After 21 volumes, The Devil is a Part-Timer! comes to a close. The Devil King, the Hero, and their closest allies prepare to give the adorable Alas Ramus the best gift ever: defeating the angels, including the “god” Ignora. Will everyone make it through? And what will the characters do with their lives after the fact?
Well, uh, good news; you’ll know the results to those questions!
The bad news? How that info is given — not to mention what those answers are — are going to be very divisive.
If you haven’t been keeping up The Devil is a Part-Timer! and just want to know if the recent slide is corrected here in the climax, well, you should know “climax” is debatable. Around page six, the story jumps ahead to a day three years in the future, and for the rest of the book, the events of that day will continue at regular intervals. It’s not like the battle against the angels are presented as a flashback, where the characters are reminded of something from back then; a new subchapter can either continue in the present or suddenly jump to the de-facto epilogue before the real epilogue.
So any semblance of drama regarding the final battle (which takes over half the volume to get to and is short to boot) is thrown out the window. Six pages in, you know Maou will be fine, and then other characters check in later. Most readers will have assumed Maou wouldn’t die in the battle, but the way volume 21 is presented, you never feel like the conflict was ever high-stakes. Any intrigue about Ignora, the person in the space suit, and Heaven comes screeching to a halt as the story interrupts itself to continue Maou’s day.
In addition, with many characters showing up, it can be hard to keep track of who’s speaking. Characters like to make quips at each other’s expense or make observations, so I was constantly having to go back a line or two once a clue about the speaker was established. I’m sure it’s easier in the Japanese version since the language has more distinct speech patterns and habits, but this is an unfortunate side-effect on top of the volume’s narrative problems. But at least the Sephirot and the Sephirah, central concepts which have been kind of confusing at times, are laid out in a straightforward manner.
But…the elephant in the room. The Devil is a Part-Timer!‘s ending will be forever contested. True, very few series please every fan of the work, but volume 21 will either be a cause for celebration or a reason to set the collection on fire. Very few people are going to care about the technical aspects of volume 21 or debate whether Maou and Emi’s fight on Heaven was good or not; it’s just going to come down to ship wars. Compared to most love triangles where it’s just a debate over who’s the best girl/guy, in The Devil is a Part-Timer!, the arguments are going to run much deeper than that: character development, the author’s motive, theme, etc.
I guess that’s good if you like controversial works, but how controversial could a work like this really be when for a good portion of its ending characters are hanging around a café and ribbing each other? I haven’t been thrilled with The Devil is a Part-Timer! for a while, but I hoped the finale would have captured some of its original magic.