Ojou to Banken-kun

When Isaku Senagaki was five years old, the death of her parents left her to be raised by her yakuza boss grandfather, Tasuke. Now preparing to enter high school, Isaku is determined to start fresh with an honest attempt at having a normal high school experience. All she wants is to be able to make friends and find love without being defined by her connection to the yakuza.

But Isaku's dreams are thwarted when her overprotective caretaker, 26-year-old Keiya Utou, takes it upon himself to enroll in Isaku's school by bribing the school administration. While Isaku yearns for a reciprocated love, she is trapped in a one-sided infatuation with Keiya, who only sees her as the boss's granddaughter he helped raise. Her longing for a normal life becomes a constant battle, and breaking free from her heart's grip is far more challenging than it sounds, as Keiya's overprotectiveness and disregard for her boundaries make it almost impossible to move on.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Utou, Keiya Main

Umehara, Yuuichirou Japanese

Senagaki, Isaku Main

Kitou, Akari Japanese

Tanuki, Mikio Supporting

Enoki, Junya Japanese

Katsuki Supporting

Aoyama, Yoshino Japanese

Senagaki, Tasuke Supporting

Terasoma, Masaki Japanese

Satonaka Supporting

Hasegawa, Ikumi Japanese

Andou Supporting

Ueda, Hitomi Japanese

Harasaki Supporting

Nemoto, Miyari Japanese

Sekiya, Kaori Supporting

Nakahara, Mai Japanese

Tamaru Supporting

Ishiya, Haruki Japanese

Matsui, Yuuko Producer

Itou, Hirofumi Producer

Kurosu, Nobuhiko Producer

Nakata, Hiroya Producer

Reviews

Jul 9, 2024

jesuscristo

Recommended

Funny

This show is quite honestly one of a kind, and I suggest everyone should at least try it.

Let's start with the premise: "A girl comes from a yakuza family and falls in love with her guardian." Okay, so there's many ways to make this work. It could be a heavy drama about grooming and a girl who puts end to the abuse, or it could a self-aware satire where the male romantic interest has just the worst traits of a typical Shoujo male, or they could make the guardian have a modicum of decency so that the focus of the story is the coming-of-age aspect ... of it, you know, the guy rejects her properly and she grows as a person and so and so.

Instead, the story takes the worst direction possile by making it a "standard" romcom about the girl and the guardian falling in love with each other. I can't understate how perfectly awful this is. Every person I have told this to has reacted with either incredulity or some level of disgust. Take, let's say, Spy x Family, Buddy Daddies, or The Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting. Now imagine one of those girls growing up and pursuing a relationship with the adoptive father. That's what happening here. Meanwhile, the original work is being published in a Shoujo magazine -- aimed at teenage girls. On the other hand, the show was wisely chosen to air at 0:30 in the morning, which is at least a deterrent for the youngest watchers.

The writing itself: It is bad. The absolute worst arcs come late into the story, so I won't give too much away. Let's just say some content warnings were missing from the version I watched.

The female main is your run of the mill Shoujo MC whose personality traits are being a bit too sheltered, wanting to be normal in spite of her background, and being in love with someone. The male main is an amalgam of the worst possible aspects of the Shoujo Male. Abusive? Check. Obsessive? Check. Immature? Oh yeah. Being an actual criminal? Well duh. Ah, but maybe he is just a tough guy who doesn't commit an actual represensible crime on screen? Think again. The developments are as dumb as they can possibly be. Starting with the male main trying to pass off as 10 younger than he is while enrolled in the same class as the FMC, as inconspicuous as Mechazawa was in Cromartie High School. There is a plot point that involves underage drinking, which sounds interesting. Problem is, things are solved by the male MC being violent. Womp womp. The opportunities of using Yakuza politics and intrigue are fully wasted. The romance is as toxic (on the guardian's part, at least) as you could imagine. You could pass the plot verbatim as solid parody, but here it is played in full earnestness.

The production quality: Look, Project No.9 is a pretty decent mid-sized studio with distinct visuals. However, this season they decided to put out three full shows at the same time. A Girl and Her Guard Dog was definitely the one they sacrificed whenever they needed time for the other two. There's plain bad art, choppy animation, faulty frames, continuity errors, mismatch with audio, style dissonance within a scene, lazy backgrounds, weirdly paced scenes, recycled animation, extended flashbacks (from previous episodes) and probably more. The direction itself and the pacing of the season as a whole were rather good, if you do care about the story. The voice acting and BGM were of standard quality, some pieces even stand out for being particularly effective.

This is purely speculation, but seeing how the vast majority of the recent works from the studio have a male demo, this was a change of pace that was forced into them, and they didn't spend any extra bit of effort in the show besides what was needed so the episode aired.

The OST: I live for Masayoshi Ooishi and the OP didn't disappoint. The ED is good too. They don't count towards the rating so moving on.

Before going on to the conclusions, I want to say that the ickiness of the plot goes way beyond the age gap. The aspect that makes the story completely reprehensible is that he's her _guardian_. He's been her only family and parental figure since she was six. It's the fact that any romance that could develop between them will be a fundamentally assymetric relationship. This is fetish-tier material.

In conclusion, you should watch this show. This is not an ironic review. The show is horrible and you should watch it. Is it entertaining? absolutely. Just mostly not for the right reasons. My own experience of the show wasn't even mostly hate-watching. The most awful plot beats pass by quickly, so there's not much to feel truly angry at. The enjoyment came from being aware that the plot was so ridiculous, and yet the story moved on, undeterred, seemingly unaware of everything it was doing wrong.

I presume that the main demographic of the show is young girls who already read and watch dozens of bad romcoms concurrently, and older girls who _are_ aware of how depraved the premise itself is, of how awful a human being the male romantic interest is, and enjoy every second of it. If you find yourself in one of these two categories, chances are you already watched the show, and perhaps are considering watching it again. Go ahead. No one's judging.

For the rest, take the show as an educational experience, as a presentation of the most sordid aspects of the Shoujo genre. Or perhaps, as an introspective experience: find yourself interested in the story, wanting to know what happens next, all while knowing you are watching one of the biggest train wrecks in recent anime history.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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Dec 22, 2023

Cherry_Banana

Mixed Feelings

Ok so, the big controversy about this anime is the age gap. Everyone is making a big fuss about it, but I won't get into any of that in this review. I am personally ok with such age gaps and rather enjoy them even; if you're not and are absolutely convinced that it is not ok, just skip over this anime.

Alright, starting this review, I have been excited about this anime since last year and I couldn't really wait to see it because I felt like ugh, finally a classic, typical, shoujo plot. We've been missing those for a really long while now. After having ... finished this anime, I am gonna say that just for the concept and plot, I would've normally given it a 7/10. Regrettably, the poor execution, direction and animation made me downgrade it to a 5. The animation was barely anything professional.

I am cutting this anime some slack while being hard on it at the same time. That is because we don't normally get anime series with such plots and I would very much like to encourage it. I can also imagine that not a lot of money was put into it, which made the overall quality of the anime just about acceptable. There are some animation mistakes, but I am trying to give them a break because of what I've mentioned above.

The ultimate reason it became a 5, is because it seriously could have been much better, and because it didn't live up to its full potential. That affected the enjoyment part of it a bit. HOWEVER, speaking from a shoujo enjoyer perspective, it hit some really nice marks for it. It won't disappoint in terms of romance events and scenes. If you're craving some physical romance instead of the common innocent love that's usually presented in other anime, I would recommend this anime for you.

tl;dr > romance scenes are nice, but production quality falls short. Nonetheless, still enjoyable.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Dec 21, 2023

KANLen09

Not Recommended

A Girl & Her Guard Dog - a case of deja vu from an author who struggles to stand out amongst many similar contemporaries, such that it forces his/her hand to create a derivative that, ironically, becomes so derided from its small community. And don't get me started on the appalling production values just yet.

Meet a mangaka who goes by the pseudonym name Hatsuharu. The context in which the author's works since 2013 have been growing from oneshots to small manga series serving the Shoujo market in the romance genre. But as you know, the romance genre is one of the most popular yet oversaturated ... genres to stand out from, much less the works that only cater to the Shoujo market, which have been far and few in between. And the author, having suffered under a rut of creating short stories, 2016 would be the year that he/she come out with a manga series titled "Mainichi Kiss shite Ii desu ka?" a.k.a "Can I Kiss You Every Day?" That manga exploring childhood friends who force themselves upon one another in a rather pushy relationship would serve as the antithesis to grow into the author's latest manga that has been consistently firing shots of unpleasantry: 2018's Ojou to Banken-kun, which, for better or for worse, is twice the force and quadruple the frustrations, thinking that forced relationships will make for a rather spicy story. If that was the intent of the author, he/she succeeded, but the story itself is quite the dumpster fire of a garbage mess that it is.

Do you remember age-gap relationships, like, say, Summer 2022's Kumichou Musume to Sewagakari a.k.a The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting? That was a show that had a Yakuza family as the setting, between a normal Yakuza right-hand man and the boss's precious child daughter as a means to teach him how to live life the right way (that's not child grooming, by the way). In the context of Ojou no Banken-kun, take that premise and push the age button into high school territory, while incorporating the things that would rile up the Shoujo market: a Yakuza Ikemen with the normal boss's daughter, who just wants to be a typical commoner girl. That's the story of Isaku Senagaki, having been taken care of by her gangster grandfather when her parents died in an accident and, even worse, being shunned by the people around her for being the daughter of a Yakuza boss. Fast forward to high school, and the 15-year-old wants to be free of her Yakuza familial constraints, to live a normal life and bond natural love...except that would have been the case, if not for the Senagakis' young leading subordinate: 26-year-old Keiya Utou, who acts as her overprotective guardian, who sneaks by the way to infiltrate her school to look after her. Talk about forceful melodrama.

Initially, I wanted to cheer on Isaku because she has been pretty shielded for much of her life as the daughter of a Yakuza corporation, barring which her high school life was to be the result of going back to life as per normal, to befriend her classmates, have fun, and find the love of her life outside of the heavy Yazuka doors, even though she doesn't have any friends and is bad at socializing with her serious but shy personality. But Keiya, as the Ikemen guardian, if this kind of Otome Game function (not the Isekai video game kind, but like pure mobage dating games) had existed, say before the turn of the 2020s, it would've garnered the same attention, though not as much of a critical AniManga community like now, especially when the author has developed crude ideas of the relationship, from cheating to pure rape, because Yazuka can do anything within their powers to bend people to their will, women included. Such is the case with Keiya's other Yazuka family rival, Mikio Tanuki, who acts literally like a cunning tanuki a.k.a raccoon, targeting Isaku by playing the bad guy in the rather unkempt relationship between a Yakuza associate and his direct boss's daughter, whom Isaku slowly warms up to but still controls due to Keiya not understanding the fine details of what it means to be in a relationship. It takes two hands to clap, and this is a relationship that will take MORE than two hands to do the same.

Of course, you do not need to tell me the series' Achilles heel, or, should I say, Achilles' HELL. Project No. 9 is a studio that has recently gotten a lot of attention due to its most recent success: this Winter's Otonari no Tenshi-sama a.k.a The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten. But in the process of trying to capitalize on said reputation, the studio has gone and done the near-impossible: produce 3 shows in a season, which is relatively unheard of, the last of which was Liden Films attempting this with Saiyuki Reload: Zeroin, Tribe Nine, and Ryman's Club way back in Winter 2022. Most studios are always limited to a maximum of 2 shows per season, simply due to the fact that production circumstances could break down easily in this day and age, and while I feel that Liden Films is the exception to the rule, Project No. 9 is not the case here. This show, Hikikomari Kyūketsuki no Monmon a.k.a The Vexations of a Shut-In Vampire Princess (which is clearly the studio's best effort this season), and Buta no Liver wa Kanetsu Shiro a.k.a Butareba: The Story of a Man Who Turned into a Pig, suffered from production issues. The sum of the worst production values belongs to this show, as you can tell from the facial figures to the animation, which is objectively worse than subpar garbage. It's so unpleasant to watch because it just looks like ass.

Out of all the complaints I have for this show, the music is the only forgivable outlier to this contraption. Honestly, both Masayoshi Ooishi and Isaku's VA Akari Kitou's OP and ED songs are just TOO good for what the show is worth, and I quite like both songs. If only the same could be said about the rest of the anime...

Objectively, this is undoubtedly one of the worst shows this season; you can throw it into a garbage bin and it doesn't even mind it. From appalling production values to a mangaka's persistence who really wants to push the envelope (and I have no reason to criticize him/her since it's their own work), Ojou to Banken-kun is no mere Shoujo Ikemen romance show; it's just a glorified sum of fantastical ideas made into fiction that does not represent the genre for what it is, even if it does go into uncomfortable nether areas that are boldly addressed.

Just watch some other romance show and wash your eyes off this "Killing Me Softly" gangster-buckling roast fest.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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