I somehow managed to completely overlook this one yesterday. Perhaps I was just that eager to play LotRO, or perhaps my brain was protecting me from something. I guess we’re about to find out.
Okay, so stop me if you’ve heard this one before: non-threateningly dumb guy moves to a hot spring inn inhabited by a whole bunch of girls grown in a lab to appeal to as many creepy loser otaku as possible. There’s a violent tsundere who thinks nothing of assulting Our Hero in a manner that should probably land her in jail, an alcoholic with no sense of personal space who can’t seem to find clothes that fit, an Actual Goddamn Child, a girl with a moderate case of Hollywood Autism, and a young woman with a tragic backstory whose psychological trauma is only debilitating enough to provide for plenty of “D’awwwww” moments when Our Hero has to take care of her.
As far as harem ecchi comedy goes, you could do a lot worse than this. The episode managed to put off making The Same Exact Joke Every Ecchi Anime Makes until near the end, and while there’s still plenty of oppai and pantsu if you’re into that, the fanservice is fairly restrained by ecchi harem comedy standards. That’s a pretty big qualifier and basically just means we only saw the back of the little girl, the drunk lady’s gag boobs didn’t come with cartoon sound effects, and even though Yuuna was acting like she was in a bondage hentai when she was all tied up during the episode climax, the camera refrained from any close-ups of her underthings. A low bar, to be sure, but still one the episode manages to clear.
The only thing content-wise I really took exception to (aside from the OP and the fact that one of the girls looks like she’s nine, but since she only got a brief introductory scene in this episode, there wasn’t enough of her for me to get too bothered by it) was Yuuna’s helplessness during the climax, despite it being established that she’s plenty capable of defending herself. It was somewhat justified since she was taken by surprise, but I’d really like for her to be able to take care of herself more in later episodes.
The production is pretty okay. The animation is pretty standard and the character designs are distinctive enough. It’s not gonna be showing up on the sakuga blog any time soon, but it doesn’t look terrible, either.
Overall, this premier was a solid C. I might give it a couple more episodes, but I also might completely forget I watched it by next week. We’ll see how things go.
Ace Anime Reviews 