Series Review: Mob Psycho 100, Season 1

Mob Psycho 100, Season 1

The second season of Mob Psycho 100 premiered recently, and it's a series I'm not particularly familiar with. I ended up binge-watching the entirety of the first season, 12 episodes long and released in 2016, over the past week, and... and I must say, it's a pretty fun series!

This won't be a particularly intricate review, for the simple reason that Mob Psycho 100 isn't the most intricate of shows. The brain-child of web manga artist ONE, well-known for his other series One-Punch Man, this series definitely has shades of ONE's other work. Like One-Punch Man's Saitama, the main character in Mob Psycho 100, the titular Mob (or known by his real name Kageyama Shigeo) is a regular dude with immense power -- possibly the straight-up most powerful being in their respective settings. 

But where Saitama is more of a parody/deconstruction of superhero comics, Mob Psycho 100 is... it's a bit different. Saitama's pretty sure what he wants to do in life, and the society that One-Punch Man is set in accepts superheroes readily. It's everyday life that supervillains or giant monsters rampage around, whereas Mob Psycho 100 takes place in what's basically regular, real-life Japan... with the addition of telepaths. 

But what made Mob Psycho 100 so much interesting is the dynamic between Mob and his "mentor", Arataka Reigen. These two are the first characters we meet, and the primary characters of the first season... and it's from these two that the relatively unique story of Mob Psycho 100 is told. Mob, despite being a powerful psychic, is definitely socially awkward and utterly confused about what to do in life. To this end, he had ended up becoming the apprentice of Reigen, a self-proclaimed "greatest exorcist in the world"... who's actually just a very, very good smooth-talking swindler. Possessing no actual psychic abilities and the source of many comedic moments as Reigen peddles bullshit to exorcise his clients (with salt rituals, massage and photoshop skills), Reigen spends the first couple of episodes basically utilizing Mob to actually give some credence to his business and actually, y'know, exorcise the strange evil spirits of his clients. 

For his part, though, Reigen actually ends up becoming a good mentor from the moral standpoint, giving Mob the ironclad rule of never, ever using his psychic powers to hurt others, and one of the major themes of the series -- or at least the first season -- is that just because you have superhuman powers doesn't actually make you better than anyone else. It's this mentality that keeps Mob grounded, and his goal in life -- at least at this point -- is decidedly very simple, joining up with a group of recurring characters, the Body Improvement Club. 

While the first couple of episodes were standalone ones featuring Mob and Reigen fighting whatever enemy of the week (including a particularly nasty ghost that tried to set up a cult, but eventually became Mob's evil sidekick, Dimple), the plot starts to kick into higher gear around the fourth to fifth episode, where Mob ends up getting suckered into a fight between delinquents, forcing Mob to fight Teru, a fellow psychic that ends up getting utterly humbled by a very, very unwilling Mob. Similar to the Hulk, the pacifistic Mob is very much affected by his emotions and mental state, accidentally transforming into a ???% form and destroying the entire school during combat when he was knocked out. We see a couple of times this season that the titular "Mob Psycho 100" is the level of stress in Mob's body, and when a particular emotion reaches 100%, be it sadness, anger, acceptance or anything else, it unleashes his psychic powers in strange ways. 

While all of this is going on, the next couple of episodes follows Mob's brother Ritsu, who is a very, very interesting take on the jealous rival. Ritsu is very talented in real life, but has no psychic abilities whatsoever. He loves his brother, but is secretly jealous of his brother's psychic power without actually hating his brother... but when he eventually does awaken his psychic powers due to the stresses of being peer-pressured by the school council to set up a scapegoat, he awakens his psychic powers, and ends up reveling in it. This leads to the final arc of the season, lasting from episode 8 to 12, where Mob and his unlikely bunch of former enemies end up assaulting the base of the supervillain gathering of psychics, Claw, to rescue Ritsu. 

Without spoiling too much, it's a very well-done series that puts a lot of focus on the primary characters' mental state, their emotions and their growth throughout the season. The animation is splendid, and the character designs are as quirky as ONE's other work. It's definitely a fun show to binge-watch and while it admittedly didn't quite grab me until the third or fourth episode or so, it's definitely one that I recommend highly.