The decent direction, premise and overall progression of the plot make “Hoshi Neko Fullhouse” watchable. However, it suffers from tonal whiplash, overt lewdness (this lessens as the 4-episode series progresses), some key plot points being left under-explained or not explained at all, and a number of substandard technical aspects. Regarding the plot, the synopsis listed on MAL as of this writing is completely incorrect; it sounds like a different show. The gist of the story is that after the appearance of a UFO, the supercomputer Eterna that runs everything on Earth suddenly unleashes a robotic uprising on the entire planet, rounding up humans, taking away theirthings and bussing them off to the equator to live primitively. This also causes all spaceships to stop functioning. Meanwhile, a guy who smuggles adult material for a living along with his robot on his unregistered spaceship finds that he’s the only “free” person around after the uprising, and ends up saving 3 rich girls whose spaceship stopped working en route to a chorus competition on Earth. After teaming up with the UFO and visiting a space pirate colony, they go to Earth to figure out what happened and to stop Eterna.

As I mentioned earlier, the premise is interesting, and the way the story unfolds, with lots of twists and mysteries, made me keep watching in anticipation of what would happen next. The direction is also pretty good, and there’s a nice callback near the end, with a scene nearly identical to the opening sequence. The opening and ending themes, as well as the background music, aren’t bad.

The main drawbacks of this series that would keep me from recommending it to others are the tonal whiplash, unexplained key plot points, and most of all, the lewdness that is particularly blatant in the first episode. The series is generally presented as being lighthearted, but there are some jarringly serious scenes interspersed throughout, such as someone attempting suicide, and people getting stripped of their belongings and forced onto buses to unknown destinations. Some such scenes are portrayed as being comedic, which is disturbing. For instance, spiking girls’ drinks in an attempt to score with them, confining girls in a room they were lured to under false pretenses, and kidnapping a guy and leaving him to die in a warehouse. These are all presented as funny scenes, when they’re actually creepy.

Discussing the unexplained key plot points in detail could be considered spoiling, so I won’t elaborate. The story does wrap up in a satisfying conclusion, but explanations for the main reasons why the events in the OVA occurred are brushed aside.

The lewdness of the OVA goes beyond mere “fanservice” and into crass, gross-out cringe territory. The OVA opens with the robot telling a long, grossly perverted joke. Also, as the main character is a young, single man living alone who smuggles adult material, his ship is shown as a “man-cave” of sorts with lots of dirty (in more ways than one) stuff floating around. He tells the robot to clean it up before the girls board the ship, but for whatever reason, the robot doesn’t, so the girls decide to clean it themselves, touching and examining all manner of nasty objects with their bare hands. Lots of nudity (and worse) is shown. When the girls move in, the robot secretly takes footage of one of them getting out of the shower, and shows it to the main character. Most of this type of content gets pushed aside in the third and fourth episodes (it’s particularly heavy in the first episode), but it’s present throughout the OVA.

The technical aspects are substandard. The animation is not that great. The voice acting isn’t, either, especially for the 3 girls, who are not voiced by professional voice actors. Even the veteran voice actors sound like they’re phoning it in at some points, just using their default voices, so the acting comes off as generic. In each episode, there are odd musical interludes that happen out of nowhere and stop as suddenly as they start. All of them are songs sung by the 3 girls, whose voice actors also sing the opening and ending. It seems that perhaps they were being promoted as an idol group, but that didn’t work out.

Overall, while there are some positive aspects to this OVA, and it is watchable, the abovementioned points, particularly the perverted and creepy “humor,” make “Hoshi Neko Fullhouse” difficult to recommend to the average audience.