Akiba Meido Sensou

The innocent Nagomi Wahira has always admired the cute girls serving at maid cafes. Hoping to fulfill her dream of becoming one, she moves to Akihabara to work at the maid cafe Ton Tokoton.

Nagomi's first day seems completely normal—until she has to run an "errand" at a rival maid cafe along with her fellow recruit, the mature Ranko Mannen. There, things quickly go south, and Nagomi soon gets her first taste of Akihabara's violent maid wars. As she watches Ranko calmly battle her way through a horde of gun- and knife-wielding maids, Nagomi realizes that maid cafes are drastically unlike what she had envisioned.

While struggling to reconcile her expectations with the harsh reality she finds herself in, Nagomi searches for the enjoyment she once saw in the lives of maids.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Mannen, Ranko Main

Satou, Rina Japanese

Wahira, Nagomi Main

Kondou, Reina Japanese

Yaegashi, Yasuko Main

Takagaki, Ayahi Japanese

Zoya Supporting

Davidyuk, Jenya Japanese

Yumechi Supporting

Tanaka, Minami Japanese

Shiipon Supporting

Kurosawa, Tomoyo Japanese

Okachimachi Supporting

Hirano, Aya Japanese

Nerura Supporting

Iwami, Manaka Japanese

Manami Supporting

Yurin Japanese

Lion Ace Maid Supporting

Hikasa, Youko Japanese

Sotokawa, Akihiro Producer

Kitazawa, Shiryuu Producer

Takenaka, Nobuhiro Producer

Yao, Di Producer

Reviews

Nov 15, 2024

Airinn

Recommended

I don't watch anime as frequently as I used to, but I really enjoyed this one and I watched all in one day. I really liked the sense of humor and I thank that they do not explain the jokes as animes use to do. Overall, I think it has many interesting turns, funny moments, they know also how to transmit tension. I really liked it. This anime is not as centered in the characters themselves, but in the plot, and I think that is okay. I didn't have much expectatives when I first started it and I feared that it may be cringe but ... it is not. I hope you like it if you give it an opportunity:)

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Dec 23, 2024

Koina-Beach

Mixed Feelings

I found the anime very good and fun, the proposal was different and unique; the op is very good and the editing is incredible, since if I'm not mistaken the music is similar to the music from the time in which the anime takes place; the environment is very good too. But it would be better if there were more episodes and developed more both the background characters and the protagonist herself and used all the potential that night, weapons and e,pregados have to offer. After finishing the anime I felt a little empty, wanting to know more about the world of the anime and ... the characters, their motivations, desires, etc., and how it all actually started.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jun 15, 2024

Mistrals

Not Recommended

I could not get into Akiba Maid War at any point. For a while, I thought this was just the usual ‘comedy I don’t particularly find funny’ kind of watch where the novelty runs through quickly, and I never really care about it but I slap a 5 on it because a joke does land here and there and it’s not really that bad – an anime/10. Those are pretty hard to watch, but there’s nothing really wrong with them, right?

This one… there was one notable character I cared about whatsoever and the show's endgame trampled all over that while undoing the entire conflict/resolution of ... the prior episode and it’s just like… why? Why any of this show? I couldn’t find anything interesting here.

See, it’s my belief that comedy works as a subversion of expectations. It simultaneously needs to make sense to the viewer, and yet catch them off-guard. Akiba Maid War felt like the exact opposite of this, a show with no rules, rhyme, or reason entirely banking on the crazy nonsense factor to entertain and amuse the viewer. There’s no other substance here – it lives or dies on this.

And this backfired completely for me, because there’s just no logic to it – it’s just random noise. Worse yet, this makes it very predictable, because I as the viewer expect nothing but random noise, because the show’s main ‘joke’ tends to be solving its problems with a bunch of random violence and shooting, and because it largely falls into generic trope-y episodic layouts otherwise. From the very first episode, the show reveals its entire hand immediately with the first scene and opening, and then builds that entire first episode towards the “surprise” factor of the maid show actually being a violent mafia show anyways.

Beyond that predictableness, it just feels stupid and inane in a completely disinteresting way. Another crucial thing for comedy is you need to actually ground anything ever in your story. Campy shows fundamentally work by taking their amusingly stupid concepts seriously and playing them straight, and end up making the ways they don’t make sense make a ton of sense. This show spends its time metaphorically elbowing you in the shoulder about it being stupid dumbfuckery every few seconds, never, ever takes its ideas or tone seriously and doesn’t seem to even realize taking a bunch of plot events seriously with this delivery falls flat as a board.

For instance, (removing all the meaningful spoilers that actually make this sequence exponentially dumber within context) one episode has a plot where the characters discuss needing to assassinate the head of a rival gang who’s going to wipe them out, and decide it’s going to be too difficult because that character will be under constant guard. And then, like 10 minutes later, an armed Ranko and Nagomi get her alone with one minion of her's and an ally/close friend of theirs in an alleyway, hold said gang leader at gunpoint, and proceed to... watch her have a 1-on-1 fight with their ally for no fathomable reason before leaving to fight her entire gang next episode. It's as if the show doesn't even pay attention to the words it says when trying to have any semblance of internal logic.

It doesn’t even convey why Nagomi wants to be a maid in this world. I understand that she wants to be a maid from our world where maids are just cutesy and not mobsters, but that’s not the world she lives in. As our resident ‘sane’ person, she explicitly tries to run away from being part of the maid underworld like at least twice. Of course she doesn’t actually do it, because the show needs her around, but why does she choose to be part of this nonsense violence world? Because the show needs her around. It doesn’t stop us from having an episode dedicated to her crisis of faith that doesn’t work emotionally at all because I cannot fathom what this character is thinking (since the show feels the need to play tropes straight without actually putting any of the thought into why it is using tropes or any of the effort into setting up the tropes), but hey.

Did I mention I don’t like Nagomi? I generally don’t like the ‘innocent normal girl in the pile of weird nonsense’ trope anyways, but she was especially excruciating about just having no fucking awareness whatsoever and just creating stupid situations trying to get killed or piss people off. I like her better than the manager, whose joke is that they’re a greedy piece of shit and… yeah that’s the bit I cannot fathom what would be endearing about this character, they literally just annoyed me being a piece of shit. (Give Ayahi Takagaki a better role to work with, I’m begging you.) Ranko was like, alright I guess. Despite always being in a blunt comedy demeanor mode with a haha she’s old and not very moe bit that always fell flat, I would call her background serious bits the only things I felt any understanding/empathy/kinship towards in the entire show. The other characters sure just existed.

Genuinely, Akiba Maid War just felt stupid to me. I can’t even find ideas to like in the concepts because it felt like there was no thought put into any of them as to how to make a story. The writing is stupid, and not in a fun way, a lazy way where it just says a bunch of nonsense and expects me to buy into it when it’s transparently just saying things to subvert things with more nonsense things. Cool, some guy noticed maid in Japanese (メイド) = meido, the word for underworld and thought that’d be a fire “parody”. As to what it was parody of, I couldn’t tell you. After all, a parody by definition makes fun of something or critiques something, and this had nothing to say. When people call something like Zombieland Saga a parody, they’re wrong – it’s just an idol show with a silly premise that proceeds to play idol show beats straight within its silly premise. This was just a gang war show with a silly premise that played everything curved, and so none of the gang war beats actually work – as such, it’s just nothingness.

As you can probably tell by now, I really hated watching this. The only rule and only goal is stupid crazy nonsense, but it’s all not even nonsensical enough to ever grab me in that aspect. I laughed once at the ending out of a sheer ‘what was even the point’ – finally, the show was trolling hard enough that something just felt ridiculous – and half of that got erased by the post-credits immediately anyways. Otherwise, I was just bored and really didn’t want to be here at any point. Like, I was starting other shows because I didn’t want to be here, I took a break from this for a week twice because I didn’t want to be here, and I left the final episode on pause a few minutes in for hours because I just really didn’t wanna be here.

I sat thinking for a good 15 minutes trying to decide my score after I finished. The endgame had made me pretty sure I wanted to give it a 1 (after kinda assuming it’d be more of a 3-4/10 show leading into the endgame), but I also know overly emotional kneejerk responses like that often don’t last. Eventually, what made me punch in the final score was a mental comparison to Guilty Crown – my textbook example of a lifeless show where I just did not care about a single thing and did not feel like a single person writing it wanted to be writing it either. I came up with more things I valued about that show, and if that isn’t a death sentence, I don’t know what is.

1/10. A real apathetic experience, and I’d really like to feel something watching an anime now.

Reviewer’s Rating: 1

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