Hajimete no Gal

Depending on whether you watch the sub or dub of this show, you may actually enjoy it. To a degree.

Firstly, I love this anime. It has cute moments, nothing particularly aggravating throughout, and if you watched the dub- most of the irritating misdirects are played off into funny moments. Outlandish jokes a few times even, where it really gives the same energy as Ghost Stories.

That said… The pedo jokes, rushed ending, and lack of consistency with romance leave a lot to be desired. I mean, really… Why are these girls just jumping all over him? Why isn’t the main romance interest bothered whatsoever? Why is ... it that this man is absolutely the worst loser of all time and still can’t catch a break when he’s seemingly doing everything in his power…

It’s a train wreck. But for a few laughs, and a happy ending. I’ll take it. I wish there was better, but we’re scraping the barrel. If you like any of it at all by the end of episode 1, you’ll find it okay.

Honestly, I only stuck around for the valley girl accent.

This is the perfect example of a bad show I enjoyed a lot. If you take it at face value, this is a reasonably cute short romance anime. But it suffers from, among many other things, an issue of perspective. We, the audience, can hear every one of Junichi’s thoughts. We hear him being gross and sincere, horny and romantic, stupid and thoughtful.

To us, he’s a fairly well rounded protagonist for the genre. But if you take even a second to think about how other people see him… woof. Junichi spends most of the show just gawking at beautiful women. We may hear him ... say something hilarious and sweet, but the girls around him just see a dude with a massive erection and his tongue fully dangling out of his mouth.

Yukana carries the relationship way too much, which I suppose is the fantasy. It’s a shy guy with basically no charisma rizz up beautiful women for 10 episodes. I was embarrassed for and by Junichi every step of the way. Not to say that I hate him, but it was very clear he was liked because he was the main character, not because of anything he actually did or said.

That was my main gripe but there are many other issues with this show. Mainly, the obscenely disgusting jokes made around underage girls. One character is an out and out pedophile. The show lampshades it by calling him a criminal and other characters consistently say things like “you have to go jail” but it’s just too common of a joke about something so horrendous.

The animation is dated. The plot is predictable. The writing is consistently misogynistic. The fan service is gratuitous. But I kept watching for the few moments where Junichi and Yukana were legitimately cute. It was refreshing to see an anime romance that acknowledges that people have sex drives and desires without just being porn.

This is not a good show. You could say it’s bad. You probably should say it’s bad. But I still liked it.

The only thing I enjoy in this anime is the scene where the boys pretend to be soldiers.

But it's the same as other heroine gal stories where she turns out to be pure even though she dresses like a total *****. The story is very badly written, the reason why the heroine accepts MC is very unreasonable, the development of their relationship sucks, the conflict at the end of the story is also forced (seriously why did they add that douchebag).

Although there are some things that can be enjoyed, there are also many things that's unbearable to watch. But this is what you usually get ... in a title like this, I gave it a low score because there is nothing new to offer in this story. Don't waste your time, there are many more interesting gal titles.