Room Mate

I'm a straight male who believes One Room and One Room Second Season are the epitome of great short anime (OK, slight exaggeration but I still love it so much). Seeing how they also made one where all the MCs are Guys, I decided to see what was on the other side.

It is completely different from One Room. One season of One Room is divided into 3 non connected parts with characters getting 4 episodes each. With each episode, it is always the main character that interacts with the viewer. I thought it'd be the same with Room Mate but boy was I wrong.

All the characters share a house and they get to interact with each other and not just the viewer. It's pretty entertaining seeing this interaction. I actually got a few chuckles from it.

Diving in, I already knew who this anime is targetted towards, so I had to keep an open mind. Yes, it was cringey seeing the fanservice after each episode, but if I were a girl I'd totally be ecstatic.

There isn't much of a story or development in Room Mate, but it doesn't need it. This anime isn't made to satiate your thirst for a good story, it's here mostly for a light laugh and some eye candy, and it does it well.

But yeah, after enduring 48 minutes of Male fanservice, I'm just glad I survived it. Also, cheers for first review :3

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How to describe this anime. It would best be said, that if you were really constipated, this is the anime to watch, because holy fuck is this anime shitty.

There is zero plot, and I say zero because the only plot is the owner sends a letter with rules saying the boys can't date you. Surprise, they try to anyway.

The characters are bland, the only remotely relatable character is the glasses guy and he's still terrible. One kids personality is just "climbing" and another one is clearly gay AND a bottom. What am I going to do with that? Nothing.

There's one part in the first episode at the end that shows climbing boy sweaty and moaning in his bed to tease the next episode. Did that get explained? No. Did it come up again? No. Was he sick? NO BECAUSE HE GETS SICK LIKE EPISODE FUCKING 8 FOR 2 MINUTES.

The best part about the anime was the ending transitions because whoever was in charge of doing the ending really had fun you can tell and it was a meme in itself to just watch the transitions and wait to see if there will be dick or ass. But they ruined that in the last episode, the grand finale, the creme de la crop of transitions, the ending, you expected a fantastic transition, ground breaking, stunning, maybe you'll finally see a dick because the anime had NO action at all other than glasses guy being kinda rapey. But guess what? IT ENDS WITH THEM FULLY CLOTHED. Now, I dont give a shit about these characters, but I'm practically insulted, that you would have these boys shirtless in every ending, and the last ending, they're fully clothed?

tl;dr this anime is the equivalent of a horrible ruined orgasm that a dirty hobo gives you in some bushes behind a gas station that you think about for the rest of your life and wonder, "why did I waste my time on that? really?"

also my review is longer than the anime.

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 In short : For people wanting to stare at good looking guys exclusively.

I’m a straight woman.

There, now that this is settled, I can delve in this review without people crying at me that I’m voting it down unfairly because I’m a straight man or something.

First of all, I’d like to point out that I do wish for more equality in terms of fanservice, however, it isn’t at whatever the price. And this short Anime is a perfect example of that.


Story :

And actually I shouldn’t have this category to begin with. Because….it actually fails at delivering the most elemental point of a fiction : a story. I know that’ll be confusing for most, since in the vulgar sense of the term, it is, but in the narratological sense there isn’t. Now, I won’t make a narratology course, but let’s just summaries by saying that there’s a need for a beginning, a middle and an end which are all tightly connected to each other. Connected being the key word of my sentence since the events presented in this show are random events following each other.

Despite that overly catastrophic aspect, I can redeem itself on one aspect : there’s a regular complain lately toward otome games that they take too much time to get the juicy stuff started (in short, they are complaining about the presence of development), so if the producers of this short anime were aware of it, they might have answered those wishes. So while it can be praised for that, it won’t change that the result is a storyless anime.

That said, that “praise” itself could be questioned : those complainers clearly have no idea how writing works, is listening to them a good idea ? Sure, there’s a need to listen to your audience, however, it should be avoided to do it at all cost, there’s a need of balance, of making the difference between the pertinent complains and the others. Sadly enough, if they indeed did it with that in mind, they listened to the wrong people.

Though, who knows ? Quality and success are two things, so maybe it did pay off in the end ?


Characters :

If there isn’t an actual story, there are, at least, characters. Well, they are stereotypes and never delve into anything else. I’d even call them a melting pot, or a 3-in-1, even if it isn’t accurate, why ?

Oh I don’t know…  younger, middle , adult  blond, brown, black  cheerfully childishly cute, the main love interest that you know is going to end with the heroine, nice looking guy that actually is sadistic/arrogant  uncommon job, athletic, geek

You got the picture…they try to touch such a large set of tastes to that they become…well, pretty much nothing. Because you can buy all the colours available in a shop, randomly throwing them at the canvas won’t magically turn it into a painting. You need to actually do something out of it.

In its defence though, and this time it isn’t one I shall question : it is a very short show, and even if it had tried to do something decent, it’d have been hard to achieve it. So I can see in a way why coming up with a set of broad tastes was more their focus.


Art :

When it could have been good at the very least on that aspect, because…truth be told, it’s probably the bishies they only cared about in their production, it is inconsistent. When they are close, most of the time, there’s no issue, when they aren’t, the difference in details is striking to the point of looking amateurish at times.

Well, at the very least, the frames are ok, I didn’t notice baffling misses.

Can’t say the same regarding the colouring. More specifically, the rainbow + blur at the edges effect. I suppose its aim is to make it look “prettier”, but it just unnecessarily dirties the image and it isn’t without reminding me of the filter I put on my very first AMVs when I was twelve years old. Needless to say I realized the amateurishness of such a procedure. The image needs to remain clean and without unnecessary adds.

And most importantly of all : this is a xViewer anime. The “camera” is supposed to be “you”. The “camera” in this is the worst a xViewer show can have because...while it sets it as “you” early on, it’ll randomly move, zoom, jump cut, dezoom, float in the middle of thin air, etc. Oh, no, no, it’s not you having superpowers or something, it’s just that the camera switches from “default” to “you” at random. It can even totally forget “you” (what happened in that bathroom ? did “I” faint ? did “I” leave ? finish your event properly, dammit ! D8< ), basically, it fails at sticking at its most basic element as well. Which begs the question : why choosing that approach when you’re failing at sticking to it for four minutes ?


Sound :

The only thing I’d say is that one must be ready of the awkward silences (no sound effect or music) as this is a xViewer anime, so I might encourage you to talk at your computer, even if just for mockery purposes. There’s nothing worth mentioning aside from that.


Overall :

This is anything but a decent show, and I admit that if I hadn’t mocked the stereotypical dialogues I’d probably have dropped it soon as when I watched it normally I got bored after two minutes. (that’s…quite an achievement I think ?)

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Roommate was one of those guilty pleasure shows for me. Well okay, I don’t exactly like it but I don’t exactly hate it either!
First we start with the story, “you” are going to be living with 3 boys as the manager of the place they live. The story is all about how these characters interact with you and soon fall in love with you. With this anime being geared to a female audience that sounds about right. I see nothing wrong with the story and for 4 minutes per episode you really can’t expect anything more.
Now let's talk about characters, each character has their own personality and hobbies. In character design and personality the characters follow the normal character tropes but they also added in character specific hobbies. Acting, climbing and gaming. These hobbies seemed out of nowhere because they couldn’t develop why the characters are so passionate about what they do. When they tried to explain Takumi’s climbing hobby, he just says it’s relaxing so it doesn’t really make sense as so why climbing (probably just used it as an excuse to show Takumi shirtless and sweating meh)
Character design: you would think that these boys would be more attractive?? If I want an anime to put me in the shoes of a main character I want the guys that fall in love with me to be a super attractive bishi. Of course it’s the inside that matters but it’s an anime trying to fulfill girl’s dreams of hot guys falling for them in a super romantic way! Takumi especially because he looks really good on the anime cover but terrible in the show.
There is nudity in every ED of the show (with a really catchy song), which includes erasing clothes and all that stuff but it’s always above waist. I don’t speak from research or anything but I am am a girl and at least for me I don’t think girls get as excited about nudity than males when seeing butts and boobs. That’s just me but that’s what I expect most of the female population to feel because I don’t want to generalize. I don’t mind the nudity but I can go without it.
Other stuff: I don’t know much about voice acting so I don’t really want to comment on that but It sounded pretty fine to me. Also, The show has a cute logo and title screen, I just really wanted to say that xD

Overall: 5/10
I pointed out so many flaws with this show which kinda confuses me on why I don’t absolutely hate it. Despite all of it’s flaws It is actually to some extent enjoyable and because of that I don’t see the flaws as something that I need to give a lower score for, but rather the anime could have really improved if they did these things. I wouldn’t go to the extent of calling it a bad show which is why I give it a 5 out of 10 (average)

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