there’s so much more bad i could talk about this than good. for a start, the plot and writing is awful - i don’t mean riddled with holes or anything, it is legitimately lazy and unsubstantial. it has an interesting premise, if a little cliche, but quickly these cliches just pile up until you realise there is nothing But.

and it’s thanks to these clichés that nisekoi feels like a B-list anime from 2005, there is almost nothing original apart from a few notes in character design. there’s blonde tsundere american girl, cute shy japanese girl, blue-haired tomboy (who everyone thinks is a boy!! haha) and yamato nadeshiko as well as pervert best friend. morimoto is actually surprisingly unique, a little

now i don’t mind unoriginal character design particularly (at least, these could be a lot worse) but another flaw of these characters is how downright unlikeable they are, particularly shuu and tachibana

shuu has no respect or regard for other people and their feelings and his behaviour is borderline disgusting (as well as unoriginal). his funny scenes just pissed me off. they’re clearly nothing more than attempts by the writer to shoehorn raku and another character into yet another compromising situation. examples: selling lewd pictures taken of girls w/o their consent, trying to pressure tsugumi into confessing her crush

tachibana is literally awful - there’s nothing likeable about her whatsoever. remove the comedy aspect from shuu, give her a bigger role, and that’s it. she is an absolute piece of shit from her personality to her behaviour. she actually herself forces raku into bad situations; some kind of poor writer self-insert? she is abusive and manipulative and is exactly who no one should aspire to be, ever. examples: saying if raku doesn’t marry her her dad will fight his gang, demanding again and again he will marry her even after he says no 1,000 times

raku is the best of this trio as his main fault isn’t negative personality but rather lack of personality whatsoever. how would i describe him? he is not afraid to speak his mind? he is almost exceptionally bland and viewer self-insert, with an interesting visual design as well as backstory & hobbies but no actual character. he is pretty much a bad OC

tsugumi, kirisaki and onodera are actually redeemable for cute and interesting designs as well as functions/interactions/behaviour.

however i’m going to use that to segway onto another point - gay erasure and poor form in terms of gender roles. tsugumi is a sincerely great character who seems to have been raised without gender roles (“why does everyone think i’m a boy?”) who imo very clearly had a crush on kirisaki. of course instead of queerbaiting the show doesn’t even acknowledge such a thing is even possible - no throwaway lines, no development, and it’s dropped as soon as she crushes on raku.

a homosexual character would’ve been great, but displaying gay tones and not even considering them so is incredibly insulting. no one can relate to this, it doesn’t work and honestly comes off as offensive, which is reinforced by kirisaki’s awful notions of gender roles. tsugumi doesn’t want to wear feminine clothes yet she forces her into them.

what the fuck?? she’s supposed to be your friend kirisaki what the hell and “you’re a girl so you should wear girl clothes” kirisaki strikes me as the girl who would be most modern so why she retains ideas from 1910 i have no idea. which actually points to a larger issue - kirisaki doesn’t act like she should. for someone who is supposedly half american and who lived in america for a good while, she has pretty much nothing to show for it and acts really dang japanese

ah yes realism a word the writers had probably never heard of: i’m laying it down, the plot that wasn’t entirely tropes was pure forced drama garbage. so these kids all hung out when they were like 5 and one makes a promise to raku they’ll get married and gives him a lock necklace while keeping the key to it and then they all leave etc

no one who is 16 remembers anything they did when they were 5 and no one is going to take any such promises seriously anyway?? who the fuck is going to marry someone just bc they made a promise when they were 5 i don’t even need to explain why that is dumb

and the show points out it’s dumb a total of once. no one else questions the absurdity of the situation and there’s so much drama over “who did i make the promise with??” as if it has any weight whatsoever and as if you can’t just fit everyone’s keys into ur lock to see who fits

essentially nothing is resolved btw we don’t find out who made the promise or why anyone else had keys, thanks for making such a huge deal over an idiotic plot point and then not concluding it

more trivial points - animation was ok. i felt the budgeting was ok, but the budget was just low in general. pretty noticeable quality decay after the 10th p imo which isn’t that bad in terms of budgeting but still a little disappointing - where did the budget go? lazy animation in pretty much all scenes and not much to show for it anywhere else. i’ve seen it praised for little SHAFTing but honestly it would’ve been more fun with the SHAFTing. at least there would’ve been something nice to look at while the characters said smth stupid

i kinda liked how many OPs and EDs there were, a trend i don’t mind seeing continue. not a viable reason to watch any show though

another single redeeming point - the show is somehow engaging, at least up until maybe ep 12. i didn’t rly find myself getting bored while watching, thanks SHAFT. the first half is roughly good, interesting and actually funny and fun, but once tsugumi is introduced the quality declines massively (not that i don’t love tsugumi, i do, but the treatment of her is gross and offensive)

summary

 - writing is 90% cliches
 - original writing is melodramatic and ridiculous
 - growing to hate characters ur supposed to like
 - characters not punished for garbage behaviour
 - homosexual erasure
 - awful response to gender-deviant character
 - goodbye all suspension of disbelief
 - ok budgeting
 - quality decay after ep 10
 - no SHAFTing
 - high amount of different OPs and EDs
 - fairly easy to watch
 - first half is interesting and funny
 - second half is hell

final verdict: don’t touch, not worth it