LOVE FLOPS

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MANGA ComedyRenai Flops

REVIEWS

• 

  HidamariSeashore

  73/100
  Whether or not this anime is worth the watch depends on your patience.

  (WARNING: This review contains MAJOR spoilers. Proceed with a LOT of caution.)

  Spend enough time around the anime block, and you’re bound to at least hear about anime that have a particular combination of genres: ecchi and harem. The premise of one guy being involved with multiple girls has been done time and time again and will continue to be done, and most of those times, fanservice will be sprinkled into the mix. A couple of my favorite anime may be part of these two genres, but like many others, I have grown slightly weary of them. For that reason, when I came across a screenshot from a certain ecchi/harem anime that had just started airing, I expected it to just be another generic ecchi/harem anime; looking into it, however, led me to discover that it was an original anime (as in, not based on a manga, light novel, visual novel, etc.), and for some reason, that convinced me to watch the first episode. Despite thinking I’d drop it after that first episode, something about it made me feel like there was more than what meets the eye, so I kept watching.

  One entire season later, here we are, with me trying not to do a victory dance over being proven that I was right that something was going on with “Renai Flops”.

  Although it takes place in a more futuristic setting than most, Renai Flops starts like any other rom-com anime, with our hapless hero, Asahi Kashiwagi, having five different risqué encounters with five different people - Aoi Izumisawa, Amelia Irving, Ilya Ilyukhin, Bai Mongfa, and Karin Istel. When he finally arrives at school, he discovers that Mongfa is his new teacher, and the rest of them are transfer students in his class. To top it all off, these five all confess their love for Asahi and even move in with him. So begins Asahi’s life with these five, with their feelings for him developing more with each episode. Pretty standard setup for a harem anime, right?

  Well…. you know what? We’ll get to that later.

  First and foremost, I should talk about the technical aspects of this anime, starting with the art. The character designs are pretty solid for the kind of anime this is, the backgrounds are quite pretty, and the animation was nice and fluid. At the very least, it’s easy to see that Passione put some passion into this project! (Cue someone throwing a banana peel at my face.) The voice cast is full of all-stars - such as Ryouta Oosaka and Ayana Taketatsu - who also do a solid job at their roles. The music is probably the best part of the anime, with the opening and ending themes being quite pleasant to listen to; heck, I went out of my way to purchase the opening theme, “Love? Reason why!!” by Konomi Suzuki, on iTunes! One song that stands out in my mind, however, is the insert song that plays during the final episode; as of now, I don’t know the name of the song, but I do know that it’s sung by Miku Itou and that it, accompanied by the scene that it played in, almost made me cry!

  Unfortunately, Renai Flops’s story and characters aren’t entirely at the same quality as the art and sound….although that statement might be debatable. At the very least, the first half of the series will take a lot of patience to get through. Not only are there almost all, if not all, of the clichés that can come with an ecchi/harem anime, there tend to be played out in such an over-the-top way that I found myself cringing. There are a few moments that make it stand out among the crowd, but those moments are few and far between. In the first half, the characters are also pretty standard for this type of anime, with not a whole lot to make them stand out among other characters like them. All of this is on purpose, as is made clear later, but even knowing that doesn’t make the first half of Renai Flops any less exhausting to watch.

  There is one thing I can honestly praise the first half of Renai Flops for, though, and that is its foreshadowing. From episode 1, there are hints that something isn’t quite right here. These hints range from pretty obvious, like when Asahi fails to remember his “best friend”, to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-type moments, such as the date on Asahi’s alarm clock inexplicably changing. A conspiracy theorist could have a field day with those hints, and ultimately, by the time episode 7 ends, they would be doing a victory dance over how correct they were all along.

  Well, if their theory was that none of your waifus were real, anyway.

  To be more specific, Asahi was part of a simulation, and Aoi, Amelia, Irina (Ilya), Mongfa, and Karin were all artificial intelligences. This plot twist is probably a predictable outcome given the anime’s setting and all of the hints that were dropped previously; however, those who aren’t paying close enough attention will be caught off-guard, and even those who are may not be able to predict the full extent. The moment the plot twist is unveiled, the story steadily begins to improve. There is less fanservice, the characters develop in a way that make you care about them more than before, and as I briefly mentioned earlier, there are some nearly-tearjerking moments during the second half. The ending does raise a few questions, but I wouldn’t say it was a bad ending, by any means.

  Overall, I think Renai Flops was alright. Fans of the ecchi and harem genres and those who have a lot of patience may find themselves appreciating what it has to bring to the table. Those who don’t like those genres and don’t have the patience to sit through it, however? Sorry, but you’ll probably see this as a flop.

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• 

  DigiTheMelon

  70/100
  Renai Flops is an enjoyable mess: one that abandons consistency in favor of its grander ambitions

  NOTICE: Major Spoilers for Renai Flops. Non-specific spoilers for details post-episode 7.

  

  Out of all the shows airing in Winter 2022, the one I did not expect to get the most attached to was Passione’s Renai Flops. It was seemingly the dime a dozen harem anime, with exactly nothing to boast about. The art and animation was passing and the soundtrack just existed, and the girls were cute enough (while packing surprising firepower in the voice department). The first episode could not even fully deliver on the more perverse aspects: a shame when the alternative manga version indulges in its lewd, explicit, and compromising scenes and adorable art style. As odd as it sounds, I was actively waiting for the show to at least have a panty shot. That feeling evolved into actively waiting each week for the show’s next ridiculous episode.

  Dire lack of ecchi aside, Renai Flops was more than it let on. It attempted to be more than it was. Renai Flops isn’t just a harem anime. It’s a mess. An entertaining, ambitious, and incapable mess. One that captured me and had me craving more, as if its trashiness and underlying dread– yes, DREAD– were personally making sure I woke up every Wednesday just to watch the show.

  But, how? I said the show had nothing unique. Well, that was a facetious statement on my part. Renai Flops is an example of a perfect twist, soured by its adherence to its premise.

  Renai Flops was the archetypal harem. It’s more appropriate to refer to it as formerly the archetypal galge. The main character Asahi Kashiwagi is introduced to five girls in rapid succession through silly, perverted incidents as if he were at the start of a game. Within the first seven episodes he goes through their routes, obtains their flags, and they truly fall in love with him when his actions align with a locked memory they have.

  Throughout these episodes, the show takes a sharp turn toward the bizarre. Each of the episodes stands at the impasse between mediocre and genuinely good, with the cast having the potential to endear you. Let’s use this opportunity to discuss the characters, as with the exception of two episodes, the first seven focus on one girl at a time:

  Amelia Irving says funny sex words. Her episode was surprisingly successful in endearing me to her. As well as the fact, I find her character design visually appealing. Throughout her episode, she struggles with Kanji due to being an American transfer–being a foreigner is a trait shared amongst most of the girls but she’s the only one with this difficulty. She’s shown to be a sort of perpetual loser, never really winning at anything. But, watching her move forward, persevere, and show so much effort makes it impossible to dislike her.

  Irina Ilyukhin doesn’t have a dick, but she does have the funniest episode. Her shy personality had to bounce off uncomfortable circumstances and her own increasing desperation for some really great comedy that forced her to be aggressive and active. She fulfilled the “trap” niche. Illya ends her episode learning to be true to herself, abandoning her disguise and embracing her femininity.

  Bai Mongfa kills people in her episode. It’s one of the earliest examples of the show diverting from the norm. She’s foreshadowed to have been an assassin, but it’s taken to the extreme. Her backstory eclipses the former two girls’ and she changes the tone completely. She’s given a place to belong, a refuge from her encroaching past as a killer. She’s my favorite of the girls, which put me into quite the unique dilemma in the show’s final act. Mongfa is the perfect package of mature, aloof, sexy, and adorable.

  Karin Istel is a magical girl. I know what I typed there, the episode was a shock to me too. It was a major suspension of disbelief and part of the show’s worst episode. As much as I like Karen, it was unsalvageable. The preachy moral of valuing herself more felt incredibly disingenuous, for an ecchi harem. It gets even weirder when the entire episode is also just a dick joke. The character herself is one of the more fun ones: she has enough personality, snark, charm, and energy to make her likable. But, it seems that the world was against her.

  Before discussing the final two initial main characters, I have to note the massive shift in the character-focused episodes. It went from normal, albeit with quirky hijinks ensuing, to off the deep end. It doesn’t make sense for there to be such a divorce in the character settings, but Renai Flops relishes in that level of insanity. After all, the girls had all initially fallen in love with him over inane actions. Only with these later ones is there any meaning in their love.

  Aoi Izumisawa slowly goes insane. Her character type isn’t one that’s appealing to me. She’s the typical shy, megane character. The type you expect to be the main heroine and envelope the majority of the screen time. But, she surprisingly lacks a dedicated episode: a fact of her presence that becomes increasingly ominous as the show progresses. It’s something that’d be overlooked if you didn’t have an eye for foreshadowing and had no knowledge (either as the show aired or posthumously) of the twist.

  Asahi Kashiwagi is fine. He’s not an insultingly bad lead, nor is he one that I’m excited to watch. He falls into the same conservative pitfalls as his contemporaries. But his general kindness, in spite of his lackings, made me like him a small amount. The latter half of the show is where he truly shines, anyways.

  The cast is admittedly fun to watch, which is a necessity for success in the genre. Appealing character designs complemented by personality is what sells. The issue arrives with the episodes themselves. Their basic premises aren’t bad by any means, but the execution is middling. This is a critique that may describe the show as a whole. It’s packed with absurdist humor that either makes or cripples an episode, especially since they struggle to begin with. The girls are the saving grace for the premier half of the show. This means that if you don’t love the girls, there is no reason to sit through six episodes. Thankfully, I liked the girls.

  Then the show flips itself on its head. There’s a lot of visual information littered throughout the show that foreshadowed the twist. Even the theme song has constant hints that something is wrong with the show. It’s what will make the show for most people, and anticipating it was one of the best parts of watching the show weekly. Alongside that is the odd behavior in which Asahi starts the show, Aoi’s inconsistent appearances, the insanity of the situations, the AI in each of the girls' name and that key moment where each girl falls in love with Asahi. Everything was building up for the eventual twist, as if it mattered more than anything else throughout the show. Episode 7, after having some of the worst parts in this entire anime, reveals the truth of the world: it’s all a simulation. Doing so in such an eerie manner was a definitive plus and makes the reveal so much more worth it. It’s creepy, well-directed, and leaves a viewer shocked.

  Through this twist, the themes of the show evolve as the world expands. Renai Flops begins to espouse themes of humanity, the love, grief, and moving on and attempts to transform into an emotional rollercoaster. The recontextualization of the show created an opportunity to both dissect the nature of the world, our main protagonist, and the show itself. It provides an astounding amount of depth to a show that was masking as a simple harem. Looking back at parts of the show only demonstrates how much care was put into the twist. The setting, characters, theme songs, and even the anime's website was all a massive hint for the story that the writers wanted to tell.

  And that story is a mess. Episodes 7 and 8 were executed surprisingly well until you realize the show’s quick descent into cliche and predictability, as if the ridiculous soul was sucked out and replaced with a stronger narrative. Yet this is the moment the show picks up and has genuine direction. It’d be a lie if I said that aspects of the climax didn’t make me feel anything. Especially since it redeemed Asahi for me. He has some really heartwarming scenes within this mess of a final act. Still, a lot happens in such quick succession with such predictability that it drains so much of the climax’s weight as well as having decisions at the very end that will actually ruin the series for some viewers. This coupled with the fact that this latter half can be so distinctly described as such hurts the general experience of the show. All without mentioning the actual quality of the genre shift which left much to be desired.

  The execution of the premise struggled with cohesion. On the level of foreshadowing and generally performing the twist, the show excelled. When presenting a likable cast of girls, the show delivered. On creating a consistent experience with functioning parts, the show flailed about. The independent pieces don’t add up because the show was so focused on its grander endeavors. The early episodes’ greatest strength in absurdity is their greatest weakness and contrasts too heavily with the latter half especially since it insists on having comedy still be present. There is no internal consistency because everything is in purpose of the twist. The final episodes become too predictable and have choices of varying agreeability. Its mask and twist, the most important part of the Renai Flops experience, will make it hard to watch for people. The galge and drama collide for questionable results. However, I still had fun despite its flaws. The show was entertaining if not much else and that allows me to be appreciative of it. Anyone can respect and admire the lengths taken for the experience, but the journey ventured may not be worth it. At least I can attest for this messy little show.

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• 

  AftershockWolf

  62/100
  a brief chat about the show that forced me to face my greatest fear

  
  ~ Istel Karin<center>
  
  Hi, AniList review readers. This isn't going to be like a normal review you'd see from me. I watched this show back when it aired and haven't revisited it or discussed it recently, or anything of the like. I couldn't approach a genuine review of this show with any sort of confidence, as I don't have a clear enough memory of the little details of the plot or characters that would make me remember this show as anything but what it is on the surface. Many reviews for this show as the years go on are those looking back on it and claiming it to be "underrated" or a "hidden gem" but that's far from what I'm planning to do here. So, if you'll excuse me, I'm about to get way too personal with strangers on the internet.
  
  </center><img width='500' src='https://a.storyblok.com/f/178900/1280x720/ad6697378d/738308a36134aed21db58e41d8110fde1658829524_main.jpg/m/filters:quality(95)format(webp)'><center>
  
  _Love Flops_ by almost any conventional measure is not a good anime. It's completely incoherent, inconsistent in both writing and tone, tasteless at absolute best when it's not just grueling at worst. The ecchi elements feel slapped in for the sake of having ecchi elements, rather than being used provocatively by any means, the characters are not much more than just loosely stitched together tropes given a vague purpose of being, and its attempts to be a parody of the genre lack the actual edge required to meaningfully cut into and critique harems for their faults and contrivances. Hell, the plot basically relies on contrivance itself in the way of artificial coincidence to force relationships into existence rather than giving them any chance to develop or feel in any way organic. Sometimes the series will gesture towards larger ideas or themes, but very rarely actually demonstrates in any good way the ideas in action or exploration. 
  
  I even want to make it as clear as possible, and you can just check my anime list for any evidence you need, that I do genuinely enjoy ecchi anime, harem anime, and can arguably enjoy a series just fine even if it barely has a plot worth mentioning. My biggest issue with _Love Flops_ is that it seems to present itself as something with ideas to share, as if better than those other series, but only manages to fall face first in almost every minute of its screentime. The characters are flat and one-dimensional, but it's not like I actively dislike them - Mongfa was easily one of my favorite characters from the season, Amelia hits just about every design aspect I could ask for in a character, and I don't remember any of them being genuinely grating *most* of the time, atleast. Rather, the characters feels too much like characters for me to develop any actual connection to them, as they're given such little personality outside of what you already expect from them. 
  
  And yet, despite all of this... or maybe because of it, *Love Flops* is one of very few anime I've watched that actively forced me to pause an episode, sit in silence for minutes on end, and genuinely take a breath before I could press play again. So, what about this show that I clearly don't have an insanely good opinion on led to this? Well, I'm glad you asked. The answer to this question doesn't lie in what *Love Flops* did right, but, rather, in what it accidentally stumbled into. 
  
  </center><img width='500' src='https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTljMzM0MWYtNzUwYy00MDI0LTkyMjgtZWYzM2ZiNTRjMDIxXkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_.jpg'><center>
  
  For most of its runtime, the show presents itself as what I can only describe as an exaggerated farce of a harem romcom. Asahi, our protagonist, is suddenly surrounded my girls of varying personalities, whose encounters and feelings feel almost predestined by some mythical fortune that he had gotten earlier in the day. Of course, that's part of the comedy in this case. The goal here is for the viewer to laugh at the contrived setups and artificiality in these encounters, with the happenstance being the punch line. As far as destiny matters in *Love Flops*, it's clearly not anything romantic, but more like something running on a script. Love isn't discovered, it's as if it's been assigned from the very beginning. In this way, it's similar to the (much better) recent romcom *100 Girlfriends* in the way the characters are fated to be in love, literally by the hand of God. 
  
  In that show, this artificiality is the entire point and it does it well. Yes, the romance is destined, but it's rarely actually immediate and there is still a journey of falling in love. Here, the artificiality just feels lazy rather than intentional. The girls don't feel like people as much as they do just archetypes following a prewritten routine built into their genetic code. Feelings surface too quickly, love feels too easy, and there's not actually much of any emotional connection between them and Asahi to call for it. As a result, the relationships feel fake, and, for a romance anime, the show just feels hollow where it should, theoretically at least, have the most care put into it.
  
  Did I mention yet that it was intentional?
  
  Later in the runtime of the series, it's revealed to Asahi that his world isn't real. The school, his daily life, and, of course, the girls he's grown attached to over the time he's spent with them so far... all sort of based on reality, but fake nonetheless. It's all a simulation - research. Asahi is just a participant in one big algorithm to train an artificial intelligence on what "Love" is and what it feels like. In almost an instant, the series failures - it's shallow characters, the contrived and bare relationships, the sense that nothing ever felt real enough to connect with - aren't just an affect of poor writing. Now, don't get me wrong - some of it was very likely due to bad writing, I don't want to just exclude every fault of a show because of one twist, but some of them, at least, begin to make more sense. The love presented here was never meant to be seen as real, because it wasn't ever trying to be. Love, for all intents and purposes, is a means to an end. 
  
  For Asahi, this realization genuinely breaks him. I mean, this doesn't just equate to losing the people he's began to love, but is basically forcing him to confront the idea head-on that they never existed in the first place. Every memory, every shared word, every moment shared - everything he has experienced in the full duration of this show becomes suspect as he begins to grapple with his very understanding of reality. It's not that he imagined everything, he did live through these experiences, but it's about the fact that all these experiences were just an instrument of creation. Love, as has been explored in the series so far, was never something real, but was something created for a purpose that he was forced to serve. 
  
  This is the point in the series where *Love Flops* stopped being just another trashy seasonal harem anime and became something much more personal... uncomfortably so. 
  </center>
  <img width='500' src='https://repotama.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/11-01.jpeg'><center>
  
  Let me answer the question you probably had when clicking into this review. My greatest fear isn't death. It's not physical harm, it's not isolation, and, for clarity's sake, it's not spiders, or heights, or snaked, or needles, or anything like that. My greatest fear is almost exactly this. It's a fear that none of my relationships are real. It's a fear that people do not care for me out of genuine affection, but out of convenience, obligation, pity, or any other number of sour reasons. It's a fear that my presence in their lives is built on a condition - that, as long as I am still useful, agreeable, entertaining, then I can still stay a part of their life. I am scared of relationships because they end, and, more often than not, it's done quietly, without any explanation or even any malice from either party. One day, without warning, you've traded your last messages, the effort to continue the relationship begins to falter, and, eventually, as if just a part of the plan, you are forced to realize they've moved on.
  
  I often find myself wondering what the lives of those I surround myself with would be like if I wasn't here, or if I've made a big enough impact in anyone's life that, if I were to disappear today, they'd remember me. To briefly self-advertise for a moment, I'll often tell viewers of my streams that one of the reasons I stream is because I hope to make someone smile, and that, hopefully, that moment of happiness can stay with them in their hardest times. A reoccurring part part of my life is just hoping that I'll leave some sort of impact notable enough to remind people that I existed and that my life was real. 
  
  What *Love Flops* does, even if clumsily, is presents the worst possible version of that fear. A world where affection isn't just conditional, but synthetic - literally programmed to exist. Feelings here aren't misunderstood, but manufactured, and the suspicion that you're valued only as a means to an end isn't just paranoia, but the full, objective truth. There's a unexplainable cruelty in love being something that can be real to the person experiencing it, while remaining as something entirely instrumental to the one who is providing it, and it's the exact reason cruel jokes like asking someone out on a dare exist in the first place. Human hearts are fragile, and, more often than not, worn on our sleeves, and it makes them the easiest thing in the world to manipulate. Unlike that, though, Asahi isn't necessarily betrayed by anyone here. No one turns against him out of spite or malice or because they thought toying with him would be funny. In truth, the bonds he treasured literally couldn't be reciprocated in the way he believed they could be. Yes, the girls were theoretically expressing their own thoughts and feelings, but it was never actually human. It was code. Code executing as intended. 
  
  Look. The series doesn't actually handle all of this with any of the grace or subtlety I'm explaining here - the writing still remains shaky at best, it's emotional beats work sometimes but are largely undercut by the missteps the show takes to get there, and the plot only gets more absurd and messy from here. Despite all this, this core idea lands with an unsettling amount of force. Love is an emotion that is almost entirely impossible to understand. It's not as simple as happiness, or sadness, or anger. There is no strict definition or feeling of love, and every one experiences it and expresses it in a different way (some not really at all, love all my aromantics out there). Thus, love is an emotion that requires belief without any way to prove it. Gifts, physical affection, words - these all do well at expressing love, but there's no way to actually prove you or anyone else is in love. Considering that fact, love is so exceptionally fragile, and the slightest shakiness in that belief can shatter it, leading to loss that feels life ending. 
  
  In the real world, we aren't ever given a reveal or twist as explicit as the one Asahi faces here. No one sits us down and gives us a lovely little chat about the fact that our relationships are actually all simulated, and that all the love and affection we've received was a command getting run rather than a choice made by a human heart. Regardless, we all experience things similarly, if much less fantastical. Instead of this, though, we can only infer things from the absence of what there was. There's no such thing as confirmation in the end of relationships - just silence. We don't get the clarity of knowing whether our fears or justified or just a figment of our imagination, and it's far more likely an answer will never arrive. 
  
  It's this ambiguity in this fact that makes this fear so persistent. I can't blame some big bad villain, nor is there some evil organization working behind the scenes that I can expose. Instead, it's the far more human experience of a slow erosion of certainty. It's the questions that ring through my mind each and every day, with unrelenting pounding against my heart. 
  
  Were they ever choosing me? Did I truly matter, or was I just a present force? Will I be someone they remember tomorrow?
  
  </center><img width='500' src='https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBkCuPubkAAdDp7.jpg'>~~~
  
  *Love Flops* doesn't answer these questions. I'd argue it barely understand them. Still... in it's attempt to become something more than just a shallow parody of a genre, it does one thing incredibly well: it exposes a truth that I will never be able to fully escape. The truth that the real terror in love isn't in its loss, but in the possibility that it was never real to begin with. 
  
  For clarification, I don't think *Love Flops* is some secretly brilliant masterpiece. It doesn't succeed as a critique of the harem genre, nor does it explore the themes of AI or emotions in any meaningful way. What it does do well, almost entirely accidentally, is brush against something deeply human within me and refuse to let go of it. 
  
  *Love Flops* is, at it's best, a fine anime that, for a brief moment, articulated something painfully real. 
  
  Sometimes, that's all a story needs to break you.

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