Review of Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro

Okay, let's get this out of the way: Nagatoro is maybe the second most annoying character I've ever seen in anime - second only to Yozora in "I don't have many friends" (and her friends are close behind). The first ten episodes I would have rated this a three and not moved on to the second seasons. The last two redeemed it - a *little*. But I don't like her. I mean, I *really* don't like her. I get that she has her own things going on and it might be the way she expresses affection, but I don'tcare. She's awful. I mean, really awful. And even though she gets a little better through the season, and "senpai" doesn't seem to mind so much, it doesn't change that she's awful.

That's the thing about this anime - the thing that makes it very much like a watered down version of "I don't have many friends" - it's the characters that made this anime what it is, and that's not a compliment. There's not a one in the bunch that I actually liked or had any sympathy for whatsoever. Literally not one. Nagatoro, as I mentioned, is annoying. Senpai is a mess. Nagatoro's friends are even worse than Nagatoro, and I think they got way too much screen time (what they did at the culture festival actively made me angry, and it's HARD for an anime character to do that to me). Even the club president is kind of a mess.

So, you might ask, Lycoping, if you hated this anime so much, why did you end up scoring it higher than a 3? Well, that's simple. It actually did make me laugh. The characters are awful, the plot (what little it had) simplistic and cliched, it's ecchi or at the least ecchi adjacent, but it did have some truly funny moments. They weren't enough to save it in my view, but they were enough to have allowed me to actually watch it through. So there's that.

Everything else is fine. The art is okay (well, in more ways than one, you'll see...), the sound is okay, the voice actors, well, voice acted their little hearts out, everything was fine technically - except when Nagatoro lost her fingers and her hands turned into stumps, but I guess that's just the art style. It's just the characters that really messed this up.

Mixed feelings. If you can get past Nagatoro's absolute awfulness and Senpai's utter lack of a spine, maybe you'll enjoy it. I didn't, really, but the laughter was enough to make me not entirely regret watching it.