First getting into Rent-A-Girlfriend from reading the manga, I was excited for this anime when I found out that it was being adapted. My anticipation for this anime in January when I finished binging the manga was off-the-charts, to say the least. Over time, as my opinion of the manga started to drop and the manga itself started to dawdle and show cracks, my eagerness for this anime to air sunk like a rock. Luckily, it was one of the anime that I watched from the Summer season that wasn’t delayed due to COVID, so I didn’t have to wait longer than usual to watch it. While my opinion of the manga has been free-falling for a few months now, this anime covers the part where I still thought it was good and wasn’t wasting my time chapter by chapter.

Rent-A-Girlfriend is about Kazuya Kintoshita, a twenty-year-old college student that makes the mistake of ‘renting a girlfriend’ in the heat of the moment while reminiscing about his ex-girlfriend who dumped and blocked him on all social media. To his surprise, his date with his rental girlfriend Chizuru Mizuhara goes exceptionally well. When he goes to leave his five-star review for her, he becomes infuriated instead when he reads positive reviews from lonely men like him that rented her, and gives her a one-star review instead out of spite and jealousy. On top of that, he decides to rent her again to give her a ‘piece of his mind’. After Kazuya gets a phone call telling him that his grandmother collapsed and is at the hospital, he abandons his ‘date’ with Chizuru and dashes to the hospital. Little does he know that Chizuru, obligated to stay with her date for the entire allotted time like a good rental girlfriend, tails him to the hospital, which unfortunately gets them into the situation of being thought of as actual boyfriend and girlfriend by Kazuya’s grandmother, which is conscious and mentally fine in her hospital room. To add on to that, Chizuru’s grandmother, who is also at the hospital, ends up also under the impression that they’re dating. Instead of Kazuya looking like Japan’s biggest loser and admitting to his grandmother that he ‘rented a girlfriend’ for the sole purpose of chastising her for doing her job, they decide to go along with the charade, at least for the time being.

As much as this series relies on the girls to generate interest in the series and establish a ‘waifu war’, much of the reason why Rent-A-Girlfriend is interesting in the first place is because of Kazuya. He isn’t an alpha ladykiller or a self-insert MC--he is, in layman’s terms, a ‘simpleton’ often shortened to ‘simp’ by many on the world wide web. One has to be in a dire state of affairs emotionally to ‘rent a girlfriend’ in an attempt to get over your ex. There are many individual scenes I can point to show how much of a loser he is, the one that sticks out in my head is when Kazuya spends no less than two minutes in anime-time beating off to a picture of his ex in a swimsuit while also thinking about how selfless Chizuru has been, culminating in him realizing who he’s really in love with. Perhaps it’s unfair to call Kazuya a loser. He’s way more emotionally vulnerable than pretty much any other main character of an anime that I’ve watched. His paranoid thoughts and foolish behavior is honestly a better representation of the target audience that would watch this anime, rather than a personality-less yet somehow cool main character. All things aside, Kazuya ~is~ a simp, there’s no way of getting around it.

Now on to the girls, which is probably the main reason why you want to watch this anime. I’ve already mentioned Chizuru, who is a hard-working, meticulous, and sometimes ornery girl. The anime doesn’t wait to tell you that her (or most other girls in the show) are beautiful and are too good for Kazuya. The reason why she’s the ‘main girl’ is due to her commitment to the bit of being Kazuya’s girlfriend in front of their family and friends. Things like that play well to Kazuya and to most watching the show. The other girl I’ve mentioned so far, the ‘ex’, DOES have a name. It’s Mami Nanami. She is easily the most controversial character on this show for reasons easy to see why. She dumps Kazuya for vapid reasons that are hard to understand and seems to only reappear to meddle with his life. Her reasons for acting this way aren’t clear to the viewer, or her for that matter, but it should be examined with more nuance rather than calling her a ‘bitch’ for acting weird. That would probably be asking too much though. Ruka Sarashina, the second most popular girl, is introduced halfway through the anime. She is introduced as another ‘rental girlfriend’, and becomes attached to Kazuya since he’s the only man that has made her heart beat over 90 beats per minute. While Ruka causes as much, if not more, trouble as Mami, viewers generally see her as less of a ‘bitch’ and more ‘childish’. She is of ambiguous age and seems to know where Kazuya is at most times. What she lacks in smarts she makes up in ambition. The final girl that is featured in this anime is Sumi Sakurasawa. It’s hilarious that they have her up in most promotional images with the other girls and in the OP and ED because she doesn’t appear until episode eleven. Let me remind you that Rent-A-Girlfriend is a twelve-episode anime. I’m being a bit facetious here since there IS going to be a second season, and Sumi being in only two episodes is due to the way the anime adapted the manga. Don’t worry Sumi stans, she will make more appearances in the second season. On to the character of Sumi herself; she is a friend of Chizuru and a fellow girlfriend-for-rent. Her main charm points are that she sucks at smiling and that she’s a mute. Not to be brief about her, but due to her only making a short appearance, I can’t make a serious assertation about her. If you want to know about her, go watch the anime.

On to the plot--I enjoy that the anime relishes in the fact that Kazuya is a moron at most times. Rather than having him be in the right at all times, Rent-A-Girlfriend isn’t afraid to paint him as an unreasonable imbecile. At allows for the prospect of future character growth, which admittedly has not happened yet. Him being a foil to the driven and always-moving Chizuru is a huge slap in the face for him. There’s something about her that lights a fire in him and makes him not want to be a useless bozo. What gets in the way of me enjoying this anime more is the convoluted nature of it. Not that I hate it when shows are convoluted, but the way that Rent-A-Girlfriend executes it is atrocious at times. The part that stands out, in particular, is when Kazuya and Chizuru have a chance meeting at the beach, when both of their friend groups plan out trips to the same location. Making an anime convoluted is a huge risk, with it being hamfisted severely dragging the entertainment value of it down. It’s one of those things that you’ll have to watch to understand what I’m talking about, since talking about it would spoil most of the story. The anime also doesn’t explore the concept of a ‘rental girlfriend’ so much from the girlfriend-for-rent’s point of view. While I can’t say that this would be necessary, since it is Kazuya’s story after all, but it would be nice to show what it’s truly like for someone like Chizuru to do a rental date. I can’t imagine that most people that would go on a rental date are stand-up people. Maybe that’s my bias. The anime does whitewash the rental girlfriend business though, which I found out IS a real thing in Japan after a Japanese friend showed me websites for it (google ‘レンカノ’ to see for yourself). While being a rental girlfriend doesn’t seem to have the same dangers as being a sex worker, there is still potentially some major risk involved in being one. Again, this is Kazuya’s show, so this complaint might seem a little unnecessary. The point is that I can’t imagine being a rental girlfriend being a desirable job, and the presentation of it in Rent-A-Girlfriend is naive at best.

Should you watch Rent-A-Girlfriend? It depends. My friend James had to drop the anime after a few episodes because Kazuya was too cringe-worthy for his liking. If you hate ‘cringe’ MCs, then do not for the sake of your sanity watch Rent-A-Girlfriend. If you’re looking for a semi-realistic story of a failson trying to not break his grandmother’s heart while also trying to enter the life of someone who’s seemingly out of reach, then this might be your show. If you want to brainlessly root for your favorite girl against the other girls, then this is a show for you, unfortunately. It's a fun show to watch, which is the most important thing at the end of the day. It’s depressing to say, but this show will only get worse (and less fun) from here on if it follows the trajectory of the manga. I’ll still review the damn thing though when it airs.