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The worst anime I've ever competed. Arifureta is impressively bad. The plot is a contiguous flow of deus ex machina, the characters spontaneously and wildly change personality, and the visual design looks like Sword Art Online but more emo. There's a moment (back half of episode 9) where Arifureta jumps the shark and enters into "so bad it's good" territory (a la "In Another World With My Smartphone"), but it quickly regresses to utter inanity (this spot of glory is what saves Arifureta from the dreaded 1. Characters declare things to be their core motivation (repeatedly, loudly) and then just forget about them entirely when ... inconvenient for the plot. Arifureta is a train wreck from start to finish and the fact that the caboose ended up twisting into a half-decent piece of modern art does little to save it.

For me, this was quite painful to watch. I powered through because I wanted to see how it ended, but I had to pause more than once to get the cringe out of my system before being able to go on.

The most painful thing for me is that the tone of the show is serious, but many silly events occur and they are played completely straight. Almost every character has a ridiculous/exotic backstory, with no justification for why so many unusual people happen to be involved. If it were a silly-themed show this would be fine (see: To Love Ru), but the show's serious theme ... demands some kind of justification for the craziness which just isn't there.

Piled on top of this is a heavy helping of some of the worst puns I've ever heard.


The other major gripe I have with the show is that the writing seems lazy. It pulls lots of Deus Ex Machinas to steer the plot where it wants it to go and conveniently forgets about things when they go against the intended story direction. Some examples:

When in the middle of the series they need a reason for a normal human to be able to take on a squad of alien attack robots, a new character shows up out of the blue and gives the human magical power stickers, with no proceeding explanation of who she is or why she's helping or even WHY MAGIC EXISTS IN THE UNIVERSE (it didn't up to that point).

Another example of this is when they introduce a character with a teleport ability. They have a whole scene where she demonstrates how she can teleport objects up to 50 meters. Then, in the very next scene a bad guy throws a flashbang at her and she just cringes and takes it instead of using the power she just demonstrated to teleport it away, resulting in the bad-guys escaping. If she were caught off-guard and had remorse for her mistake afterwords that would be fine, but she never even notices that teleportation was an option in that situation.

The leader of the good-guys has a multipurpose transmogrifier/organizer/weapon thing which she makes a big deal of pointing out is a weapon, and then despite it being involved in multiple battles throughout the remainder of the series it's never actually used as a weapon; Chekhov's gun is never fired.


It's not entirely bad; the character arcs are decent if predictable and unlike many harems the protagonist manages to avoid being a doofus (although he is a bit oblivious). The references to other SciFi and fantasy shows are a nice touch (including Star Trek, Red Dwarf, I Dream of Jeanie, and Bewitched), and the theme song parodies can be fun.


I would advise my past self against starting this series, as the pain of viewing it was not worth the payoff of seeing the ending. If I was going to do it anyway though, I'd let my past self know that the first two episodes are prolog and very different from the rest of the show.

Kono Naka takes a unique approach to the problem of maintaining dramatic tension in a comedy harem anime. Most series write some kind of socially debilitating trait into either the protagonist or the girls to prevent them from resolving situations in a sane way and allowing for the escalation of increasingly improbable hijinks.

In contrast to this, in Kono Naka has comparatively sane and level characters on both sides. Instead, they build the tension through the mechanism hinted at in the story's title: one of the girls in the harem is secretly the protagonist's sister (and he knows it). Since the protagonist has to get married ... before graduation he's under immense pressure to find a girl he likes (and there are plenty interested in him). Over the course of the series, these two forces push him back and forth between playboy and gynophobe.

It's refreshing because the actions of all the characters are (more or less) relatable; there are no insane characters or total idiots -- you can imagine these events actually taking place.


It's not perfect of course. The anime is composed of three arcs. The first arc is by far the best (4 episodes). The second arc is quite weak (it could be cut without losing anything important). The third and final arc is ok; it picks up where the first arc ended but it's pretty predictable (my guess of the outcome made during episode 1 was validated in episode 12).


To summarize: It's a show with a neat premise and OK execution. It could be better in the middle and the ending is predictable, but if you like harem comedies this is one to watch.