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In writing this review for Arc-V the manga, a comparative discussion of Arc-V the anime is impossible. I will be referring to each of them to make my points.

The first distinction that stands out to me is how differently the manga handles the four dragon wielders from the anime. In the anime, each of the four are manifestations of Z-Arc, separated across the dimension and each using one of his ace dragons as their own. This was in itself not a terrible set-up, but they did one of their characters dirty: Yuri. As the fusion incarnation, Yuri was not very deeply explored, and when ... he was ultimately subsumed into Yuya we never truly got to see the four dimensional characters interact. This is something that the manga remedies: the four characters are all siblings, doting on their youngest brother. The amount of doting was overplayed, but the slow realization of who they were and why they reside in Yuya in this continuity was far more heartbreaking than anything the anime threw at the viewer. Loss and consequences are always an important theme in any YGO story, and the manga really has all the characters experience their own loss in their own way. Yuzu was also handled far better in the manga than in the anime; rather than having three other under-explored dimensional counterparts, Yuzu is the character that holds Yuya together again. The final twist that unveils Yuzu's true relationship to Yuya is also just heartwarming on a level I can't really describe.

The second distinction is the globe-spanning crisis used to compel the characters into action. In the anime, Akaba Leo wanted to unite the dimensions into one, motivated again by loss. We are led to believe that an entire organization willingly follows him and commits genocide on his behalf for this incredibly personal motive cloaked under the shadow of righteousness. In the manga, multiple characters are separately led through regret to the desire to manipulate time using the G.O.D. card. In a review I made on my own blog for Steins;Gate, I noted the power of time travel in narratives that focus on trauma, paralleling the physical ability of the wielder to travel through time with the emotional trauma that locks him into a particular moment in time. For a series about card games, the strength of Yu-Gi-Oh as an entire media franchise has been the way that, through the cards and injecting symbolism into them, each card battle is not simply entertainment - they reveal a great deal of character development. It is this character entertainment that lies at the core of any time-travel story, and for a card game manga, it does a stellar job.

In both these significant departures from the anime, the manga succeeds at reformulating the entire narrative into a much tighter, more compact, yet somehow more emotionally impactful narrative than the anime. What more could you ask for from a story?

I am terrified of men. Rocking off my experience of assault, I had developed a pretty extreme androphobia and as a result don't know how to interact normally with men. The one thing that has made me less scared is how pathetic this MC is and how much he's being framed as an audience stand-in. Like, is his experience really so universal that this show dares to put him as an audience stand-in? He's really even more pathetic than the MCs of many other romantic comedies - I don't think I've really seen one where the character literally jacks off to the mere thought of ... his ex-girlfriend in the aftermath of a breakup. This MC has made me less afraid of men because like, holy shit, do guys like this actually exist???

Story - 1/10
Extremely derivative. There's nothing really to the story, it's just your classic romance anime/game style of storytelling. There are events, flags are set with the characters, and then they're just left in some form of limbo. Limbo for everyone except MC, who seems to be stuck in some Sisyphean hell pingponging endlessly between the women in the show. It's another one of those shows where there is a pretty obvious main heroine that the MC is supposed to be set up with but by virtue of the fact that the MC has to build a harem for unknown reasons (because he's suuuuch a nice guy) none of the tension ever resolves. Maybe the manga is better but hell, I wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at the adaptation.

Art - 6/10
It's just another one of those cute anime. Most of the attention is, obviously, laser-focused onto building the looks of the heroines, with MC's sidekicks looking distinctive but in a very sidekick way. I don't really have much to say because it's just another one of those modern romance flicks with too many bright colours on its palette to be really memorable.

Sound - 11/10 (really 3/10)
Brilliant. I derive half of my enjoyment of this show from the awkward placing of sound cues, like placing badass music and then having the MC stutter out a line of extremely awkward and pathetic speech. Episode 4 was the epitome of this, where he would do something completely lame but the show was desperately trying to get you to think he was being tough and standing up for himself or some shit.

Character - 3/10
MC is hilariously pathetic. The heroines are also one-dimensional in their behaviour towards MC as far as I can tell.

Enjoyment - 710
It's been so long since I found a show that I can genuinely laugh at because of how hilariously bad it is. You can tell that some effort was put into the production of this show, and that's the funny part. Like, they even have A-list voice actresses on this thing! KanoKari goes beyond just any simple derivative harem comedy anime in what I'm going to call the Harem Gap: the gap between how attractive the harem anime wants to convince you the MC is, and how attractive he really is. This show really tops the list on that chart. The funny part is that just going of looks alone, MC really isn't that unattractive (ofc, it's anime), which is the exact same thing that can be said about most incels, which I believe is the original target audience of this show. If I were to properly reflect on this show I would say that at least by the quality of the media that is broadcast to the incel markets Japanese incels are probably less dangerous to interact with than Western incels because they don't really seek to weaponize their inceldom. I don't know man, every single episode is just a rollercoaster ride of confusion and random stray thoughts from trying to picture who exactly this show is supposed to be for and what exactly it's supposed to be for them. Tl;dr it's so bad it's good.

Overall - 4/10
I'm not going to knock it simply because it's a copy of all the harem tropes that already exist in the anime space. I'm not going to knock it because of how funny the show is even though the creators don't intend it to be funny in the way I think it is. I admit I have watched anime for half a decade, basically, and have seen all this before in a billion other slightly reworked formulae. At the end of the day, it's just a bag of potato chips. You open it up, the bag is really empty and there's just enough flavor in the chips to make you want to keep going, and then you throw it away. As somebody who absolutely loves dumpster fire anime, I wish this show would just embrace how much of a dumpster fire it is and go down the path of DomeKano. It's a half-decent cringe-watch for me, but I probably won't remember anything about this show come next season. Except that some men can be less scary and more incredibly pathetic, thanks KanoKari for solving my intractable androphobia and making me feel sad for a lot of people.