Review of Teasing Master Takagi-san

tl;dr: An amusing and adorable premise but no evolution at all beyond that. This anime is incredibly simply in that it’s simply about a middle school boy named Nishikata that’s constantly being teased by a classmate of his named Takagi and wants to get back at her. However he doesn’t really manage to pull that off even once, at least over the course of this season. Thus, this is simply a series of short stories of him being outsmarted and teased. This can certainly be amusing at times, but that’s pretty much all there is to the anime, and it didn’t really feel like it wasenough. As it becomes clear that Nishikata will always fail there isn’t really any suspense or tension to things at all since you know it’s going to end in Takagi’s favor. There’s also some very light background on the two of them, but it didn’t really feel like there was much of any character development or relationship development outside of a few cute moments, so the romance aspect of the romcom wasn’t all that strong. There’s not really any overarching plot outside their relationship either. So comedy is all there really is in this series so far. In addition to the dynamics between those two, they interact with a few other characters and there’s even a trio of friends that some of the stories focus exclusively on which adds some variety to the comedy. But the focus is still largely on the main two and the exact same interactions between those two, so the comedy still felt repetitive.

The art and animation are pretty solid. The art style is pretty basic but fits well and Takagi and Nishikata’s facial expressions come through incredibly well. The OP is solid enough in terms of audio and visuals. The ED is a bit strange in that it has several different songs, but plays basically a remix of the same visual for all of them. This visual is decent enough and the songs are all decent enough as well and sang by the voice actress of Takagi so they fit pretty well. The soundtrack has the instrumental of the OP at times but outside of that didn’t feel particularly memorable.