I remember when I decided to start watching Makeine, it wasn’t in my plans to watch this show at the start, because when looked from afar, it looked exactly like every other romcom you and I already saw dozens of times, and I thought I was already watching enough of those. I decided to start watching it after I dropped a show whose name I cannot even remember anymore and because I heard that this “wasn’t like other harem romcoms”, this “this was different”, and without even having even started it I knew those claims were a lie, why would I believe these people when the cover and the synopsis definitely doesn’t even imply what they’re saying? But the second you start the first episode with a quote that even Oregairu would deem childish, and which is not actually relevant to the series because this isn’t about failed relationships in high school but rather about people who failed to get one, as if the author failed to grasp what his own series is about, then my mind just ended up being completely sure about one thing: this show is just any other romcom which both you and I already saw dozens of times, but it thinks it isn’t and by that little detail it comes across as worse being than them.

The only argument you could make about Makeine being “different” is that the girls didn’t fall in love with the MC immediately, and that’s honestly misleading, a lot of girls in those other harem romcoms don’t fall with the MC instantly either, and in fact this series plays exactly like them, because those romcoms linger on the fact that it is a more of a “will they or won’t they” dynamic, so actual romance doesn’t happen most of the time besides the MC sharing moments with each of the girls in each of their respective arcs, and if you didn’t notice it by now, Makeine works in the exact same way.

This is one of the most pathetic attempts of an MC I have seen in a series as praised as this one this year, I don’t think I need to mention his name because he was such a nothingburger of a character since he’s a soulless self-insert, this MC doesn’t even have a personality at all, his most notable qualities are that he reads light novels (because he’s just like you) and that he likes tap water, aside from that he doesn’t have any notable trait to him and yet all the girls are flocking to him, why? Because he is the MC, and in fact, there are multiple questions that you can do and the answer is the exact same thing every time: why did the tomboy started undressing after getting trapped in the same room as him? Because he is the MC; why was he found in a changing room alongside a girl that already has a boyfriend by her boyfriend? Because he is the MC; why did the super busty girl that already has a boyfriend fall with her breasts on his face? Because he is the MC, and that scene even had a “I heard that exact line in a light novel!” as if trying to be self-aware, but this series isn’t actually self-aware. This anime is not doing anything different from other shows of the exact same genre, it isn’t subversive no matter how much you try to twist it, it just thinks it is different despite using the exact same tropes as all others, and the fact people actually buy there’s anything unique about it makes me think they need to watch more romcoms.

This show reminds me of Oresuki, that show worked on a similar premise that other girls around the guy were in love with his best friend so they wanted the MC to set them up with him, however, Oresuki was pretty much honest from the very beginning by making a girl in love with the MC from the start. I saw many people saying that Oresuki was a subversion of the usual formula and it really wasn’t, but it was at least funny to watch, which is more than I can say about a lot of romcoms and specially about this one, the cracks that this was written just like a normal harem romcom were pretty obvious from a glance, but that show didn’t have a good reception like this one, probably because the fact that it was a harem romcom was even more obvious than here, and this anime has A-1 Pictures on it so you can say it was made by the same studio that did other “peak”, and by that I mean overrated, romcom shows like Kaguya-sama combined with their “great visuals”, and by that I mean the usual A-1 slop, make some scenes like someone dancing or boobs bouncing look good and make the rest of the anime look average, wobbling with so many drops in quality that the times it doesn’t look bleh seem impressive in comparison.

This shows tries to get me interested in how the girls solve their previous rejections because other girls got with the guy they were in love with which is terrible to watch, and while the comedy can be tolerated the drama here is simply unbearable, partially because I don’t care about these other couples, and the fact that all of these love triangles the girls went through makes one of them the childhood friend of the guy makes me think that the author fell for the meme that “the childhood friend always loses”, it is the same kind of stupidity that another anime already committed years ago, that show was called Osananajimi ga Zettai ni Makenai Love Comedy, and it was called that way because the author is stupid and also fell for the same meme. Of course, that series had a modicum of competency with the writing in some characters, something that I cannot say about Makeine, because in this series it isn’t even a focal point, it is there because you already watched other romcom shows and can recognize the joke from there, and that’s actually the part where Makeine shines, and that is in trying to be different just to return to the usual formula in one way or another. Obviously, after the girls get rejected, they have someone to go to cry to and that person is the MC, because once that other guy gets out of the way, they can flock to your self-insert after they got over their love for the other guy so they’ll slowly fall in love with literally you, because that is the type of show that Makeine is.

Thank you for reading.