Dedication or Obsession?
Asuka Sora is considered the uncapturable heroine not because the game is hard, but because of shitty quality testing. Bugs abound such as but not limited to corrupting sound files, sprite flipping, sprite substitution, save file corruption and bricking. It’s a technical nightmare to the casual gamer, but a mere challenge for a God such as Keima. By now we all know that there is no such thing as a heroine that cannot be captured as far as he is concerned, and for him all it really requires is more than the usual effort to free. Every heroine deserves freedom.
In his own words, there are no bad heroines, only bad games.
Elsee said it best: He may be a goofball, he may be eccentric, but this is the reason why he’s good at what he does and why he will succeed in capturing escaped demons when others could not. Again you can call it dedication or much easier simple obsession, but in reality it’s more likely both. He may be obsessed with galge to the point of completely ignoring everything else, but you have to respect the dedication he puts into them. He plays not only because he needs to, but also because he wants to. He wants to save those heroines and see the ending.
It adds a greater degree of depth towards his character that others only see is a gamer freak who does nothing but press on his PFP all day. I’m not denying of course that it’s unhealthy and he really shouldn’t be ignoring the rest of the real world, but by now we already understand that he must have some reason why he chooses the galge world over the real world, and we cannot help but have some degree of respect for something that goes beyond simple obsession or dedication, but it’s practically his passion. Galge a part of him as him as much as his hand or foot is.
Presentation wise, I think the best part of this episode are the loops, specifically how it simulates the visual novel style of repeating the same scenes with different choices to see different outcomes, dialogues and CGs. Naturally that’s the way to play such games anyway, so I guess I should give props to the studio for trying to adapt that concept to animation, though the looping thing has of course been done before. It was funny and enjoyable to watch Keima’s struggle for perfection, his unwillingness to give up even when faced with a seemingly eternal cycle of repetition with no end in sight. It takes god-like skill and dedication to defeat bugs that are practically so hard coded into the game that the entire game’s development team even gave up on fixing it.
I think it speaks a lot about his character.
Even if it was a great adaptation, I still have to ask myself if it really needed a whole episode to do. This is one chapter in the manga and they stretched it to fit half an hour. From a characterization viewpoint I think it did it effectively to dispel the assumptions that Keima’s just a crazy megalomaniac on the run from reality and show the dedication and passion he has for what he does, and not because he’s a candidate for the asylum.
But even if they could make it into a great 30 minutes adaptation, they didn’t need to make it one.
If this season is really running only for 12 or 13 episodes, they have a lot of ground to cover if they really want to try and finish the entire story by the end of season 2. They could cut out stuff to make it fit, but from that view making something this long doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Because I’m too brain dead to figure out what Manglobe plans for the series, I’ll assume they have a plan for it since they’ve been doing great so far. In the end this episode boils down to two: either you want a extended but great adaptation, or a shorter one to have more content in the long run.
And as much as I liked this episode, I think I’d preferred a more compressed piece from them.
And the scene where Sora turned out to be alone whenever she wants to show him her picture was a nice touch 
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