Akiba Maid War’s premise rests on asking a rather simple question: what happens when a Yakuza game and a maid café have wildly-passionate sex and produce an offspring that gets twelve episodes to show what it’s capable of doing? There is beauty in linking two things together that you would never imagine should be put together. It triggers a kind of fascination – just how are these two things supposed to work when you put them in a blender? In the spirit of that disparity, the series wastes no time in showing that potential. It starts with is a campy bloodbath as bullets fly from Ranko’s gun, while Nagomi stands in terrified awe of the carnage she witnessed.

It is not just that the moment itself is positively shocking, but more intriguing instead is the manner by which that shock is conveyed. Nagomi, who entered Akiba and started working at Oinky Doink Café all wide-eyed and eager to please, couldn’t have possibly imagined this outcome. Within the course of a single evening, her entire preconception about what maid life is like was completely destroyed. Who could blame her for being so taken aback and scared? Maid cafés rest on the aesthetic of servitude for the patrons, the sensation that your every whim is adorably accommodated with cuteness so plastic that it’s kind of hypnotizing to experience.

A part of Akiba Maid War’s initial draw is seeing what lies behind that plastic veneer, what kinds of darker and seedier undercurrents lie in wait. The bloodbath set against the Oinky Doink Café girls performing a song-and-dance routine highlights this perfectly. All that beautiful lighting and adherence to 1990s moe aesthetic rings with a deep, deliberately-garish irony. If the premise of the series rested on a question, the first episode ends likewise for the viewer: what the heck is coming next?

Yet despite hedging its bets on the inherently-funny juxtaposition between Yakuza-style storytelling wrapped in a maid café backdrop and aesthetic, Akiba Maid War always feels like it is restraining itself from actually letting loose. The first episode’s sheer insanity was for the purposes of making a good first impression; the rest that follows is nowhere close to being as crazed, nor as inherently comedic. This is a twofold problem, with the primary reason for this is in its treatment of Nagomi. While Nagomi is ostensibly the main character in terms of setting up the story and serving as the fish out of water who comes to work at Oinky Doink Café, Ranko is the character who is actually given the things to do in regards to action. Ranko has moments of muscular thuggery goodness aplenty, blowing away enemies with guns or grenades and treating the world she resides in completely straight.

Since Ranko hogs so much of the spectacle spotlight, this reduces Nagomi to primarily being a spectator to the action, a side component who can do little more than bear witness to the insanity rather than take a more-proactive role in Akiba’s chaotic choreography. Granted, she does not have the insane training or life experience that Ranko does (and in terms of actual age, Ranko is in her thirties while Nagomi is a younger woman), nor has been in Akiba nearly as long. As such, she is underequipped to deal with the fallout of everything that transpires.

The show therefore sets up a classic interplay between Nagomi and Ranko, that the battle-hardened veteran of Akiba’s bloodwar will, in time, have her edges somewhat softened by Nagomi’s naïve, optimistic, and demure personality. One represents the recognizable maid lifestyle while the other symbolizes the reality of what the maid lifestyle is actually like in Akiba. But even within this dynamic, Ranko takes centerstage such that the balance never rights itself. In part because of the first episode’s crazed battle sequence, Nagomi finds herself outclassed not only in terms of prowess, but in being capable of carrying the story’s main intrigue. The idea of learning about and seeing Nagomi change (the extent of that is highly-debatable, which I’ll get to later) becomes increasingly less enticing when the show has so brazenly highlighted someone else.

Such is Ranko’s presence as the main fixture of the story that it also comes at the price of nearly everyone else. It is easy to forget that there are other maids besides her and Nagomi who work at Oinky Doink. The other maids both within and outside Oinky Doink, along with their manager, serve as little more than providing exposition dumps and being ancillary or orbital presences in the story. At most, each of the others may have one moment where they are allowed to step forward and move beyond the confines of what the anime has allowed for them, only to be thrust back into the background when their moment is over.

The ways in which the characters change therefore are mostly relegated to how they conduct themselves in the café (you have to master ketchup messages, right?) and less about how they carry over into a larger whole of Akiba’s brutal tapestry. Yumechi, Shiipon, and Zoya’s presence act more as placeholders. While the show does, in theory, give them things to do and developments to undergo, any sense of actual lasting development is either quickly resolved at an episode’s finish, or relates moreso to the power of friendship. For a show that is willing to engage in bloodsport at the drop of a hat, it is so curious that Akiba Maid War would default to all the maids being friends as its constant takeaway, and not in a way that contributes to the show’s comedic juxtaposition. Because of its stubbornness to not break out and cause a serious shake-up of the status quo (until it comes at far too late an hour), the rest of the maids are surprisingly undefined, which sadly makes Oinky Doink feel less like an ensemble and more akin to “Two Maids, and Then the Others Who Just So Happen to Be There.”

The inability to let the other maids strut their action-packed stuff ties into the second way the series feels restrained, which is that the narrative is debilitated by its sense of routine. Just about every episode of the series follows the same pattern: something bad happens because of the café’s financial straits, often because the manager is a greedy idiot chasing a quick buck. The situation thus involves the Oinky Doink maids finding themselves roped into a terrible situation with their lives on the line, which Ranko then more or less helps—if not single-handedly—get them out of. Although the various events presented hint at a larger-overarching tale relating to Nagomi, Ranko, Oinky Doink, the rest of the Akiba maid area involving financial or hierarchical politics, or what it means to “be a maid,” an actual sense of progression feels wanting. It reads far more as an “episodic problem of the day” format, which while in and of itself is nothing to look down upon, gets repetitive and old very quickly. Even if the episodes themselves might be amusing, they’re not funny enough either as straight melodramatic comedy or as meta comedy to give Akiba Maid War more of a half-life.

And part of this lack of half-life and debilitating routine brings me back to Nagomi. As the outlier to the insanity surrounding her in Akiba, she is the one who is most in need of having to adapt in order to survive. But the show has no time for this; whether it be in its attempts to not take the focus off Ranko, or because of the need to maintain the status quo for as long as possible, her naivety is still ever-present. Nagomi never really learns; constantly being surprised by some kind of dark twist in Akiba’s maid life stopped being excusable after that first episode’s battle. When she finally does undergo a transformation of some sort in the middle of the series, it is largely, just like in the show’s treatment of the other maids and their own sense of growth, put on the metaphorical bus and sent away. The series steadfastly refuses to make Nagomi more of a combatant for too long, opting instead to have her be an idealist in a setting that does not behoove this.

Perhaps that explains Akiba Maid War better than anything else I’ve written here: it’s constantly defaulting to ideas that would have been better off being strapped to a grenade and thrown into a rival building with truly reckless abandon. It only really knows how to play it safe. In trying to ideally rest on the laurels and initial appeal of its edgy tone in the maid backdrop, it doesn’t cast that aside and really indulge in that tension and go full-fledged into the stylistically-adventurous valley. The dance sequence in episode one was the show loading only one bullet into its chambers, firing it, but never reloading…though as far as Nagomi is concerned, she’d probably wonder why someone was carrying a gun in the first place even into episode ten.

There is, however, one takeaway that does give me reason to be optimistic. Between this year’s earlier Ya Boy Kongming! from the spring and Akiba Maid War, PA Works as a studio seems to be headed in the direction of trying out the crazy-on-the-surface and seeing if it works, adaptation or not. For all intents and purposes, I hope that they continue along this trajectory. Anime is a better place in general with wacky ideas like these. When it succeeds, it’s infectious and easily becomes the talk of the town.

And I do sincerely wish that I enjoy their next experiment more than this one.