WWW.Working!! / WWW.Wagnaria!!

this post only discusses the web predecessor to the manga working!! that is set in another restaurant of the same name with another group of characters. the blog post to the main working!! series can be found here.

this post also contains spoilers, so please read at your own discretion.

main information:

• genre: comedy, slice of life, workplace (restaurant), romance
  
• season: fall 2016
• number of seasons & episodes: 1 season, 13 episodes
• myanimelist / anilist 

to the ones who are confused with the titles, www.working!! is based on the initial version of the manga that was published on web, until square enix reached out to the author and asked them to post on their magazine, which later became the main working!! series and got animated first in 2010~2015 with 3 seasons. the web version (i.e. this post) is usually called the cat-group while the magazine version is called the dog-group in order to distinguish the 2 versions of the same manga. both versions don't have any relations with each other, the only thing in common is the name of the restaurant they take place in (i.e. wagnaria). therefore, in this post i will be referring www.working!! as cat-group and the main working!! series as the dog-group.

cat-group goes through a new set of characters, with our main guy higashida daisuke (cv nakamura yuuichi) finding a part-time job at a branch of wagnaria due to his father losing his job. once he joins the staff team, he found out that it is full of weird people, the restaurant is run by sakagi kenichirou (cv toriumi kousuke), who is a bit timid and scared of some of his employees; single mom kondou kisaki (cv mizuki nana) who brings her 1-year-old baby to work; and there's also the loud and violent miyakoshi hana (cv tomatsu haruka), muranishi sayuri (cv hikasa youko) who seems to be able to communicate with the supernatural, the 2 chefs adachi masahiro (cv uchiyama kouki) and kouno takuya (cv shimono hiro), the rich girl kamakura shiho (cv amamiya sora) and her childhood friend shindou yuuta (cv ono kensho) whose father borrowed a huge amount of money from her father causing him to be poor af.

cat-group has a bigger ensemble cast than dog-group, but maybe also because of that, i started to find myself a bit confused while distinguishing the characters and was struggling to remember all their names. some characters feel redundant and/or unnecessary that they only exist to be funny, but honestly due to the character confusion, i couldn't find myself enjoying cat-group as much as i did with dog-group. the characters feel one-dimensional, the focus started to drift away from the usual workplace environment to the characters' daily lives in their schools after a few episodes, a lot of jokes or gags feel recycled and repeated, and the supposedly surreal moments (e.g. miyakoshi punching the store manager in his face) just don't feel surreal enough.

the main problem i have with cat-group is that it feels like it's trying to recreate its success with dog-group, but this time with the lack of character depth and their dynamics just don't really match to me. plus it only has 1 season, but it seems like it's trying to push a development that lasted for 3 seasons like what dog-group did, so a lot of the main plot feels rushed a lot as well.

i found myself a bit hard to sit through some of the episodes in cat-group as well due to the reasons above, for example episode 3 where kondou dragged everyone to a night adventure kinda thing, that i found it being irrelevant to the main plot as it has nothing to do with working in a restaurant? there's also the whole saint valentinus bit that i just don't understand the need to include it (except to be funny, where to be fair the idea of it is pretty good, but it just does not feel fitting to the theme of the whole show).

i think i also read somewhere that the characters in dog-group will appear in cat-group as well, which was why i decided to sit through all 13 episodes, although there were numerous moments that made me want to drop this whole show. turns out they did not even appear in the background and i feel scammed?? maybe they did in the manga, but at least i don't remember seeing anyone from dog-group appearing in the anime of cat-group.

therefore to be completely honest, if you were to get to the working!! series, just watch the 3 seasons of dog-group and probably read the web manga of cat-group if you are interested in how it was formed. i just feel disappointed by the execution of cat-group as it was created by the same team of people who did dog-group s3, but dog-group was way more bingeworthy and remarkable (if we only judge by s1 of dog-group).