Review of Love Tyrant

A cosplaying angel descends to Earth with the goal of utilizing her magical Kiss Note to create couples (preferably yaoi ones) by writing their names down in it to make them fall in love with each other, and somehow manages to end up in a 4-way relationship between herself, a yandere, a lesbian siscon and a perfectly ordinary guy. Sounds ridiculous? Well, that's Renai Boukun in a nutshell for you. This is a hilarious parody of your stereotypical romcom, Death Note and more. Renai Boukun does not take itself seriously whatsoever and is packed to the brim with light-hearted gags and references. It is utterly sillyin every sense of the word but doesn't pretend to be anything else, resulting in a plethora of shameless, unapologetic comedy. And oh boy is it fun to watch. When the mischievous angel Guri arrives in the average joe Seiji's life, she helps him finally being able to get together with the girl of his dreams—Akane—only for him to find out that she was actually a psychopathic yandere all along with madly possessive feelings of love for him. And when Akane's little sister Yuzu confesses that she in turn had always been in love with her own sister, things quickly become about as chaotic as it gets after all four of them are roped together into a twisted relationship thanks to the power of Guri's Kiss Note, which also gives them all immortality. Add to that a creepy dog-angel, a giant black rapist penguin of doom and you've got yourself one hell of a strange anime. The whole thing is all over the place, but it results in a ton of absurd slapstick comedy which is very well-executed in general.

The problem with Renai Boukun however is that it doesn't maintain the same quality for very long. The first four episodes are hilarious, but starting with episode five, Renai Boukun starts to drop off pretty fast. And it starts with the introduction of a new girl called Shikimi, who just so happens to be *another* psychopath, but unlike Akane, this girl is one of the most obnoxious characters I've ever seen. She is the epitome of being crazy for the sake of being crazy with little rhyme or reason attached to it. But her being annoying in person is not the main problem, but rather that she takes the role of the villain in the story and starts interfering with the main characters consistently for her own strange reasons, which results in the anime as a whole becoming significantly more serious as there's now an enemy they have to fight. Thus, the hilarious comedy/parody content almost disappears entirely to make room for it, which is an awful trade-off. It just leaves you wishing that the story would've kept doing what it was doing originally instead.

Compared to the manga, Renai Boukun is technically a pretty rushed adaptation in terms of how much content is covered in every episode, but given the hysterical and hyperactive nature of the show, the faster pacing ends up working out alright anyway I think (kind of like with the Prison School adaptation). However, the genre-switch unsurprisingly bothered me just as much in the anime as it did in the manga, and that is the main downfall of Renai Boukun.

Now that doesn't mean that the show isn't worth watching all of a sudden. The first few episodes are quite good and even later on it's still bearable, albeit not great. It's just one of those series which leaves you with a bad taste in the mouth solely because you know it could have been so much better still.