Why Nisekoi works as a harem anime?

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Nisekoi – Generic and Cliched but wildly entertaining.

Hey guys. I’ve been wanting to talk about Nisekoi for a long time and this post has been in my drafts for literally 2 years. But now I can finally post it. This is basically going to be a short noncomprehensive review of Nisekoi.

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Nisekoi is pretty popular on the anime side of things especially for rom-coms. It was one of the first anime I watched and one of my favorites. Nisekoi is a story of childhood promises and high school romances. Ever since it’s original anime release in 2014, there’s always been a fairly large amount of hype and waifu wars around Nisekoi. Now Nisekoi was not innovative, it’s your generic rom-com with a harem but it achieved everything it aimed for. It’s one of those shows that I don’t know what to feel about, with predictable plot lines to the same old harem, but it’s execution is splendid.

Nisekoi is amazing because it is nothing more than a fun, generic harem with great animation(as Shaft always does) that enables awesome waifu wars. I know that some people would be like what’s s fun in watching a anime with no literal plot but sometimes it’s just fun to just watch stupid waifu wars. And waifu wars are not the only thing great about it – Nisekoi has great comedy pacing(especially in the first season) and the unique characters.

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Now coming onto the harem part. The biggest problem with harem is that 80% of the time the MC just attracts girls for no reason. No special quality, no nothing. The girls just fall in love with him for some reason. And too often it feels like the girls are also written to just fulfill some cliché categories such as a tsunderes, childhood friends, a tomboy and etc. Most times it just feels like a congestion of different stories at a time due to different role of the girls in harem. And the main thing harem is added is to delay the story. Whenever you feel like that two characters realize their love, an third character jumps in to interrupt it. Now as a love triangle, it’s fine but when it comes to harem – they just keep milking out the story which could’ve ended in a few episodes.

I have seen many a harem animes that doesn’t take the time to actually consider its quality as a story — a main character that’s a generic nice boy, generic heroines that all follow the stereotypical archetypes such as falling for the MC after witnessing his good side. I want to give the genre a chance, because I do think something innovative could be achieved with it but so far I have not seen anything like that except for a few ones. Eg: Nisekoi, The world god only knows, yamada-kun and the seven witches, love hina, rosario+vampire and ichigo 100%.

The reason why Nisekoi stand out among the list is because of it’s popularity. Out of all the anime I mentioned, it is probably the most generic one with no new addition to plot but it still has won people’s hearts. And I believe that the thing that helped them stand out is the excellent production – the great animation(especially the expressions and body language), style, soundtrack, voice acting and thing I found different was the consistency. Each episode had amazing quality.

Nisekoi seems to be an anime I can’t help but like even though it has its flaws, it’s obviously been popular and done well enough to earn a 2nd season, so I can’t be the only one who feels that it really worked as a harem. Despite its problems, it worked exceptionally good to this popular to date even among harem haters because its strengths make it something that is at the very least, enjoyable. It does not have that interesting of a premise, or really well-written characters or a unique twist(except its ending was not much of a twist) but it is damn enjoyable.

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Now onto the waifu wars. As we all know Chitoge wins at the last even though Onodera was the best girl, according to most polls. But the story was set up from the start to have Chitoge win. The one shot that appeared before the original manga already had them like each other, so Onodera never had even a remote chance to win. That can also be seen with the character development of Onodera, she barely has any personality other than she like Raku and cooking while on the other hand Chitoge went from a full on Tsundere to liking Raku with several character development stages. Ngl, I was rooting for Onodera all the time but as time went on, I started liking Chitoge.

The fact that Nisekoi’s so generic is actually really important to bringing the hype, because nobody is conflicted about who their “best girl” is. If every character was well-developed, then there would be a argument on best girls but with cute pictures and personal opinions to back ourselves up, it’s fun to just lay back and enjoy the show.

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There are a few recent harem that were pretty decent – Date a Live, saekano, Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki, Quintessential Quintuplets but does not compare to Nisekoi. Anyway, as one of my first animes I have a slight bias towards liking it but believe me it does have a world wide recognition as a good harem anime.

In conclusion, Nisekoi is awesome. Watch it.

Thanks for reading.