Oreshura

Japanese Title: Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru
Alternate English Title: 
My Girlfriend and Childhood Friend Fight Too Much
Genre
: Romance/Comedy
Allegiance: A-1 Pictures
Director: Kanta Kamei
Vintage: 2013
Format: 13 episodes

Intelligence Agency Report by Drake:
Eita has entered his first year of high school ready to work hard to gain admission to a good medical school. Discarding the notion of love following his parents’ divorce and abandonment of him, Eita reaches the top of his class without distractions and is well on his way to achieving his goals… until the silver-haired Masuzu appears, that is. She gets possession of Eita’s personal diary and uses it as blackmail to make him her faux boyfriend in order to avoid the constant grief of the entire school asking her out. Unfortunately, this does not sit well with Chiwa, Eita’s childhood friend, who does everything in her power to keep him to herself. So much for simply focusing on his studies – high school for Eita just got a lot more complicated.


Field Agent Report by Drake:

Plot
Characters
Animation
Audio
Impact
2.50
1.50
8.00
5.00
2.00

Overall

3.75

I’ll be honest; I walked into Oreshura with no idea what I was getting into – not the plot, the genre, or anything really. All I knew was a friend told me they added it to their queue on Crunchyroll after seeing the first scene of the anime. As for the reason they added it? It had a vibe of a fantasy story similar to Sword Art Online, which it really did. I was excited seeing that opening scene….but then the opening song played and I just wondered, “What the heck?” So I trudged through the first episode waiting for some sign of the epicness from the beginning to return, which it didn’t, and for some reason I held out hope in the second episode as well before just giving up and settling down for what I hoped would be a good romantic comedy. Sad to say, it is not.

First off, there are absolutely no redeemable characters in this show. Each back story feels too forced and fake, and each character’s motivation is not realistic or interesting. We have a main character who was a slacker in middle school that suddenly decides to aim for med school to cure his childhood friend’s injury, and is instantly at the top of his class. All the while, he loses his ability to fall in love following his parents’ divorce. Then we have three variants on the childhood friend character: the girl next door, the long lost friend, and the girl from a past life. The third one creeped me out a lot, and makes the least sense. The other two are pretty stereotypical, and offer nothing but a headache. The plus side to these three was that they did show development signs over the course of the anime in their interactions with each other, but it was not good enough. Then we have the main lead female, who is also anti-love like the protagonist, and is absolutely detestable. She spends all her efforts to try and make everyone as miserable and as close to her ideals as possible. To put it in a nutshell, these characters aren’t even worth the effort. I actually cared so little for them that I can’t even tell you their names off the top of my head.

The main premise of this anime was Masuzu attempting to manipulate and blackmail characters into doing her bidding – to make them as messed up as she is. This might not have been so bad had the cast been limited to Masuzu, Eita, and Chiwa. Adding two new female characters to form a harem only caused plot holes and ruined any chance of a good romance (though still a much better romance then Twilight), especially when the level of fan service rose from acceptable levels to downright ridiculous. It really turned bad when the last few episodes focused on a trip to the beach, and the stereotypical scenes of girls in skimpy outfits running around for no reason dominated the conclusion of the series. The worst, however, is probably a lack of resolution or conclusion which will inevitably lead to a season two with much the same plot.

Now before you think this is a total lost cause, I will say this: the animation in this anime is very beautiful and the character designs were equally well done. Clearly someone in production over-budgeted in the animation department, leaving no resources for the story writers. The music, while pretty good, was not too memorable. The opening song was just another J-Pop song that will be quickly forgotten.

In the end, save yourself the time. This anime wasn’t worth the price of admission. If you really want a good harem anime, go look up Tenchi Muyo, or even Love Hina. There are plenty of actually good anime in the romantic comedy harem anime genre, I promise!