Review of Ya Boy Kongming!

I really loved when this show leaned into its overarching plot or its silly premise, but it did unfortunately little of both. Instead it spent a lot of time on character-based plot for characters that felt very flat. While each character has a generally unique personality, they don't really interact with each other. Eiko is expressive, outgoing and a little silly, but nobody ever reacts to her. She'll emote and quip with no reactions from anybody. Kongming is stoic with a carefree & goofy side, but people only comment on 1) him being clever and 2) him wearing strange clothes. His close friends never actually ask abouthis past, despite him seemingly being willing to talk about it.

When that type of thing plays out over and over again it's hard to find the characters believable. Characters need to interact with each other to get you invested in a world.

The OP is fantastic, both the music and animation. The music is upbeat and full of personality, and the animation has characters interacting with great chemistry. Unfortunately those elements are hardly present in the actual show. The OP has kongming and eiko dancing together and driving together. The show has them talk mostly about business.

All of this to say: I wish that they invested more airtime into slice-of-life segments and allowed us to get more invested into the characters. Instead the show is left feeling very forgettable.

For things I liked:
I liked the rapper character and his friends. He didn't talk to the main cast much but he had good chemistry with his own friends and had genuine character moments. He got more character airtime than anybody else in the show.

I liked the lack of fanservice. It helped so much with presenting Eiko as a character and not a bunch of waifu tropes. Clothing was realistic (no t-shirts vacuum sucked to boobs) and the public bath scene showed nothing below the shoulders or above the ankles. impressive tbh

I liked the variety outfits given to Eiko.

5/10 because even though I enjoyed it enough to finish it, I'll probably forget about it by next month and I wouldn't recommend this show to any of my friends. I might bring up Paripi Koumei in conversation for specific things I liked.