Hyakkano was something I probably mistook for another series that had one guy romancing two-three girls at once but I watched some clips of the anime before I decided to dive into the entire thing. As per usual this was about the time the season ended and I binged the whole thing before binging the entire manga. I actually enjoyed it to the point where I bookmarked its updates so I could keep up with it, which doesn’t always happen with these series I tend to binge.
If you remember The World God Only Knows Hyakkano fulfills a similar premise with the main protagonist obtaining a various assortment of girlfriends. Except this time, he’s 100% committed to each and every one of them compared to Keima merely finishing a route and starting over from scratch each time. When I first watched the anime, I thought a lot of the 4th wall breaking jokes was the anime quickening the pace to actually realize its title to quite literally get to 100 girlfriends but to my surprise the manga is also equally self-aware of the absurdity of its premise and DOES NOT hesitate to go absolutely mad with showcasing Rentaro’s sheer determination to love everybody as equally as possible.
So if you haven’t gleaned it yet, I did particularly enjoy the experience. Bibury Animations, the ones behind that first Azur Lane animation project definitely improved since I last saw them and I hadn’t gotten into Quintuplets to really judge them for that but it really feels like they went above and beyond for this particular project since the whole thing looks pretty damn nice throughout the entire 12 episode run.
I don’t want to necessarily turn this into a discussion of the manga and my impression of every single girl, which at the time of this writing is at 28, but I think I will cover the girls who show up in the anime. The first season of Hyakkano covers Hakari, Karane, Shizuka, Nano, Kusuri, and Hahari and Season 2 is looking to cover Kurumi, Mei, Iku, Mimimi, and Meme. I think after catching up with the series, Karane ranks above Hakari because the former is pretty funny and plays her shtick a lot more noticeably than Hakari who has to compete with her mother in the open/closet pervert deal. Karane acting as the secondary straightman to all the nonsense is appreciated since Rentaro is also beyond sane in his dedication. Plus her name is KARA-NE and that’s just hilarious. Shizuka has foreshadowing towards her own relationship with her mom that’s not that great so while that arc was nice, I don’t consider her to be a big favorite. Par for the course with a character like that, you really have to knock it out of the park to get to me with that archetype.
Nano is the clear-cut favorite, even when considering the 20+ girls who are brought into the fold later, easily top 5 material, maybe even top 3. Kusuri is definitely a gag character who I mostly look at like a series mascot because its her improbable drugs that provide like half of the set-ups to keep the manga’s gags interesting. Hahari doesn’t really get all that much focus outside of her introduction as she mostly acts like a bigger Hakari in terms of kind of wanting to be degenerate. The 2nd season is shaping to have three girls I really enjoy while it’ll one I really don’t care for and another I tolerate. There’s going to be a 100 girls and we already have a quarter down, there’s obviously ones who are not going to be my fancy but the initial six are fine for the most part. Every now and then when I get disillusioned that the series misses its mark on a new girl, there’s usually one that I like who ends up showing up later so it’ll be fun to see how many of the 100 I truly like.
One of the biggest pitfalls of harem series are that the girls usually tend to orbit the main character and, at most, tolerate the presence of the other girls or just flat out fight them. Since Hyakkano makes it clear that Rentaro has the capacity to love all of them, the author does make the tremendous effort to have the girls get to know each other and become very good friends. Entire chapters of just daily life between the 28ish girls hanging out and being friends helps maintain relevancy and not have any 1 girl be left out. It’s only going to get more chaotic from here since we’re going to end up populating that entire fucking roof by number 50.
Hyakkano manages to thread the line between self-aware and being sincere to its love story and goes above and beyond in leveling the playing field for all the girls involved. So far it’s been 5 girls since I’ve been interested in any of them, namely the violence-hungry violinist who I find charming enough but the ones who came after her I haven’t been all that charmed by. I like approximately a third of the girls out of the 27 as of the time of this writing so while not all are hits, I only really outright not-care for the Snufkin expy, the wannabe cat, and the numbers obsessed one.
Lair of the Idle 