The second romcom this year with Yoshitsugu Matsuoka, Ayane Sakura, and Inori Minase, but this one's about childhood friends instead of quintuplets. (You should watch that instead.)

The show starts with Maru as a pretty nondescript guy, but over the season we learn more about his past as a child actor and his current career aspirations.

The three love interests are his childhood friends from different parts of his life - Shida knowing him the longest as his neighbour and best friend, while Kachi and Maria know him from on and off the set respectively during his acting career.

Kai and Abe act as observers, with Abe playing the rival for the first couple of episodes before largely acting as a sounding board for Kai's thoughts. The other characters get little focus, fading in from the background for jokes at best and showing up for the last quarter of the season completely out of place at worst.

The animation never really goes wrong, and the art style overall is bright and clean. There aren't really any high action scenes that warrant praise, but it's a romcom, after all. Or they claim it's one, anyway.

That covers everything except the overall plot -

Oh, man.

The first three episodes start innocent enough. One easy to follow "revenge" plot and a few characters doing their thing. It's after that plan wraps up that the story starts to meander and pull you wherever it feels like going that episode, introducing new characters and exploring Maru's past.

There's a lot of plot threads that don't go anywhere; to be expected since this season doesn't have a definitive ending, but there were a few "twists" in there about a few of the side characters being secretly related to each other that were brought up once and never again. This happens once per episode for a while and you never get used to it.

The competition between the girls ends up taking a back seat for most of the season, focusing more on Maru's return to acting and the obstacles in his way. It only pops up in the show's brief lucid moments where it remembers it's a romcom just long enough to put one of the girls in the lead until Kai monologues otherwise.

In the end, I feel like I only stuck through it because I was already committed to watching it as it aired, and I was ever so slightly looking forward to seeing what curveball they'd throw in my face next.

P.S.: The characters mostly take their names from Fire Emblem if you're into that, like Maru, Shida, and Kachi being named after Marth, Caeda, and Catria, Kai and Abe = Cain and Abel, etc. It was interesting as a Fire Emblem fan to see how the characters' namesakes somewhat reflected their role in the anime... not enough to recommend watching it, though.