Your mission is to find a wife in a gaggle of girls – but don’t pick the half sister that’s in there that you don’t know who it is.
What They Say:
During his father’s funeral, Shogo hears a voice outside his window claiming to be his little sister, before he has a chance to learn more, he is told the conditions of his inheritance
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the light novel series by Hajime Taguchi and drawn by CUTEG which began back in 2010 and have six volumes already, as well as the expected manga adaptation thta began in 2011, this twelve episode series comes from Studio Gokumi. Crunchyroll has brought out the first two episodes at the same time which has its advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, you get a better look at how things are quickly without being able to fall out of it easily with a week of waiting. On the flip side, you can get too much at once sometimes with a new show and realize quickly that it’s not for you, whereas on a weekly basis it’s easier to get sucked in.
The show introduces us to highschool student Shogo, a young man whose father has just died. His father created a business that was massively successful inside of a single generation as we learn and that his passing has created quite a loss for the company. While he’s coming to grips with that (lightly, I might add), he’s being introduced to some significant changes in his life. The first is that his mother has set him up at a new residence in order to advance in his life, finding a proper spouse and so forth. While life had its difficulties and its easiness along the way, he now has to make a stronger push towards something more real since he’s in a new position because of what happened to his father.
His life does shift quickly when you get down to it as the new school life starts and he’s thrown into things where everyone finds him cute and he’s definitely the center of attention. What helps ease things for him is meeting Konoe, a young woman he met outside a cake shop before school got underway. She’s a student there as well and helps him to get familiar with the place and gets close to him easily since he is so comfortable to be with in general. The two don’t exactly have chemistry, but she’s nicely playful with him and shows him the ropes with ease and without much in the way of drama. Which is important since there’s other personalities in the school such as Kanagi that will come to life as it goes on that will overpower her simple but nice demeanor.
Where things are a little weird with the show at first is that Shogo at first hears a voice at the start of the episode that he has a little sister and later on he gets a call from the same child-like girls voice claiming to be the same and that she’s actually at the school he attends. It’s an amusing kind of stalking that’s going on and it’s paired with a scene afterwards of Konoe washing herself off and enjoying playing with her breasts while talking about Shogo and how his mere presence in her mind makes her do such awful, dirty things. It’s amusing in its own way and is pretty much the biggest part of fanservice in the first episode, something that did feel a bit weak overall in that episode.
Because of the way he’s getting teased by this supposed sister, he does start doing a little investigation into his father, but that just leads to the company’s security team pushing back against him to not pursue it any further. The introduction of an attractive woman in charge of things just adds to the fun of it all but she does at least treat things seriously. The crux of the problem that Shogo has to deal with is that due to the inheritance plan his father set out, he has to find a wife at the school in order to get everything. But he also has the danger of falling for a sister by another woman without knowing it, which could be catastrophic to both him and the company itself. And with so many girls interested in him and he being open to a lot of them so far, it makes him wary since he doesn’t know who is really who.
So, hurray for semi-incestual romance.
With that in mind, and with the help Mizutani from the security side, he finds himself getting even more caught up with the varied girls at the school and their personalities as they attract his attention in different ways. Including one of them doing a table dance in a short, tight skirt at a party that’s definitely not meant to be like that. Amusing, Mizutani wants him to collect samples from all of them so they can run some tests, but that’ll prove difficult in its own right. Running that kind of idea, and the search for the sister in general, in parallel with Shogo potentially finding a spouse here amongst all the cute and attractive girls is a fairly interesting idea, one that just feels like it doesn’t work well in this particular execution.
In Summary:
While the show has an awkward start, things settle down a bit more in the second episode as the setting is more defined and the cast is expanded upon without being completely obnoxious. I didn’t care much for the show in the first and liked it a bit more in the second, but not in a way that really demands I come back for more. What really hurt the show for me beyond the execution is the animation, which feels very cheap and stiff in many scenes. Well, outside of the fanservice scenes where you can tell the animators paid more attention. It also doesn’t help that Shogo is pretty bland himself and doesn’t offer up more than a cardboard performance. And the creepy stalker factor of the sister and the game she’s playing just leaves me feeling uncomfortable with it. I’ll likely watch either a few more or through completion, but it’s not a series that’s engaging and demanding of attention.
Grade: C
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
