Choukadou Girl ⅙

Recommendation: You can skip this one. I wanted to like this series. It's a cute concept, it has some funny parts, and I liked Nona and some of the other girls. Unfortunately, there's really not much else to recommend about it. The plot is pointless, dumb, and needlessly convoluted for a short romcom series. The characters are animated with a mix of hand-drawn and CGI, and the CGI faces are firmly in uncanny valley creepiness territory. The main character, Haruto, is pretty unlikable and it devolves into generic harem bullshit pretty fast. It's a real waste. The initial premise of afigurine girl with the personality and memories of her character from a sci fi anime exploring the human world at 1/6th scale is fun, but it only manages about 2 episodes of that before discarding the concept. They almost never leave Haruto's apartment after that point, instead meeting a succession of new figurines that have come to life and exploring inside of the video games and animes that they come from. Some of the figurine girls are fun, I liked Nona and Subaru in particular, but this series would have worked far better as a regular romance story between Haruto and Nona rather than a harem setup. The competitions between the figurine girls for Haruto's affections are by far the least interesting part of the show, and it makes Haruto come off like a two-timer for flirting with all these other girls after marrying Nona early in the series. The romance part is unsatisfying because there's so much going on in such a short series that it never really develops beyond being a regular harem where a particular girl is clearly going to win eventually, but is nowhere close to that point by the time the series ends. Haruto's frenemy Kanmuri is a weird choice of a villain, and he's really not much of one. Their whole relationship is truly strange. At one point, Kanmuri kidnaps and holds Haruto hostage at one point to force the figurine girls to play a game where they will have to become living test subjects if they lose. They win of course, and after that, Kanmuri just shows up at Haruto's apartment later and they hang out like nothing has happened. What? The show is also too short for all the stuff it has going on. If it had just focused on Haruto and Nona, the short episode format would have been perfect, but there is too much material for that as is and it feels extremely rushed. It should have been a full length series if it was going to cover things like Subaru's love/hate relationship with her father and her rivalry with Rindo. It's better to not include all these complexities if you're just going to speedrun through them in 3 minutes because there's no space in the rest of the episodes to ever bring them up again. It's impossible to care about them without the time investment and it takes away crucial blocks of time from more important segments and characters. If you're looking for positives, I did think that it was cute sometimes, I liked Nona's arc of coming to terms with the fact that she's a fictional character, there was some good comedy occasionally, and it's short enough that it's not an enormous time commitment if you just want to give it a shot (you can get through the whole thing in about 2 hours if you really want to). I wouldn't say it's enough to be worth watching unless you're desperate for novel romcom concepts though.