The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You

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Rentaro Aijo is a hopeless romantic – emphasis on "hopeless." Before starting high school, he'd already confessed his love to 100 different girls and was rejected every time. But a trip to a local shrine of the God of Love brings him good fortune, of a kind. Due to a clerical error in the heavens, Rentaro is guaranteed to find that special someone – 100 of them, to be precise. He is destined to have triple-digit soulmates, and it's up to him to find them all, cherish them all, and keep this Love Hectogon stable, lest disaster befall him and his many, many, many, many loves.

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You is based on a manga series of the same name by Rikito Nakamura and Yukiko Nozawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

I'm honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed this premiere episode of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You. In a lot of ways, it's a standard harem rom-com first episode. We introduce our main character, the main girls of the harem, and the driving plot point that keeps the story going. Even the twist—that if he doesn't date these girls they will die—isn't wholly original as far as mainstream harem romance stories go. However, two things set this one apart from the crowd.

The first is the fourth-wall-breaking humor. The show knows that it is doing a bit of retreading of the usual plot points and decides to lampshade them. Whether it's naming Aijo's middle school friend as “Best Friend A” or calling out that, while the setup may be boring, it's vital information, there are more than a few laughs to be had—and that's outside of the great normal jokes like the whole mix up happening because of the god of love and the yearly Japanese obsession with watching Castle in the Sky on Friday Night Roadshow.

The second way this anime stands out is in how it handles the harem aspect of the show. In the majority of harem anime, there is one central guy who either A) can't choose which girl to date, B) shamelessly hits on all of the girls without choosing, or C) is completely oblivious to the fact that all the girls want to date him. The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You chooses the much rarer D) route: date them all in one massive poly relationship.

And, honestly, the show does a pretty good job of selling us on the idea. Throughout the episode, Aijo is shown as being a pretty stand-up guy. He's helpful, and kind, and puts the feelings of others before his own. Even when he has the perfect bad rom-com excuse to act like a pig—i.e., date all the girls secretly and lie to them that they are the only ones to save their lives—he instead asks them straight up to make a polycule with him.

I like the idea that he chooses to go the honest route—and in doing so actually has a chance for happiness for all involved. After all, if you don't have trust and honesty in a relationship, it is doomed to fail—something doubly true in poly relationships where things can get infinitely more complicated. So, yeah, I'm down for a few more episodes—though I worry about what happens once the girls get into the double digits from a storytelling perspective if nothing else. I mean 101 main characters is one heck of a tall order for any piece of fiction.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I know many people were looking forward to this one, so I'm disappointed that I didn't like it more. It annoyed me an impressive amount. Mostly, that comes down to both the setup and the girls themselves, at least the two we've met so far, and that's not down to the genre – I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse is remarkably similar in premise and I don't have the same issues with that series. If anything, this feels like a tongue-in-cheek parody of DNA², with a stereotypical isekai-quality god thrown in, and I have mixed feelings about that. It largely comes down to the fact that this god has thoroughly screwed over not just Rentaro, but one hundred women. It may be a wish-fulfillment fantasy on Rentaro's side, but things are looking unpleasantly bleak from the distaff side: they either share their one true love with ninety-nine other women, or they die.

That whole "or you die" bit is also an issue for me because it feels like aro/ace erasure played for laughs. Is it on purpose? I'd be shocked if it were, but concepts like this can be tricky for someone who falls on the ace spectrum because they reinforce the idea that there's something "wrong" with them if they aren't interested in sex or romance. Am I making too much of this? Sure, probably. But it's still something that I feel needs to be said because it adds to the overall discomfort of the episode in a way that isn't intentional.

Moving on, both girls are also intensely annoying. They're supposed to be tropes made flesh, and on that front, this is a rousing success. Hakari is the most tsun to ever dere, and every other line that comes out of her mouth is uttered in a shriek. Karane is busy trying to be the perfect little innocent to land her man, and her schemes are so close to the mark but still manages to miss every single time. Rentaro, of course, is completely taken in by both of them. Frankly, by the end of his second conversation with the god of love, he's so flustered and aghast that they could dress up in squid costumes with maid aprons, and he'd still feel compelled to date them…and maybe even a little excited to finally have a girlfriend (or two).

The easiest way to frame this is that it's simply not my sense of humor. I enjoy the adaptation gags (especially the skip button), and it looks good, even with those skirts that serve no functional purpose since they aren't long enough to cover anything, but I mostly just wanted it to be over. I will go out on a limb and say that this is a "your mileage may vary" situation.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

This was my most anticipated premiere by a wide margin, and I'm glad to say it didn't disappoint. While I can't speak for certain on how this show will play out to total newbies, as a big fan of the manga, this adaptation has already done a bang-on job of capturing the manic charm and humor of the source material, adapting the opening story's frantic humor and semi-ironic love for harem comedies with lively direction and an A+ Face Game.

Keeping things strictly to this episode, I like that the story knows right away that it can't take itself seriously. There are certainly moments of sincerity – Rentaro's reaction to his soulmates' confessions and his eventual resolution to answer both of them honestly and directly for one – but for the most part, this is pure farce, taking all the staples of harem anime to their (il)logical extremes. Rentaro becoming the fulcrum of a half-dozen girls isn't just a contrivance of the narrative but a literal mistake by God, who got distracted watching Castle in the Sky and put a couple extra zeros in Rentaro's soulmate spreadsheet. Karane, our resident tsundere, would rather lie about taking a piss in the courtyard than admit she's looking for a four-leaf clover for good luck in love. It's a game of escalation that takes familiar, often tired archetypes and juices them up by taking off all the limiters, and it makes for some great laughs throughout this episode. It's not exactly a parody and is too fond of the subject to be satire, but it's more than happy to play with the tropes and expectations of its subgenre in cheeky and clever ways.

Director Hikaru Sato, previously known for the equally outlandish Dropkick on My Devil! anime, is a perfect fit here. Yukiko Nozawa's original designs are brought to life beautifully, morphing between doe-eyed love, manic fury, delusional horniness, and everything in between with pitch-perfect expressions. The animation and direction align perfectly with the show's comedic energy, snapping through rapid-fire references and absurd punchlines at just the right pace to be funny without overstaying their welcome. The voice cast is bringing their A-game, and special mention has to go to Kaede Hondo as Hakari for beautifully capturing that girl's saccharine sweetness and deranged wailing in equal measure.

I don't know how much this will work for people who don't eat up rom-coms, or harems in particular. While this isn't all self-referential comedy, much of it's predicated on knowing these kinds of characters and enjoying seeing them tuned to 11. It's a premiere that goes really (really, really, really REALLY) hard on its brand of humor, and if that doesn't work for you, I can only imagine what kind of torture this premiere would be for you. As they say, one person's trash is another's treasure, and for me, this trash is pure gold.

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James Beckett
Rating:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: All a comedy needs to do in its first episode is be funny. That is its sole mission; everything else is but a secondary bonus. The good news is that The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You is very funny. The even better news is that it looks and sounds good enough to make even the jokes that don't hit breeze by without much fuss, and the writing is sharp enough that it seems the writers might even be able to sustain a premise as astoundingly silly and mercilessly difficult to pull off as this one.

Think about it, though, from a writer's perspective. This story could so, so quickly devolve into disappointing nonsense. Here you have set up a premise where, due to the reality-altering and eternally binding screwup of the slacker god that is in charge of assigning everyone on Earth their one soulmate, our poor hero Aijo has been saved from his life of constant romantic rejection only to face a paralyzing moral imperative: He must find and genuinely love each of the one hundred people that have been assigned him as Aijo's one and only soulmate for all eternity, and failure to successfully devote his heart to even one of those girls will mean that their death is on Aijo's hands. There is only one way for this story to ultimately succeed, really. In the end, in addition to being consistently funny and entertaining, 100 Girlfriends is going to have to live up to its name and introduce no fewer than one hundred individual characters who are all distinct enough to serve as their own sources of humor and conflict. Aijo will have to navigate some sort of sendup of the age-old rom-com cliches to woo them. It's a bold move to write a check this fat with no more than two of the hundred gals roped into Aijo's living nightmare of an existence by the end of the premiere. We'll have to see if it pays off.

Thankfully, all signs point to the journey being quite a romp. Even though I found myself occasionally bristling at the shrill delivery of the needlessly explained and repeated punchlines, I'd still say that the gags in 100 Girlfriends hit their mark eight or nine times out of ten. Considering how dire anime comedies often end up being, this is a stellar batting average. I especially appreciated the more metafictionally inclined gags that had Aijo cutting to a commercial break out of desperation or ended with the love god complaining about lines from the manga that had to be cut for time. The two girls that Aijo romances to kick the story off are also cute, as their magically induced love stupor causes their lovesick and tsundere characteristics to balloon into cartoonish extremes.

The only downside I see to jumping on board this very crowded love train is that I will be crushed on an emotional and spiritual level if 100 Girlfriends ever cops out and leaves Aijo stuck with only 70 or 80 dangerously down-bad dames. I guess it will be some consolation, though, if the show manages to bust our guts and tickle our funny bones all the way through.