't care for this anime.

This was floating around everywhere as the anime picture.

Yondemasu Yo Azazel-san suffered from only one thing - I disliked its brand of humour. With that colouring my judgement, even 12min-long episodes were difficult to sit through. Most of the jokes were a miss, and some induced a small chuckle. With one of the demons (Beelzebub) being a fly and liking certain types of nutrition, I was turned off even more (I really don't like that type of dirty jokes). To balance that out, I liked two of the demons - coincidentally, the two that had the least amount of screentime. In the end, I was just neutral about it.

Azazel showed his true colours pretty early on.

Animation
I'd say that they did try with it; it wasn't so bad to look at the screen. The ways that violence took place was unrealistic to begin with, and going frame-by-frame revealed large jumps in facial expressions sometimes. I disliked the character designs; it reminded me of old-school shounen (with Akutabe, the owner of the detective agency) somehow coupled with chibi-style (all of the demons were in "reduced" form). Ironically, the angels looked pretty hideous (especially compared to Beelzebub's true form). While nothing particularly wrong was done, I just wasn't intrigued.

All the demons that showed up in the anime.

Setting
With Sakuma Rinko beginning her part-time job at the detective agency run by Akutabe, the idea was that the man was a demon summoner who has controls over a plethora of demons. For cases that can't be fully resolved with normal tactics, he'll pull out the "big guns". With Sakuma being the main character, she became more involved with the supernatural cases, working with Azazel (the titular character) and Beelzebub, with cameos by other demons. Being a slapstick show, that was really it for the basic story.

Not even a double entendre.

Story Presentation
I hate this type of slapstick, so it follows that I generally didn't like the story-telling. The focus was on the outlandish things that the demons did (to each other and to humans, especially Sakuma), and I didn't care for it most of the time. Some of the arcs were interesting - such as the one in which Undine was introduced - and others were pretty boring - such as the one with the first appearance of an angel (Sariel). There was nothing gripping me and so watching each episode was boring. Not only that, but I also despised it every time a dirty joke regarding Beelzebub was made, which really shot down my interest levels. In the end, it's hard to enjoy an anime that is in a style that I completely dislike.

Guess what's happening.

Characters
This was not a character-focused anime, but there was slight amounts of character development. As time went on, working in such an agency in the company of demons took its toll on Sakuma and her personality began changing. Although Azazel began on a warzone with Beelzebub, with time their relationship dynamic also changed. Unfortunately, none of these things interested me too much when I had already chosen my favourite characters - Undine and Moloch. Neither of these two showed up too often, making me yearn for them. On top of that, Akutabe's character was highly unused, showing up as almost a Dues Ex Machine at times due to his super pro-ness. Really, it's difficult to know the existence of such a good character and not be able to see him. (It kind of reminds me of Shiki and Natsuno...)

I'd freak out over Moloch too~

Final Words
This anime just wasn't for me, and it showed in every review I did of it. There wasn't anything bad about it - or, at least, I'm sure the jokes themselves weren't bad. Not liking this brand of slapstick, it's hard for me to objectively speak about the quality, but I think that there's a lot of people that would find this extremely funny (just like how I like Nichijou but apparently it's not doing too well with BD sales). Each episode was only 12min, so it's not a huge commitment; I advise watching this only if you like dirty slapstick (with lots of violence).

God's personal angels are like this.

Scoring - [5/10]
This score is miraculously high, reflecting my true neutrality of it. There were lots of scenes that I hated it, but there were also some scenes that I liked and it did show me a few characters that I was very interested in. In the end, the good and the bad balanced each other out, and I just don't care to either actually like or dislike this anime.

~Aaro