Eromanga Sensei follows the life of young high schooler Masamune, who in his spare time writes light novels. He lives alone with his step sister Sagiri, a shut in who hasn’t left her bedroom in over a year. Because as you’re probably aware the protagonists of these ecchi fanservice-y shows aren’t allowed to have parents for some reason and they’re either living elsewhere or killed off to allow more freedom for the plot to play out without people asking questions about where the adults are.
Anyway back to the story outline. Masamune works with an online artist who go’s by the pen name Eromanga Sensei. They have never met in person but this artist has worked with Masamune on all of his light novels and primarily draws erotic and lewd artworks for him to use in his books. Although things get turned on their head when one day he tunes into one of Eromanga Sensei’s livestreams where he discovers the person who has been drawing his erotic artworks all this time was his younger step sister Sagiri.
Now that plot outline I mentioned above was pretty much all I knew about the series going in. And I thought the show was going to be quite one dimensional and spend the whole time just being dialogue around this idea, involving little besides the lewd drawings and over the top sexual situations. But I was wrong. The stories in the first volume are actually much deeper than I gave this show credit for and to be honest even the ‘sexy’ moments are much tamer than I thought they would be and contain no actual visible nudity. So despite the rating on the cover it’s quite safe to watch for those of you out there that prefer not to have nudity thrown at you left, right and centre like other shows in the same genre do.
The stories in this first volume cross into a number of different genres giving each episode a refreshing almost self-contained sub plot while still progressing the larger overarching story. One minute it’s a competitive Food Wars style battle between two authors then it’s a ghost story investigation episode then it’s a shonen style ‘work to be the very best like no one ever was’ story. This kept me quite interested to see what the next episode would bring to the table because after watching the first episode I was asking myself ‘how are they going to keep this up for 12 episodes?’
Eromanga Sensei also does a good job spending time to develop it’s characters. Or at least get you to know who they are as a person and what they bring to the story. Even though the cover art only depicts Masamune and Sagiri the show seems like it will build to a point where there will be a decent number of core characters. The opening credits of the show features quite a number of different characters so I knew straight away there would be interactions with other people to look forward to.
The show also gives you time to breathe and become comfortable again before throwing a new character into the mix. Spending a couple of episodes with the current cast before moving on and adding in a new person into the story. By the end of this first volume we have 4 core characters that have made multiple appearances and have their own impact on the plot with what I assume to be the 5th being introduced in the final moments of the set.
The characters are far from perfect though. While the overarching story is much better than I had expected it to be, I was a little let down by it’s characters because they all fall into stereotypical anime archetypes that I feel I’ve seen many times before. You have your shy soft spoken girl that act’s shy but has a wild side, the character that acts super strong, bossy and independent but will flip in a second when she needs help and the male lead who tries to keep the peace between all the girls in the show but constantly gets walked all over and gives into their every need. For just about every character in the show you can say ‘oh they’re just like character X from anime Y’.
The near endless mentioning of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ gets extremely awkward the more it’s said throughout the show. And it’s said a lot. Not only by the two characters that actually could use the phrase but a number of the characters call Masamune brother. In the opening episodes of the show and in the trailers it tries to drive home the fact that they aren’t blood related but it doesn’t really make the situation much better whenever it’s said. Especially after some of the situations the two find themselves in.
The home release set contains the first 6 episodes of the series on a single Blu-Ray disc and is a Madman subtitled edition release meaning it doesn’t contain an English dub and is presented in Japanese only with English subtitles. The extra’s on volume 1 include web previews which are the original episode previews for the next episode(s), commercials for the show, and clean versions of the opening and closing theme songs, which I must say are super catchy.
Final Thoughts
Overall I did enjoy the first volume of Eromanga Sensei. I was pleasantly surprised that the core narrative was deeper than I expected it to be, with many of it’s episodes crossing into varied and interesting genre’s. Unfortunately the characters fall into cookie cutter anime tropes when it comes to their personalities but the show does a good job of developing them and getting you familiar with them before introducing new members into the cast. While the fanservice can border on a little too much at times I am interested to see what happens in the second volume and find out if Masamune ever manages to accomplish his dreams.
A Blu-Ray review copy was provided by Madman Entertainment for the purpose of this review.
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7
- + Interesting episode storylines that cross multiple genres
- + Great artwork
- + Characters are introduced at a good pace and given time to develop
- - Characters that do little to break the mould of standard archetypes
- - No matter how you slice it the brother/sister thing is still awkward
