Review of Love Flops
Renai Flops is an original harem anime, which is pretty rare actually as they’re usually based on manga or light novels. The only other one I can think of is Tenchi Muyou. As such it’s an anime that tells a complete story from start to finish in one season. However, ultimately this anime is trying to do something pretty different from most harem anime, and thus it ends up getting incredibly messy. The first episode is essentially the prologue that sets things up. The protagonist Asahi is a high school student that’s living alone as harem protagonists often tend to. On his way to school heends up getting into lucky pervert situations with five girls, all of whom turn out to be bride candidates that begin living with him. This is about as formulaic as you can get for a harem anime. The next five episodes each focus on a single heroine and give each some sort of story that results in relationship development with the protagonist. These stories are wildly different and the one in the sixth episode gets downright absurd to hilarious effect. All in all things are pretty shallow and mostly pretty generic, but the comedy and romantic fluff is good so I’d still say its pretty entertaining as a harem anime.
Throughout the first six episodes, there are clear signs that there’s more going on than what is readily apparent. The seventh episode is where that becomes fully clear, and the eight episode is where the true plot begins. Things get much more serious than in any of the previous episodes and the anime begins to tackle a lot of heavy subject matter, though so as to avoid spoilers I won’t mention what exactly. Still, my point is that concepts of a good substantial story are there.
The problem is that the first half didn’t properly set the foundation for the second part. There are a lot of what are supposed to be strong emotional beats centered around the five heroines. But the first half of the anime didn’t build up enough investment in them and these moments are packed too close together, so they don’t land anywhere near as well as they need to. The final plot is centered around someone other than the five heroines, and though they’re kind of related to her they’re also not her. As such, the final two episodes of the anime are very heavy on the flashbacks building up investment in the new heroine, and it feels really rushed and pretty disconnected from the rest of the anime. I feel that moving these flashbacks into the first half would have worked a lot better. The ending I’m half satisfied with, in that it’s perfectly fine as the ending of a harem anime, but its pretty lacking in terms of the subject matter introduced in the second half. Still, I feel like they probably would have screwed it up if they tried to do something with more depth, and thus I’m happy with what we got.
The art and animation are pretty good. The character designs are also pretty solid. There’s a decent amount of CG use, but it felt like it fit well enough. I will also note that although this is listed as ecchi, there’s less than I expected. It kind of comes and goes in that episode 1, 4, 6, and 7 have a good amount, but outside of that it’s surprisingly rare. The OP was solid in terms of the song and visuals. The first ED was pretty good in terms of the song and visuals, but what I really liked about it was how it changed from episode to episode. The second ED was also decent enough in terms of the song and visuals. The soundtrack was decent too, though nothing too memorable.
tl;dr: A good harem anime that doesn’t quite deliver on trying to be more than that.