For about ten minutes, I was watching Oresuki and thinking “This is the most cliched anime that I have ever watched”. The main character, Joro, gets asked out by his childhood friend, Himawari, and the student council president, Cosmos, out on dates for the upcoming weekend on the same day. Joro’s aloofness, the way he is soft-spoken, and the trademark main character denseness just took the icing on the cake for how bad this anime was looking. But then Oresuki did a hard 180 and showed me something different.
On both of the dates, the girls confess to Joro that they like his best friend, Sun-chan, and that they want him to set them up to go out with him. Upon watching this, I was shown the true nature of this anime. For one, the gag of the ‘confession bench; is one of the funniest gags I have seen in an anime in a while. Also, it showed Joro’s true nature--a boy that has been trying to curate his own personal harem with girls of all tropes. His put on as a stereotypical MC was just an act, and he thought that his hard work and diligence were going to finally pay off when his childhood friend and the student council president confessed to him. When his fantasies are shattered, we are shown a petty and antagonistic main character. Joro is a very interesting main character, especially for an anime genre where the main characters are often uninteresting on purpose. His unfriendly manner and abrasiveness are somewhat more inviting and make him more likable than a washboard MC that everyone can self-insert into.
This is the gist of the show for the first few episodes. Oresuki parodies the rom-com/harem genre very well in the beginning. While Himawari and Cosmos do not like Joro, he has Pansy, a (and possibly the only) volunteer librarian for the school library (and his stalker), who loves him. She confesses to him (on a similar-looking bench that is in the library for some reason), telling him that she first grew a crush on him at the final game of the regional baseball tournament the year before (the baseball tournament is also a running gag). While the love is not requited, he still comes to the library daily due to her having potentially damaging information about him. What comes after that is a complicated love polygon and double-crossing on every side. This part of the anime is the best by far--Oresuki pulls of parodying rom-com and harem anime perfectly. Unfortunately, after that, it starts falling into the trap of being what it is parodying.
There are too many characters in this anime to give each their own individual paragraph, so I will try to briefly summarize them in this one-- Joro, which I have already gone over, is the main character of this anime. While he is unique in the way that he actively tries to acquire a harem instead of passively acquiring one and that he acts like a villain at times. He still is MC-like in the way that he goes out of his way to help others, and in the way that he has no distinguishing hobbies. Himawari is his childhood friend, who is also very bland. Cosmos is the president of the student council. She meticulously plans out everything she wants to do and talks like a general from the Tokugawa period when she is nervous. Pansy is Joro’s stalker, and is a librarian for the school. Sun-chan is Joro’s best friend and the ace pitcher for the school’s baseball team. Asunaro is a reporter for the school’s newspaper, and engages in a bit of yellow-journalism from time to time. Tsubaki is a transfer student that runs a skewer stand with her family. Sasanqua is Oresuki’s only tsundere--she is always failing to ask Joro on a date. Tanpopo is the school baseball team’s manager and an aspiring idol. Hose is a student from another school that comes to help Joro in times of need.
Can you see the problem that this anime may have? In the paragraph above, I had ten characters that I briefly mentioned. Of the seven girls that are in there, six of them are implied to like Joro by the end of the anime. For an anime that seemingly wants to parody the harem genre along with the rom-com genre, it gradually falls into the same hole of what it is parodying. Also, six girls is a lot to fit into a twelve-episode anime. Oresuki tries to manage this by not having every character in every scene, but it nevertheless still gets crowded later on. At least everyone has nicknames so they can all be easily referred to.
The ending to Oresuki does leave much to be desired. To be fair, an OVA will be coming out later in 2020, finishing the arc that the anime ended in the middle of. There are four main arcs in the anime, with the first one (the one I mentioned in the first two paragraphs) being the shining one. The other three arcs vary from good to okay, but the ‘holy shit’ factor of the first one will leave you wanting to binge the whole anime in one night. Oresuki’s story is good, it just goes downhill after a spectacular first arc. As stated before, Oresuki decides to go the route of what it is parodying and turns into a harem anime.
Oresuki is a smart anime, but it is not as smart as it thinks it is. Joro seems to lose his edge for most of the latter half of the anime, it only coming back when he needs it the most. The luster that the first arc ends on slowly wears off through the rest of the nine episodes. By no means is Oresuki a bad anime, but it is disappointing what a downgrade it has from its first arc onward. I am not a fan of Joro gaining a harem after the anime making fun of him for wanting a harem for the first several episodes, even if his harem is more passive than other anime harems. The sheer amount of characters in Oresuki makes it hard to pick hard favorites too. There is only so much screen time--someone is going to end up less developed in character relative to others. That being said, a second season can potentially solve this issue.
With that all being said, I do not hate Oresuki. It is a very funny anime. It has excellent gags, and Joro is one of the better main characters out there. I just believe that Oresuki is trying to be too many things at once. Being a parody of a harem anime, it fails in that Joro gains a quite big list of girls who like him throughout the anime. As a harem, it fails because we are not given enough screentime to grow attached to any girl that is not Pansy. As a comedy though, it succeeds on nearly all levels. It nails most anime cliches perfectly, even if itself falls into the same traps that what it is parodying. I genuinely hope there is a season two, so we can see how Joro deals with the harem that originally wanted to get (The lyrics “Be careful what you wish for, ‘cause you might just get it” come to mind.)
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