Review of Love Tyrant

Love is weird. On one hand, you can fall head over heels for your partner, but you could also want to dig your fingers into their throat because of how annoying they can be. I hope not every relationship is like that, but it can and has happened. Through it all, love can be hilarious due to how nonsensical the concept it can be when you put it in perspective. So why does it matter anyway? Well to Renai Boukun (aptly titled ‘Love Tyrant’), it means a lot. Story: Aino Seiji is just your typical harem protagonist. Niceto everyone, easygoing, and comes into contact with a plethora of very troublesome women through very unfortunate circumstances. After coming into contact with a girl who presents him with a “Kiss Note” (Yes, it’s a death note reference. Don’t think too hard about it), he is brought into the realm of couple-making where he must help couples get together, all the while dealing with a small trail of women himself.

This show is in a word, rushed. Smashing together about forty or so chapters of the original manga into a twelve-episode anime, the story for Renai Boukun follows the story of a hyperactive fujoshi, a shrill, incestuous stalker, a kukuri wielding yandere, and the main protagonist, as they come across various, loosely love-based scenarios that culminate into…something. When looking at it from face value, it’s quite unclear to understand what it is the show wants to be.

Aside from the overall theme of love and how love exists in various kinds of romantic relationships, the show zip zaps around from being one-off episode comedy plots, to one-two episode long drama plots involving one of the main characters. Due to the rushed nature of trying to get to the end, the show suffers from poor comedic timing, as the necessary time to let the audience breathe from in-between jokes is absent and thus makes it very difficult for the audience to really get a full kick out of what we’re supposed to laugh at. Not only that, it doesn’t help that the show relies mostly on repeated gags in order to try and be funny either.

Another problem is character development. Due to the fact that the show attempts to squeeze so much in so little, any and all character development that the show tries to accomplish feels contrived and stiff. Two of the main girls in particular get arcs dedicated to them, and it doesn’t really feel like they accomplish much of anything in the end because we’re given less than hour each of total focus to even give a crap. The ending doesn’t really help either cause things are more or less thrown back into the status quo of things, so I guess like some aspects of life, some things never change.

Overall, the story of Renai Boukun is a mess of fragments broken off from an existing manga shoddily put back together to try to create some semblance of an anime. A lot of the in-between details are missing and while the show does tell a story in the end, it doesn’t really feel genuine or rewarding because the journey watching these characters feels so half-hearted.

Overview:
- TERRIBLE pacing (Some episodes are one chapter. Others are three-four.)
- Poor comedic timing
- Contrived character development

Characters: If I’ll give the show anything, it’s that its main cast is…something. It’s something all right.

First off, we have Aino Seiji. Now I don’t know why this guy is our protagonist of all characters, but I safely say that he is as bland as they come. Seiji is your typical ‘nice’ protagonist: respects women, nice to all, easygoing, and most of all, dense. Maybe he’s not that last one so much, but the rest for sure. The most interesting part about his character I’d say is how he at least acknowledges the affection he gets from the girls (At least one of them) and has the willingness to be a kind soul regardless of the situation. Which honestly is something you have to give to the guy considering his harem is filled with absolutely terrible people, deals with haphazardly stupid situations daily, and he gets blamed for stupid shit when his involvement in things aren’t always his fault anyway. Beyond that, he’s about as interesting as a saltine cracker.

Then there’s Guri. I want to separate this one from the rest of the harem specifically because she is the cause of everyone’s problems. Noted previously as the ‘hyperactive fujoshi’ who likes to cosplay, Guri doesn’t understand love, yet does whatever she wants because she’s a free spirit and can’t be held down by any form of convention so long as it’s fun and whatnot. This can be a good archetype, except the show makes her really, really annoying. For the most part, she causes a lot of the series’ conflicts (she’s the one that jumpstarted the plot anyway), leaving Seiji in particular to try and fix some things. She’s just…not a very good character, especially since the ending tries its best to get the audience to care about her when the show up until that point gives us very little reason to give a damn in the first place.

Then there’re the two half-sisters, Yuzu and Akane. Yuzu shares similar problems with Guri, with most of her gags and annoyances coming off as creepy yuri as she jealously tries to garner the attention of her ‘onee-sama’ when in reality Akane gives little shits about her half-sister’s attention. Yuzu’s whole saga throughout the series is all over the place and lacks enough cohesion to warrant any form of sympathy or care from the audience. As for Akane, she acts as the series’ mediator while also being batshit crazy herself. Carrying kukuri knives and comically threatening anyone who gets in the way of her and Seiji, Akane is surprisingly the most level-headed member of the entire female cast as she carries a lot of reasoning and understanding that most of the girls in this series lack. Of course she does share her own fair share of problems (like having her arc be completely rushed to the point it didn’t even really matter), but in comparison, she fares so much better than the other girls in the series.

Beyond them, the sidecast involves various family members of the characters’ families (who are also all crazy might I add) that add to some of the arcs in various ways with similarly varying degrees of success, a bunch of cast members who provide their own one-off love stories to help fill up the runtime and provide a different kind of romantic relationship, and the rapey penguin. Yes, you read that right. Why he’s there, I don’t know, but he has a surprisingly large part (by supporting cast standards) in this series so…that’s there, I guess. (There’s also the character ‘Shikimi’, but we don’t talk about her and how much of a bitch she is.)

Overview:
+ Some level-headed characters
- Most of the cast is crazy (and not the good kind)
- Rapey penguin? (Don’t know if this is necessarily a bad thing, but I’m adding it.)

Art: Produced by EMT^2, Renai Boukun’s art is what I would describe as lazy. The colors are blindingly bright to the point that it looks uncomfortable to watch; background characters are usually just gray silhouettes, and the characters just look gaudy with how the colors used on them are.

It’s not even just the art. The animation for some scenes clearly show little effort is put into them, thus giving off this really cheap, cost-efficient look to the whole thing that looks very uninteresting to look at. Not only that, but character designs have their own sets of problems. Personally I find Yuzu’s hair very irritating to look at. The huge pigtails on her sides combined with the cheap looking animation make her look like an eyesore every time she came on-screen.

Overview:
- Lazy, cheap looking art

Sound: The OP known as…"Koi? de Ai? de Boukun desu!” (Lord that’s a mouthful) is a poppy, upbeat song that actually fits well with the show’s wacky and comedic story. Sure it’s just a pop idol girl song, but it has merit to it for having a unique beat to it so that it’s not just some generic anime opening that sounds similar to heaps of other openings from other shows.

Its ED, 'Suki' wo Oshiete’ on the other hand isn’t so fortunate. Comparatively, it’s not really all that unique and falls into a generic sounding song that while sounds good, doesn’t really have much in the way of memorabilia so that you would want to listen to it again, and not so you have to loop it in the background so you can accurately come up with the words to describe it.

Overview:
+ Decent tracks
- Ed isn’t really all that memorable

Personal Enjoyment: Having read the Renai Boukun manga, the adaptation disappointed me for not only not being on the same level as the original, but for rushing so much to get to a certain point in the story that it had to sacrifice so much just to get there. As such, I had a really hard time finding many positives to say since not only was the plot not that stellar to begin with, it actually got worse because it was adapted into something with a limited time frame. As such, my enjoyment with this series dipped down a bit, and I really wish it didn’t. Because I did kind of enjoy just being forced to go along with the flow of things sometimes cause like the MC, there’s really no other way out of it.

Did I like this series?

There were a few choice moments I’m glad they animated. Not only that, but I’m glad Akane mostly stayed intact. Despite her obsessive nature, she’s the series’ main voice of reason and maintains her sensibility (mostly) throughout the show despite the random shit going on around her.

What didn’t I like about this series?

Aside from the obvious plot problems, the rest of the girls in the main group: Guri, Yuzu, (and Shikimi, technically) really irk me. Their archetypes to me are actually really unlikeable because not only do they center around one thing, which is being annoying, they do it so persistently throughout the series that it never feels like they have any kind of growth to them that would warrant me to like them. There’s almost no change with their characters and it upsets me that in a harem series of all things, there are very few candidates for ‘best girl’. (Not like any of them really are stellar choices.)

Would I recommend this series?

If you are going to watch this, turn your brain off. Your enjoyment will skyrocket if you do. Beyond that, this really isn’t something worth recommending. Its plethora of problems with its pacing and characters combined with a really cheap looking animation style make Renai Boukun a really difficult watch. Coupled with poor comedic timing and a newbie seiyuu for Yuzu whose voice grates the ears, I honestly have a hard time finding many redeeming merits for this show to watch. I’d say read the manga if anything, but even then it’s best to turn the good ol’ noggin off.