MAKE HEROINE GA OOSUGIRU!

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ComedyMake Heroine ga Oosugiru! @comic
NOVEL ComedyMake Heroine ga Oosugiru!

REVIEWS

• 

  KM32

  100/100
  Where the Losing Heroines are the Winners

   Joy & Pain: like sunshine and rain. 

  
  

  I can't say what exactly one could label this anime when you get right down to it. Romance? Yeah ok. Comedy? Most defintely. Harem? Yes and no. When I added this series to my schedule at the last minute, I thought of it as nothing more than another harem adaptation and something that could fill-out my Saturday anime-watching schedule until I got bored of it. I had no expectations of it as it was a last-minute add. Like everyone reading this review, I had my doors blown off by the end of the first episode and knew that I had stumbled upon something special. The show promised that it was going to be subversion/commentary on the light novel romance formula, but ascended to become something unique in its own right. It focused on makeine—the Japanese word for the unlucky girl in the love triangle—and it showed a look of love, compassion, and dignity for these characters rarely shown in light novels or anime. The comedy and heart in this series is so balanced that one could find yourself shaking with laughter and holding back tears in the course of one episode (hell, the first episode itself is a prime example). I think it is ironic writing this review almost a week after the death of Frankie Beverly, but I could not help but have the words to his song Joy & Pain in my mind throughout this anime's run. 

  Remember when you first found love how you felt so good.

  Kind that last forever more so you thought it would.

  Suddenly the things you see got you hurt so bad, so bad. 

  How come the things that makes us happy makes us sad?

  Kazuhiko Nukumizu Is a lonely highschooler whose only friend in the world is his sister and who really enjoys light novel romances, despite never being in love himself. While eating alone at a cafe, he witnesses one of the most popular girls in his class, Anna Yanami, get rejected by her childhood friend who decides instead to date one of her other friends (who may be even more popular). Nukumizu watches the painfully-embarrassing aftermath of this and his and Anna's eyes meet awkwardly after she is caught drinking out of her beloved's cup after he has rejected her and left for the victorious heroine. Thus began one of the most intriguing relationships in recent-anime history. While Anna, Lemon Yakishio (track star who gets rejected by a guy who goes to Nukumizu's cram school), and Chika Komari (who gets rejected by her Literature club president/senpai), form his harem/girl posse(?). I suppose the anime concludes by simply letting us know they are his friends—though it becomes clear that Anna has plans to play the long-game into getting a relationship upgrade when the time is right.

  Love can be bitter, love can be sweet.

  Sometimes devotion, and sometimes deceit.

  The ones that you care for, give you so much pain

  Oh, but it's alright, they're both one in the same.

  I think one of the big things that stops this "harem" anime from being a conventional harem anime is that only one of the female protagonists has any interest with being the male protagonist's boyfriend—and she's deliberately taking her time in a very savvy way. This is a "harem" anime where the male protagonist is not in any love triangle/polygon with the female protagonists. All the other girls are in love triangles of their own and Nukumizu's primary function is to act as support for them aka be a friend. Only Anna shows any romantic interest in him, but is not going to jump the gun until he is able to return those feelings. With all the love wars mostly happening on the other-side of our not-harem, we are more looking at how Nukumizu acts as a friend with people who are not his sister and how he slowly learns more about himself through this process. Each girl is given an arc where their losing romance is allowed to play-out and those arcs (specifically Lemon & Komari's) are explorations of how these girls who were deeply in-love reconcile with being in the friend-zone and they each show their own unique takes. We get a little of this with Anna, but not a lot as I can guess her story is the most deeply intertwine with Nukumizu himself, so we'll have to wait for the sequel to learn more about her. In any case, the arcs of Lemon and Komari were masterly-done and really show the debt this series owes to its spiritual predecessors My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU & Kaguya-sama: Love is War. 

  Listen, don't it seem we go through life going up and down?

  Seems the things that turn you on turn you around.

  Always hurting each other

  (If it ain't one thing it's another)

  When the world is down on you, love's somewhere around.

  The other thing we need to mention here is the production. Good lord I knew A-1 Pictures was good, but this was Steph Curry in the Olympics good from them. They went all-in on making this little known light novel series the masterpiece that it was visually. No expense was spared on detailing every scene and individual action to its finest detail. Rarely have I ever seen a comedy this well-animated before. I feel bad for the production committee for Gimai Seikatsu which was adapting a very somber light novel romance this year of it's own and while going for an art house-feel, did not achieve the same artistic peak that this anime did. The voice actors here are mostly on the newer-side and they each rose to the occasion. It's not too surprising that the anime studio behind franchises like Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, Idol Master, and Lycoris Recoil could make a good anime, but this was on a different-level even for them. It seems A-1 Pictures took the hard lessons they learned from their disastrous production of 86 and turned their operation completely around. Still amazed that there was no pause this season, despite the high quality of animation. I guess it also helps when one of the financiers on your production committee is the Central Japan Railway Company (JR Toukai Agency). That might be a first. 

  Over and over you can be sure

  There will be sorrow but you will endure (You will endure)

  Where there's a flower, there's the sun and the rain

  Oh, but it's wonderful, they're both one in the same.

  I don't think that anyone working on this anime knew it was in for the critical reception it got. It seems the light novel author Takibi Amamori was caught off-guard with him stepping-in to write an original anime-only episode for the finale rather than anything from the light novels. I suspect he will be busy for the foreseeable future. I feel like after this series, the whole industry has been put on-notice that these new creators aren't going by the old rules anymore. The fans only stand to benefit.

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• 

  Ionliosite2

  30/100
  In its attempt to be different, it only ends up being worse

  I remember when I decided to start watching Makeine, it wasn’t in my plans to watch this show at the start, because when looked from afar, it looked exactly like every other romcom you and I already saw dozens of times, and I thought I was already watching enough of those. I decided to start watching it after I dropped a show whose name I cannot even remember anymore and because I heard that this “wasn’t like other harem romcoms”, this “this was different”, and without even having even started it I knew those claims were a lie, why would I believe these people when the cover and the synopsis definitely doesn’t even imply what they’re saying? But the second you start the first episode with a quote that even Oregairu would deem childish, and which is not actually relevant to the series because this isn’t about failed relationships in high school but rather about people who failed to get one, as if the author failed to grasp what his own series is about, then my mind just ended up being completely sure about one thing: this show is just any other romcom which both you and I already saw dozens of times, but it thinks it isn’t and by that little detail it comes across as worse being than them.

  The only argument you could make about Makeine being “different” is that the girls didn’t fall in love with the MC immediately, and that’s honestly misleading, a lot of girls in those other harem romcoms don’t fall with the MC instantly either, and in fact this series plays exactly like them, because those romcoms linger on the fact that it is a more of a “will they or won’t they” dynamic, so actual romance doesn’t happen most of the time besides the MC sharing moments with each of the girls in each of their respective arcs, and if you didn’t notice it by now, Makeine works in the exact same way.

  This is one of the most pathetic attempts of an MC I have seen in a series as praised as this one this year, I don’t think I need to mention his name because he was such a nothingburger of a character since he’s a soulless self-insert, this MC doesn’t even have a personality at all, his most notable qualities are that he reads light novels (because he’s just like you) and that he likes tap water, aside from that he doesn’t have any notable trait to him and yet all the girls are flocking to him, why? Because he is the MC, and in fact, there are multiple questions that you can do and the answer is the exact same thing every time: why did the tomboy started undressing after getting trapped in the same room as him? Because he is the MC; why was he found in a changing room alongside a girl that already has a boyfriend by her boyfriend? Because he is the MC; why did the super busty girl that already has a boyfriend fall with her breasts on his face? Because he is the MC, and that scene even had a “I heard that exact line in a light novel!” as if trying to be self-aware, but this series isn’t actually self-aware. This anime is not doing anything different from other shows of the exact same genre, it isn’t subversive no matter how much you try to twist it, it just thinks it is different despite using the exact same tropes as all others, and the fact people actually buy there’s anything unique about it makes me think they need to watch more romcoms.

  This show reminds me of Oresuki, that show worked on a similar premise that other girls around the guy were in love with his best friend so they wanted the MC to set them up with him, however, Oresuki was pretty much honest from the very beginning by making a girl in love with the MC from the start. I saw many people saying that Oresuki was a subversion of the usual formula and it really wasn’t, but it was at least funny to watch, which is more than I can say about a lot of romcoms and specially about this one, the cracks that this was written just like a normal harem romcom were pretty obvious from a glance, but that show didn’t have a good reception like this one, probably because the fact that it was a harem romcom was even more obvious than here, and this anime has A-1 Pictures on it so you can say it was made by the same studio that did other “peak”, and by that I mean overrated, romcom shows like Kaguya-sama combined with their “great visuals”, and by that I mean the usual A-1 slop, make some scenes like someone dancing or boobs bouncing look good and make the rest of the anime look average, wobbling with so many drops in quality that the times it doesn’t look bleh seem impressive in comparison.

  This shows tries to get me interested in how the girls solve their previous rejections because other girls got with the guy they were in love with which is terrible to watch, and while the comedy can be tolerated the drama here is simply unbearable, partially because I don’t care about these other couples, and the fact that all of these love triangles the girls went through makes one of them the childhood friend of the guy makes me think that the author fell for the meme that “the childhood friend always loses”, it is the same kind of stupidity that another anime already committed years ago, that show was called Osananajimi ga Zettai ni Makenai Love Comedy, and it was called that way because the author is stupid and also fell for the same meme. Of course, that series had a modicum of competency with the writing in some characters, something that I cannot say about Makeine, because in this series it isn’t even a focal point, it is there because you already watched other romcom shows and can recognize the joke from there, and that’s actually the part where Makeine shines, and that is in trying to be different just to return to the usual formula in one way or another. Obviously, after the girls get rejected, they have someone to go to cry to and that person is the MC, because once that other guy gets out of the way, they can flock to your self-insert after they got over their love for the other guy so they’ll slowly fall in love with literally you, because that is the type of show that Makeine is.

  Thank you for reading.

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• 

  Mcsuper

  90/100
  Some of the finest romance trainwrecks you will ever see

  (What an entrance to an anime! A very cinematic setup to the theme of the show, wasting no time selling us on how good the presentation is.)

  Romance anime are a dime a dozen these days, just like isekai, and many ideas have been used before, leaving little room for something to break the mold. So, count me surprised when I laid my eyes on Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!, where it took your common romance tropes and used them tastefully to craft an interesting take on the romance genre, which could be the next romance classic, especially if the anime adaptation continues.

  We’ve seen too many times, where the bland male protagonist, whether quiet, shy, or simply a loser, ends up having the most well-known girl in school falling head over heels for him for whatever reason. Here, the male protagonist, Kazuhiko Nukumizu, is by all accounts, also “bland”, introverted, and relegated to a background mob character role. The difference lies in the first moments, where he witnesses one of his female classmates being rejected, and sees her hilarious coping mechanisms afterwards.

  (At this moment, I already knew that we were probably in for a treat, and that the anime staff were really passionate about their craft, given the highly detailed audiovisual work already.)

  However, that enough might not seem too convincing, because even something like that could be a precursor to the female classmate to fall for the male protagonist, but that is not the case, as each of these possible “romantic” moments are handled tastefully to give us a laugh, to the point where later on in the anime, you can even see the punchline coming.

  The real theme of the story though, is not simply about a conventional romance, but it is initially about an observer’s view of romance trainwrecks in his school, with each heroine losing their battle with love. Through these experiences, we can see the theme of interpersonal communication in play, or lack thereof in some cases, which led to failures in the romantic escapades of the observer’s female classmates. In witnessing all these trainwrecks unfold, he in turn, also interacts with his classmates, who are all part of the Literature Club, and applies what he has learned through watching the rejections of his female classmates, and is able to not only make meaningful friendships, but also to mediate the various disputes or disagreements between others.

  The thing I enjoyed the most about this anime was that it felt like high school all over again for me. As I have grown up a little from those school days, it was easy to laugh at the romance failures, and laugh at the stupidity of some of the characters, but as they say, teenagers are young and dumb, and that’s okay, we have all been there. The anime deals with interpersonal communication very well, because that is probably the most important thing that students have to learn, how to deal with other people. In romance, that is also likely the most important factor to a relationship. If one likes another, they have to tell them before it is too late. If one is rejected, how do they interact with the person that they got rejected by, and moreover, how do they interact with the person they lost to? When we got answers to these questions, that’s where we saw the growth of all the losing heroines, and how the Literature Club was able to stay afloat, despite all this drama.

  Now, the drama’s great and all, but the comedy was just as great, and here is where the staff I think went above and beyond, especially with their comedic timing, and the nature of the jokes. They were not afraid to step into some weird territory, such as extreme BL jokes, tasteful fan service gags, or some not-so-subtle sexual jokes, which had me howling in laughter sometimes. If you’ve seen the Twitter account and the website for this anime, you would know how much they care about some really random stuff, for example, like Anna, one of the main female protagonists, and how many calories she eats per episode. It’s in these little things that I could tell that the staff had a lot of fun even in their hard work, and that is always a sign of a good anime, when everyone working on it can have a good time.

  With passionate staff, comes great production quality, at least most of the time, and here, it was one of the best animated things I have seen this season, and maybe even the year. It’s not just from a purely animation standpoint either, but the framing, cinematography, lighting, all of those aspects were excellent. Here are some of the moments that stood out to me.

  (Credit to Hiroaki Gouda)

  And lastly, in one of the ending themes, as you can see in the behind the scenes clip below, the staff went so far as to getting rigs outside to create that real life camerawork that was there. Always like to see the extra effort.

  A complaint I do see sometimes about this show is that there isn’t enough romance, but I’m honestly glad that was the case. I can’t speak to what happens later on in the story, but seeing the main character stay friends with his female classmates I think fit the mood of the show much more than forcing him to end with one of the losing heroines. The relationships build naturally, the dialogue gets more natural and the characters play off each other better and better as the anime goes along, which was very enjoyable. To anyone that has not seen this show, that is something to take note of, that it’s less of a conventional romance show between the main character and the other characters, but more a show that features romance as a side dish, at least for me, because the comedy and sometimes the drama were the things that I enjoyed the most out of everything. Is every arc seamless? No, but it handles a lot of its topics and themes with a lot of care, and most importantly, the developments feel earned.

  There are many trainwrecks that we don’t want to look away from in the anime sphere, but here, I can happily say, it is one of the best trainwrecks I have laid my eyes on. One of the best anime of the year for me, and was a great A-1 Pictures passion project. See what they can do when they work on romance anime?

  Now, excuse me as it is time for a midnight snack. What do you mean it’s not good for you? Anna Yanami told me that ice cream doesn’t make me fat… just look at how reliable she looks!

  
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