MeinMMO demon Cortyn has ventured into the depths of “Anime Recommendations”. What was found? A lot of junk.
You know how it is. You lie down on the sofa for just 10 minutes in the afternoon, only to wake up completely disoriented in the middle of the night and be unable to sleep again. What do you do? Right, you let yourself be entertained by Anime. Since I had already finished all the “Must See” series, I decided to just let Crunchyroll suggest something to me.
After all, streaming services often offer suggestions like “Did you like X? Then you should check out Y.”
That’s exactly what I did. And that led to 10 hours of pure trash anime that I wished I hadn’t seen.
But it has two decisive advantages:
- First, I can now report to you about it.
- Second, you can more easily decide whether you should give these series a chance.
The 100 Girlfriends That All Belong in the Trash
Because “Rent-A-Girlfriend” was one of my absolute guilty pleasure series of recent years, Crunchyroll also suggested the new series “The 100 Girlfriends, that really, really, really, really, REALLY love you”.
I thought the concept wasn’t that bad and offered a fresh approach for the “harem” genre.
The protagonist Rentaro, who has only had bad luck with women so far, is now about to have a streak of good luck. Because the god of love made a mistake and assigned Rentaro not just one soulmate, but accidentally 100 of them.
Each of these 100 ladies feels the one, great, true love as soon as they come into contact with Rentaro – and he feels the same. The problem: If he cannot make one soulmate happy, there is only one fate: she dies.
The only solution to this dilemma is to have all 100 ladies as girlfriends at the same time.
Yes, I know. It’s not the smartest plot, but in the harem genre, in any case, one is already happy with some justification for why the characterless disposable protagonist suddenly has the women hot streak of his life.
In fact, I found some of the “girlfriends” (of which only a handful have appeared so far) quite entertaining. Because here they apparently thought: Let’s just take all the stereotypes and crank them to the maximum.
For example, Inda Karane is a tsundere in pure form – to the point that she probably outshines all previous ones. The infamous “I-I don’t like you or anything, B-Baka!” is practically every other sentence of hers, although each time adapted to a new situation. On one hand, that’s really blunt, but on the other hand, it’s so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but grin at times.
So I can certainly derive some good aspects from the series.
However, my grin quickly faded when the number of female characters increased. Because in between, I really wondered what kink hell I had landed in.
At some point, the chairwoman of the “Chemistry Club” joins them, who brewed a potion that transforms her otherwise (very, very ample body) into that of a small child. Oh, and she also wears diapers because she always forgets everything at work.
When I reached that episode, I had to pause, stare at my living room ceiling for five minutes, rethink all my relevant life decisions, and then delete the series from my watchlist, my history, and the collective memory of humanity. I’m still working on that last point.
But luckily, Crunchyroll had more for me.
When good series are copied very poorly
I like romance stories. If they are entertaining, the story doesn’t even have to lead far. This eternal “Will they get together or not?” can become tiresome at some point, but as long as the characters are convincing and interesting, I can easily go through a season. Well, there’s a new series where I couldn’t manage that:
Our Dating Story: The Experienced You and the Inexperienced Me
To put it bluntly, the series is simply “My Dress-Up Darling” ordered from Wish, and the delivery also fell off the truck and was left exposed to the elements for 10 days.
Because all the charm, all the beautiful character moments, and all the little “spicy” scenes that you watch with an amused grin are also attempted in “Dating Story” – but it fails spectacularly.
The parallels begin with the character design of Runa, who is simply a visual knock-off of Marin. It even goes so far that in many scenes and perspectives, you get the impression that the creators have directly borrowed from Dress-Up Darling.
However, this is undermined by the fundamentally and permanently worse animation quality and the lack of character depth.
Because where Marin has interests, preferences, strengths, weaknesses, and interesting peculiarities, Runa is mainly limited to 3 “character traits” that all appear in Episode 1:
- She is pretty.
- She sleeps with any guy who confesses his love to her, as long as she is currently single.
- She jumps in bed with every guy right on the first date because she sees it as her duty to keep the relationship alive.
Honestly, Runa is still the more interesting of the two characters, because Ryuuto is a flat character even for the typical male anime protagonist.
I’m used to one-dimensional and mentally challenged male protagonists by now, but the “hero” of this series can’t say a single sentence without stuttering when he talks to his “girlfriend” in the first 6 episodes. For the first time in the history of anime, I felt the urge to hit the “Mute” button on the TV as soon as the guy opens his mouth.
The icing on the cake – literally – is an episode where the two play a kind of airsoft match with other friends. I think that was animation-wise the worst thing I’ve seen this year and came close to “Still image with Paint animations”.
Along with the already non-existent story, that led me to also have to abandon this series, and I probably will never find out how it ends. Probably just like all the other series of this kind: Pretty much exactly where it started.
There was still one more series left to kill the rest of the morning…
I am op, can do everything and everyone loves me
I like characters who have hit “rock bottom”, meaning they are at their physical and mental end after a nervous breakdown or traumatic experience, and now must fight their way back up. Accordingly, I was quite taken with the beginning of “I Got A Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too” – even though the absurd name should have warned me.
In the first episode, the protagonist Yuuya gets beaten up after he tried to help a girl in distress. Bleeding, physically and mentally broken, he drags himself home.
That’s why I liked the first episode, as I thought it could be the beginning of a story with similar brutality and tension, like with Re:Zero. A story of a desperate character slowly working his way up.
Well, wrong thought.
Because our protagonist is – as it should be – transported to another world and is completely overpowered there. Here he is super strong, extremely fast, attractive, rich, and intelligent. And because that would be too boring, he can also bring all these attributes into the real world, where his body transforms into an absolute Adonis.
His life turns 180° – he gets an invitation to an elite school, works part-time as a model, is constantly surrounded by pretty women, and absolutely everyone is thrilled with him when he sets records in sports or can afford everything with the money from the fantasy world in the real world.
I really wondered: Who finds this exciting? Who finds this entertaining?
The tension in such series actually arises because the protagonists are presented with challenges that they must overcome.
Sure, there are parodies of the theme, like “One Punch Man” – but that is purely intentional and specifically framed to be funny.
In Cheat Skill, that is completely missing. There are no hurdles or problems. The series awkwardly tries to be serious. The protagonist goes from 0 to 100 completely overpowered and breezes through every fight without any problems. The only difficulty he has is that he doesn’t have enough arms to juggle all the women that come flying at him now that he is attractive – which incidentally also paints a super-strange picture of women, even for the already low anime standards.
I can understand the appeal of series where the hero is suddenly a woman magnet and super strong. But when the conflicts are so trivially trivial that the most exciting question every episode is “Which woman will try to seduce him today?”, then the isekai genre has really been exhausted.
What particularly shocked me about this is that the animation quality of the series is noticeably good – there is real “production value” behind it, which is completely wasted on the thin and boring story.
At least: Now I can appreciate many anime series that I previously found only “average” much more. Thanks for that, automatic recommendations from Crunchyroll.
If trash is exactly your thing, here we have 5 anime that will show your parents that they don’t need to expect anything from you.
