Kono Naka ni Hitori, Imouto ga Iru Mini Review

The blandest of the bland

The best characters are not even shown together with the main ones

One of the lower rung harems out there, I blame my luck or rather my forgiveness to give stuff like this a chance.

But hey, it’s always fun to rip on things

If weren’t here to hear how I chose this series, allow me to take a brief moment to remind you (or inform). This season was pretty full of slice of life and harem series so other than the one I wanted to watch, I basically decided to torture myself a bit by deciding to have a trivial little contest. The plan was to write down all of the series that was airing and them crush them into wads of paper. If I got each one in the trash basket across my room, I wouldn’t watch any of them. Now I did get most of them in, but I missed like 3. Those were Tari Tari, Kokoro Connect, and this. So I tried again and this series stuck out and so I decided that this would be the tortue I would have to endure for this season.

So the series is basically about Mikadono Shougo who like most harem leads seems like a decent guy from the start. His father is the CEO of the titular company and with his death, Shougo now has to attend an academy to basically find a wife for himself as his future is already set as a businessman. A flashback scene shows that during his father’s funeral, a girl who has her face covered, basically says that she’s his sister (illegitimate). So we have a mystery on our hands and plus it’s a harem. Shougo now has to identify his sister amongst the crowd of girls he has attracted so that he doesn’t accidentally end up romancing his sister.

Character Lists! Boy this is gonna be fun

• Shougo: At first I understood Shougo’s reluctance to bone any of the girls because there was a chance he could have had relations with his illegitimate sister but even after that, he hasn’t decided on anyone so he gets to be grouped in the Ichika-Category. Other than being completely bland, he….okay yeah there’s nothing special about him. Girls either want him for a legit reason (mostly because he was nice to them) or his money.
• Konoe: Harem Archetype C1- The tall, busty, long haired girl next door. Konoe is one of the PRIME examples of complete blandess. Almost every aspect of the “tall-busty” character from a harem is present in this character. So of course, she doesn’t stand out at all. She’s just a horny highschooler who fantasizes about the guy she just met (although he DID save her life, and he WAS her childhood friend that he doesn’t remember)
• Miyabi: Harem Archetype C2- The short, loli, twin-tailed, semi tsundere (or sometimes full on). Yet another bland character who acts as the main competitor against Konoe. Of course, Miyabi is the extremely jealous one and because she’s short and has pigtails, she gets license to abuse the main character in any way, shape, or form. Miyabi of course has no other special features other than that she can swim and happens to be important to plot (for those who haven’t watched i yet)
• Rinka: Rinka reminds me of another character that has the exact same attitude. Kotegawa Yui from To-Love Ru. Big difference in how much I like their characters and pretty much their hair color. Anyways, I approved of Rinka but I kind of gave up on her as she didn’t really try to make any advances at all. I mean, Shougo actually (magically) got her out of an arranged marriage, she has every reason to like him.
• Tendou + Sagara: Since the one of the two really didn’t do jack-sh*t in terms of plot, I decided to merge the useless with the useful. Tendou is the carefree one of the bunch who really doesn’t belong in the harem (or at least, not now) the anime didn’t have time to focus on her so she’s just there. Sagara definitely had some say in the “plot” but because they needed to drag out the “mystery” she refused to tell Shougo. Everything becomes pretty clear at the end.
• Ikusu: The best character in this series. Hands down, no questions. The reverse trap beats every single girl out there in this series. Plus she’s the only reason I didn’t fall asleep watching this.
• Others: Suprisingly, the side characters were a lot more appealing to me compared to the majority of the main cast. Red haired maid who’s name I forgot (not too much I guess), the student council girl who squeals..and thats it. Yuzurina herself has a secret, but allow me to share the pain, just go watch it.

Going in with nothing to expect paid off, because it would have been wrong for anyone to have expected any good from this series. I’ll at least give them so minimal amount of credit because the harem/abstinence program is somewhat justified because, hey, if you found out you banged  your illegitimate family member, that just wouldn’t sit right with you…unless you’re into that (and plenty of people are, just look at how many imouto series there are now). In any case, even if it was justified, it still doesn’t help that every candidate was freakishly boring.

Best Character from this series No.1

Speaking of characters, let’s simplify the entire mystery in a couple of sentences. Konoe faked being the little sister for…I don’t even remember but basically reconnecting with Shougo because she was his “childhood friend” (the blandness makes my tongue dry, let me go get some lemons). Anyways, Sagara then faked being the sister because she wanted to protect the real one, Rinka pretended to be one because she could more or less warn Shougo about it. Tendou had nothing to do with the story. They remove Miyabi early on to trick you, I’ll just leave it that because it’s pretty obvious. Short little topic on the art and I will wrap this up: I’ve noticed that from all the series I’ve watched this season, this had the worst and it contributed to the whole bland theme I was trying to pull off here. That’s the reason why I didn’t use any pictures from the anime, original LN illustrations plus the fanart below is a lot better than that. Arcana Famiglia had stylish (but anime was bad) art, Binbougami was a fair transition from its manga, Accel World looked pretty shiny alltogether, Oda Nobuna which is next up on the list had some dynamic ass artstyle. Anyways, the anime looked pretty weak.

It’s sort of sad to that the side characters were a lot more entertaining than the main ones. Anyways, mediocre series with mediocre characters. They try to drag it out as long as possible by elimating the chances of the real candidate early. That’s basically it, if you want some bland-fanservice’d show, this is it. Nothing more, nothing less.