Title: Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei aka So long Mr. Despair, Repent!
Genre: Comedy
Company: SHAFT
Format: 13 episodes
Dates: 4 Jul 2009 - 26 Sep 2009

Synopsis: Itoshiki Nozomu has had it. Enough with the psychopathic students and obsessive stalkers. Enough with the socially unacceptable and the socially criminal. With a body double at hand, he is prepared to enter a world of hidden faces and willful ignorance. But, will his students let him get away with this?

The Highlights
Relative value: Finds itself behind previous seasons.
Standalone value: Hilarious in its own right.
Novelty: This camel has probably reached its maximum straw load.

How do you write a Zetsubou Sensei review when it’s already been done three times before on this site alone? The formula is no different, the jokes are in the same style, and character development means as little to this series as the laws of physics. The unfortunate thing about sequels is that their entertainment value has more to do with the illusion of freshness, rather than the freshness itself. And as far as Zan Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is concerned, you better ask yourself how many times you can watch the same gag before noticing its redundancy. And that alone will determine whether this sequel is as worthy as the previous ones.

Chances are, if you’d made it to this rendition, the formula is bound to be a little placid at this point. With two previous seasons and an OVA, Zan can only be so satirical before its jokes become obvious cut and pastes from preceding works. For every button-pressing gag, love dodecahedron, or marketing scam, there are plenty of puns, pop-culture references, and in-class training sessions to remind you how old this series is getting. It’s like watching a recent episode of The Simpsons, funny in its own right, but lacks the same flair a similar joke may have had ten years ago.

As an individual series, however, things are a little different. As per usual, the saturation of humor is to a level where even if you only catch half of the jokes, you can still expect several hard laughs per episode. And considering the audience of this anime, that’s a pretty modest minimum. The entire cast may lack a third dimension (and sometimes even a second). But the sheer diversity of stock characters still offers countless possibilities.

As for Zan’s more unique elements, most of them come down to two elements. The first is short story arcs, which admittedly lead to some of the series’ funniest of moments: the runaway Zetsubou Sensei being the highlight of these. And then there are the recurring gags, which grow as stale as they would in any other anime. From my own experience, turning Draw Zetsubou Sensei into an interactive game kept it funnier much longer than it really should have. There are times when the chaos of a moment will have to be adequate in place of satire. Which hopefully for some people will suffice.

While this review may sound like it’s saying, “lower your expectations,” it’s more important to go into Zan knowing that this may possibly be the last time Zetsubou Sensei will ever be funny. It’s almost as if the team knew that and threw whatever they could in hopes of what might be one last hurrah. The endless character quirks, the self-hating nature, the almost sarcastic patriotism, the occasion jab at Inoue Kikuko… This anime is pulling on strings in hopes of holding itself up over a pit of lava. But together those strings form a strong rope good enough to climb up in a moment of triumph. More so than the other incarnations, Zan will try the audience’s expectations. But that doesn’t make it nonetheless funny.

The Rating: 7

Reviewed by: Kavik Ryx