Earlier I called this the safest show of the season while talking about how being safe wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. With this show, though, just a few changes could have brought it up a few points, and they’re all to do with the protagonist. As the show went on, it just became more and more obvious that Takahashi was going to be just an aged-up version of your standard sexless harem protagonist, which is even worse when the girls are still high school aged, and his creepiness just stuck out like a sore thumb even though he doesn’t explicitly pursue the girls. He asks them to do a lot of things that wouldn’t be appropriate for any teacher and tries to counsel them with no qualification to do so, and eventually starts referring to them as “demi-chans” (“monster girls”) rather than “demi-humans” or “students”. The show goes into deep detail about the legends behind the monsters and how being monsters affects their quality of life, which is neat, but it just gets dragged down by this weirdly obsessive teacher. Seriously, just giving Takahashi a girlfriend or a wife or having him be female would have added two whole points to my score.
His presence confuses the tone of the show and blurs it between a cute girls doing cute things show and a harem, and it just didn’t work for me. I watched it all the way through and would still recommend it for people who don’t mind these milquetoast weirdos, and I want to say that in this case the strong character building was enough to redeem it, but I just can’t look past him.
5/10. So much potential, totally wasted.
The Arcane Archive 