Review of Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro
tl;dr: A pretty good girl bullying guy rom-com. This anime is about the budding relationship between a gyaru named Nagataro and her timid Senpai. The senpai is apparently named Hachiouji, but I don’t remember that name ever being used so for the sake of this review I’ll just keep calling him Senpai. This is one of those anime that heavily involves a girl teasing the guy she likes. It starts quite a bit more extreme than any of the others I’ve watched. In the first episode I felt that Nagataro was just downright sadistic, and that Senpai actually seemed to respond well to her cruelty onlymade sense if he was a masochist. That’s a fair enough dynamic to write a story about, though one I’m not particularly interested in.
Thankfully for me, the rest of the show is nothing like that. Nagatoro keeps teasing Senpai, but there’s very quickly a major drop in how cruel she is, with things continuing to mellow out even further as the show progresses. By the end of the season, her teasing is mostly just superficial other than specific instances such as her trying to motivate him to run faster when training for a marathon. She’s still throwing out loads of insults, but they’re repetitive to the point they lose all meaning and Senpai takes literally no damage from them.
To be honest, at this point it kind of felt like Nagatoro was the one taking more damage due to Senpai than the other way around. Mainly because she’s clearly incredibly in love with him. Senpai remains a doormat and doesn’t really fight back at all, but occasionally still manages to turn things around and do something that completely flusters Nagatoro. She also gets jealous incredibly easily, and her gyaru friends basically use that fact to screw with her. She’s still trying to maintain that she doesn’t care about Senpai at all and thus whenever something happens she does her best to hide how she’s feeling, but that just makes things more amusing. The dynamic between all of them is mostly just funny.
Relationship wise, there is slow and steady relationship growth between the two. It’s nothing too deep or exciting. It’s simply a result of them spending time with each other, but that’s fine and works well. Rather, the part near the end that involved actual drama between the two of them felt pretty forced and wasn’t really enjoyable at all. Still, the finale involved Nagatoro and the gyaru’s legitimately for the first time helping out Senpai without any pretenses, so it was a nice point to end on.
The art and animation were pretty great. It managed to convey Nagatoro’s expressions really well, which was absolutely critical for this anime to work at all. But even beyond that I felt the character designs were pretty good for the simple setting. The OP was great in terms of the song and visuals. The ED was decent in both regards. The soundtrack was not particularly memorable but seemed to work well enough.