3D Kanojo: Real Girl

For Hikari Tsutsui, life within the two-dimensional realm is much simpler. Socially inept and awkward, he immerses himself in video games and anime, only to be relentlessly ridiculed and ostracized by his classmates. Sharing his misery is Yuuto Itou, his only friend, who wears cat ears and is equally obsessed with the world of games.

After being forced to clean the pool as punishment for arriving late, Tsutsui meets Iroha Igarashi, but he attempts to steer clear of her, as her notoriety precedes her. Brazenly blunt, loathed by female classmates, and infamous for messing around with boys, Tsutsui believes that getting involved with her would cause nothing but problems.

3D Kanojo: Real Girl is a story revolving around these two outcasts—a boy full of emotions he has never experienced before, struggling to lay them bare, and a girl who strives to break him out of his shell.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Igarashi, Iroha Main

Serizawa, Yuu Japanese

Tsutsui, Hikari Main

Uenishi, Teppei Japanese

Itou, Yuuto Supporting

Aoi, Shouta Japanese

Ishino, Arisa Supporting

Tsuda, Minami Japanese

Ayado, Sumie Supporting

Ueda, Reina Japanese

Takanashi, Mitsuya Supporting

Terashima, Takuma Japanese

Tsutsui, Kie Supporting

Tachibana, Yuuko Japanese

Ezomichi Supporting

Kanda, Sayaka Japanese

Tsutsui, Kaoru Supporting

Aoki, Shiki Japanese

Igarashi, Chika Supporting

Kobayashi, Yuusuke Japanese

Ueda, Shinya Producer

Inage, Hiroyuki Producer

Yoshio, Souta Producer

Shindou, Tomohiro Assistant Producer

Reviews

Sep 9, 2024

Ishigami45

Recommended

This anime is my favorite romance anime!

The story is so perfect, with the pace smooth and precise. The protagonist is weak and Otaku, but your development is incredible. This romance isn't for surface persons, that they want only fast script, without signification.

The characters, all it, are incredible. The best friend of protagonist has a good development too. The girlfriend of protagonist is beautiful and... somewhat disrespectful in the beginning.

In resume: This is an anime is very good. I don't know why the persons have both hate for this anime. This is perfect. Don't hear this person with hate, probably they ... don't understand the anime.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jun 6, 2022

Happy_Tan

Mixed Feelings

Average, Average, Average. This anime was SOOOOOO mid. This anime had one
relationship problem after the other.

There was little no moment in this anime where one of the relationships had a chance to actually do something like in a normal relationship. I would only recommend this anime to anyone who either plays a lot of anime style games, or watch anime, only due to the fact the main character is an otaku.

story just explored the events which happened revolving the main character and his friends. I really hoped the couple in the story would have done something more like go on an actual fun ... date. I'm sure something happens in season 2 of this series but in my opinion this season of the anime seemed really boring and overall mid.

If you liked watakoi you will probably like this anime too.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Dec 21, 2022

RebelPanda

Not Recommended

Funny

3D Kanojo: Real Girl is a painful experience. A lazily shat out rom-com that uses cliches and plot contrivances as a crutch to hobble its way through twelve agonizing episodes. Proudly it presents insultingly stereotypical characters that are anything but three-dimensional.

All you need to do is gaze upon this glorious shitfest and it becomes abundantly clear what the show’s main issue is: it’s fucking hideous. The art is a disaster; backgrounds are a mess of fuzzy colors, there’s very little animation, and in an attempt to stay on model the characters hardly change their expressions. All the show has going for its visuals are ... the character designs, and even those are just the same faces mediocrely drawn and in worsening quality as the show progresses.

The love interest, Iroha, has one expression for the majority of the show, pouty sad girl, the main character Tsutsui is more expressive which also means more frequently off-model. From time to time you’ll see characters slide across the frame on motion tweens with no animation whatsoever, making it seem like they go to a school for ghosts. And that's the closest the show came to making me laugh. Stiff character animation is partly to blame for the lazy comedy, but also the directing is so slowly paced that even if the dialogue was good (which it isn’t) there wouldn’t be much to enjoy. Awkward doesn't even begin to describe how the dialogue feels, it's clumsy in a way that’s too unnatural to be believable and too poorly timed to hit with any impact. Sharing some of the blame is the monotonous elevator music that adds nothing but a headache to any scene it's present in.

The moment the opening song starts playing my brain feels like it's going to explode. The singer sounds so depressed like he’s about to shoot himself, I instinctively hit the mute button so I don’t have to contemplate the void while watching 3D fucking Kanojo. The rest of the soundtrack gives me the sensation of my brain slowly swelling from the aneurysm the droning music gives me. The same song with only two piano keys is looped ad nauseam during dramatic scenes. It slowly puts more pressure on my skull until I relieve it by turning the volume off. Do you like the sound of printers on repeat? Well, check out the sick beats on these action scenes because these swooshes and boops will knock your socks off. This exceeds all bounds of low budgeting, it’s just plain and simply lazily made.

3D Kanojo falls flat on its face as a comedy, but there’s still room for resonant drama (spoiler alert it’s a cringy disaster too). A story about two emotionally damaged people sorting through their feelings together is an alluring premise, and with a better writer, it could have been good. It’s not fundamentally flawed, it’s just terribly executed. The characterization relies heavily on cliches, and the character-driven story uses only contrivances to progress. Rarely does character development feel deserved; the story is divided by misunderstandings, a third party drives a rift in the lead pairing, then the conflict is resolved by the end of the chapter rinse and repeat. 3D Kanojo is barely competent because it relies heavily on this formulaic cheap method of telling its story. Even so, a character-driven story is only as good as its characters allow it, but they're trash too.

Tsutsui begins the show as the standard archetypal boy who hates real girls because people look down on him for liking anime… That’s not much of a motivation, but the series had room to flesh him out more. And nothing came from it; he remains a mostly oblivious idiot for the entire series. His only ‘character development’ comes from cheap contrivances that lead him into trouble with his girlfriend then eventually the issues resolve themselves. Instead of subverting the mountain of stereotypes it chooses the cheapest route and gratifies his misogyny by making all of the girls comically cruel to Tsutsui, with the supporting character Ishino to represent the mob of angry cardboard cutouts. Her only excuse for hanging around Tsutsui and his girlfriend is that she’s his childhood friend, yet it doesn’t seem like she has a good reason to be there at all.

Ishino constantly verbally and physically abuses Tsutsui, and he lets it happens because he's a spineless child. Who in their right mind would be friends with this bitch? Ishino is mindlessly in love with the guy who accused Tsutsui of being a pedophile. It's as if she wanted to spite him. But don’t worry, the asshole she's in love with said he was sorry. Even though he ruined Tsutsui's reputation, the asshole is allowed to join their friend group. He even goes on a camping trip with them all. Why can't he just grow a spine and tell this guy to shove it and get lost? I’m not sure what I was missing here, but how can someone go from trying to ruin a person's life to best friends in the next goddamn episode? It’s a suitably moronic resolution for that tire fire of an arc.

Later on in the series, a stereotypical nerdy girl appears to serve as another case of the trope Not Like Other Girls. And of course, she's not allowed to just be an archetype because whenever Tsutsui sees her he accidentally comes onto her, making her fall in love with him. Tsutsui’s obliviousness defies all logic, no human is this much of a bumbling moron. Sadly this is 3D Kanojo and there is no room for logic with all these cliches stuffed in. Of course, there is a plotline dedicated to this misunderstanding and the rift it causes between Iroha and Tsutsui. Lazily written misunderstandings fuel most (if not all) of the drama in this series. You’ll always know how to easily resolve a situation episodes before the characters do, it's frustrating and quickly becomes painful to watch unironically.

Before Tsutsui and Iroha started dating, he sees the Real Girl herself crying alone in public, then proceeds to creepily following her as she runs errands. Eventually, a shop clerk accuses Iroha of stealing, then he takes it as his chance to take off his hood and emerge from the shadows to defend her. Oh, drool… what a hero, this actually impresses her. That’s what their relationship is built on, him being a creepy stalker and she is not like other girls for various shallow reasons. At this point (the first episode) the show has divided itself from reality, the main character is no longer relatable and all of the playing into stereotypes the show has done goes nowhere, there is no subversion. The author of Real Hurl genuinely believes that otakus are creeps and the key to a girl's heart is stalking her until she likes you back, it’s hilariously stupid and borderline gross. Anyone who has worked in retail can tell you if you ever accuse a customer of stealing you will lose your job. The whole scene is stupidly contrived to justify Tsutsui stalking Iroha moments ago. It’s all so she can say to him “wow you are a nice guy I should date stalkers more often!” This is exactly why 3D Kanojo doesn’t even work as cute passive entertainment! It fails at being both a comedy and a drama and is not even enjoyable as passive entertainment.

I have enjoyed plenty of cutesy shoujo anime regardless of trashy writing, Kiss Him Not Me was pretty funny despite the stupid fat joke it was predicated on. There is no part of Real Girl that I found remotely cute or appealing. The main relationship is so codependent yet there’s no actual commentary on codependency. Even though she is the title Real Girl, Iroha has literally no agency in the story. Despite being this tough girl archetype she has so little characterization of her own. She’s pulled around in the story, never allowed to guide its direction. And Tsutsui’s isn’t always the one to drag her around. They even throw in the lowest common denominator "not blood-related" brother to tear her and Tsutsui apart in the final misunderstanding-fueled chapter. There was even some 100% necessary incestual rOmAnTic TeNsiON that I can barely recall because at this far into the series my mind was shutting itself down to protect my sanity.

If you can turn a blind eye to codependency, the main relationship is still disturbing. 3D Kanojo seems content with calling it cute regardless of the creepiness. I had expected at least some discussion about how the main character literally stalks, takes pictures of, and fantasizes about his girlfriend typically while she’s asleep in the same room as him on multiple occasions (the author’s fetish). But no, he’s an otaku so that kind of cute behavior is normal, right?

NO! This kind of stereotype is so moronic that it’s offensive. I take back what I said earlier, otakus deserve better than this. Watch something, anything else. It’s clear the author of Real Girl has never been close to an otaku. She has no idea what they're like. She wrote the main character based on a demographic she doesn't know at all. Tsutsui is an otaku because we’re told he is. He likes some shitty magical girl anime because we’re told it’s good. He's misogynistic because we’re told so, not for any clear reason. He’s a socially inept dimwit, so the characters have to constantly explain his emotions. Tsutsui is so vacuous that constantly we’re stumbling into these unanswered questions like; Why does he like her? What caused him to hate women? What does he even like about anime?

Score Breakdown:
[Story: 2/10] Contrived and idiotic beyond belief.
[Character: 1/10] Cliched, archetypal, thoroughly unlikeable.
[Art: 2/10] A messy disaster, lacking animation.
[Sound: 3/10] Repetitive and uninspired.
[Enjoyment: 1/10] Comparable to being lobotomized.

[Overall Score: 2/10]
3D Kanojo is so mind-numbingly stupid it defies universal logic, I can feel my IQ rapidly decreasing even at this moment just for contemplating the hamfisted story. But not only is it intellectually insulting, but it's also downright offensive to anyone who dares to try and relate to these grotesquely portrayed stereotypical characters. To top it off, the final episode closes on a non-ending halfway into the incest arc with a sequel already in the works. I can hear the mangaka laughing at me all the way from Japan because I hoped I could damn this to the void forever. Well, 3D Kanojo can fucking take the last laugh because I'm sure as hell not going to waste any more brain cells on this nightmare.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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