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The biggest problem with the anime is it pretty quickly stops caring about the premise and just becomes a harem anime. The first few episodes are in childhood and show the lead making an actual effort to become friends with the other characters. Unfortunately, afterwards all these other characters seem entirely relegated to just mooning over the lead and how great she is but without any actual additional effort on her part. All the time the lead is ridiculously dense about seeing other people's feelings for her. She takes the premise of the show seriously - that she's doomed due to being a villain in ... other people's story - even when clearly the show has derailed from the story of the game.

To be clear, I actually LOVE shows where the lead just wins everybody over with the power of friendship. But pretty quickly the show forgets that you have to actually give the lead good dialogue and make them be someone worth being friends with. The lead here spends a lot of time just eating sweets and making other people help her out. She's not unlikeable but she's just an average person, hardly worth 10 people swooning over her.

The show also has a good amount of filler even though it's only 12 episodes long. One episode is entirely about the lead's maidservant and again it's just about how great the lead is and how much the maidservant loves her even though she just comes across like an oblivious rich kid. In the episodes near the end where some actual plot happens the action is interrupted by every character doing flashbacks (in a 12 episode series???) and going on about how great the lead is and how much they love her. One episode involves all the characters' secret desires being revealed and surprise surprise they all love the lead and want to get with her. This does not change any character interactions or mean anything.

In addition, the whole premise that she's a "villain" basically doesn't appear at all. Not even a tiny bit. Even though it couldn't last long I thought there might at least be some humorous mix ups with her trying to be nice and getting misinterpreted or something like that. But it just doesn't come up.

Unfortunately too all the other characters are given basically no chance to be interesting or even have any character traits because they're too busy mooning over the lead. We know little bits about them but they're never even given a chance to act in support of the lead with their own abilities.

I felt there was enough momentum from the first few episodes that I kept watching and then by the end I was really disappointed. The music, OP, ED and OST, is nice and the art is fine to look at. And it is enjoyable in parts. It just overall feels like a bit of a waste.

Overall this show feels weirdly incoherent and not sure what it's trying to be - you'd think from the title it'd focus on the youkai inhabitants of the apartments but in the first 12 episodes only one inseparable pair of the youkai are given a full episode dedicated to their story. In fact, of the 5 youkai that appear in more than 1 episode with any role, 3 are unable to talk and 1 can only say "welcome back".

On its own that's just misleading given the title of the series but the problem is the character work is poor and the plots and emotional ... arc are a bit of a mess. I guess the closest thing to a theme of a series is the main character's maturation but the problem is we never really see him changing - he makes references to how he was "before" yet we're never given a glimpse of how he lived before moving out from his adopted family past their existence so there's no sense of development. At the same time, regardless of what he says he often behaves in weird exaggerated ways that don't match the morals he's supposedly learning. It's not clear what he wants either.

The other characters are also given very little development - even though a few human characters appear in almost every episode, there's not really much difference between most of them. One is hotheaded, one has an impressive aura, but most of the lines could come from any of them. Lots of talking seemingly "deep" things that aren't particularly profound. We don't really get a sense of their lives or anything either.

The plots are... flimsy. Within a day of watching the first 13 episodes I could only remember a couple of them. The last 3 of the first 13 episodes form a particular mini plot arc but it's extremely full of tedious filler dialogue and plot to pad out something that turns out unexciting. One episode is mostly taken up by "researching" whether something is possible that they literally just witnessed happen. There's no real excitement or emotional resonance except in one early episode because the characters are so thin and nothing much happens.

One weird thing I noticed a few times is extreme emotional whiplash - the series is pretty lighthearted but there are a few flashbacks to stories of violent murders and then near instant return to lightheartedness.


In the second half and the problems are basically the same. The youkai play very little role, which is a shame as the designs are cute. The second series revolves around school life but again the new characters are mostly weak and the series long arc around what could vaguely be described as the "antagonist" school characters is really really poor with very little development and with an unbelievably weak resolution. I complained about the moral messages in the first half but there were a few really awful ones here and some that contradicted themselves - early on there's a "don't judge people before knowing their whole story" moral *right next* to the same characters making up a whole story for another character and being very judgemental based on a single negative experience and their tastes in art! Overall the series felt like it wasted potential with a few real plot and dialogue clangers. I just wanted more youkai, mostly.