Mob Psycho 100 Review

The joke that carries the series is that Mob's power level is enormous and completely beside the point. Every arc puts a supernatural threat in front of a boy whose actual problems are body image, a crush and an inability to talk, then resolves the supernatural part almost dismissively so the other one can continue. Reigen is the finest idea here, a fraud whose advice is nevertheless sound, and whose exposure arc turns into a genuine examination of what he owes a child he has been exploiting.

ONE's art is deliberately unpolished and it works, because the emotional register is unpolished too; the hundred-percent sequences erupt out of that flatness with real force. World-building is thin by design, since the psychic underworld mostly exists to be shrugged at. The Claw arcs are the weakest stretch, closest to conventional escalation. The ending refuses a power fantasy in favour of a very ordinary act of decency, and earns it completely.