Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen

At the renowned Shuchiin Academy, Miyuki Shirogane and Kaguya Shinomiya are the student body's top representatives. Ranked the top student in the nation and respected by peers and mentors alike, Miyuki serves as the student council president. Alongside him, the vice president Kaguya—eldest daughter of the wealthy Shinomiya family—excels in every field imaginable. They are the envy of the entire student body, regarded as the perfect couple.

However, despite both having already developed feelings for the other, neither are willing to admit them. The first to confess loses, will be looked down upon, and will be considered the lesser. With their honor and pride at stake, Miyuki and Kaguya are both equally determined to be the one to emerge victorious on the battlefield of love!

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Shinomiya, Kaguya Main

Koga, Aoi Japanese

Ishigami, Yuu Main

Suzuki, Ryouta Japanese

Fujiwara, Chika Main

Kohara, Konomi Japanese

Shirogane, Miyuki Main

Furukawa, Makoto Japanese

Hayasaka, Ai Supporting

Hanamori, Yumiri Japanese

Shirogane, Kei Supporting

Suzushiro, Sayumi Japanese

Shirogane, Father Supporting

Koyasu, Takehito Japanese

Narrator Supporting

Aoyama, Yutaka Japanese

Shijou, Maki Supporting

Ichinose, Kana Japanese

Kashiwagi, Nagisa Supporting

Asakura, Momo Japanese

Maeda, Toshihiro Producer

Ishikawa, Tatsuya Producer

Nakashima, Naoto Producer

Hatakeyama, Mamoru Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

May 21, 2025

blackbunshin

Recommended

This thing is just hilarious, that I can assure. The anime is the episodic type: inside one episode, there are "sub-episodes", each one corresponding to a "battle", usually between the main couple. The MCs internal dialogues is hilarious, that kind of overthinking and scheming that's so absurd it gets laughable. It can remind Kakegurui, but like funny and PG-13. Romance stories that are kept alive by miscommunication only is usually frustrating, but this one somehow excels at it, probably because the characters have very exaggerated traits. The only bad part is towards the ends, around episode 10, that it gets sad and static, but that ... soon leads to the climax of the story so it's worth it. Overall, a great romcom!

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Apr 23, 2025

quebracore

Mixed Feelings

Kaguya-sama: Love is War is a barren treatise on an intellect-emotion duality that nullifies itself in a gray zone — a manichaean satire that merely underscores the overall cowardice of its own irresolute arrangement.

It is a pretentious piece that, in trying to appear clever, writes itself into narrative dead ends — only reinforcing its static quality as a story.

It is in this faux wit, this self-mockery, that Kaguya-sama places all its bets on a hysterical comedy that often doesn’t even care for the inner logic of its events — stripping away what little substance the work might carry [a pathetic attempt to justify itself].

Thus, it ... deceives the viewer with an irresistible gala-like charm, stitched together from synthetic fabrics — reinforcing its egocentric self-indulgence, which delights in its own gaze, resting upon an aesthetic bias soaked in circular reasoning.

The characters, far from being dynamic figures, are inert avatars — feeding a narrative that lacks depth, yet maintains an unbreakable nexus.

It is this relational inflexibility that turns Kaguya-sama: Love is War into irony itself: in this ego enchanted by its own reflection, the absurd is staged in the mundane, and unpredictability becomes the predictable.

Wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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Aug 8, 2023

Phasar2022

Not Recommended

Funny

Kaguya: Love is War is the product of training a GPT-3† model on the corpus of anime and manga, then asking it to generate two of the most basic tsundere (Kaguya and Miyuki) characters available and a deredere (Chika) character. These characters can never act like real people or else the only thread holding the plot together, that both Miyuki and Kaguya are too prideful to admit they like the other, would immediately collapse. Chika, effectively an agent of chaos, is Schrödinger's idiot: she is simultaneously an expert and utterly incompetent at reading emotions and superficially dumb while being an expert in many things.

Both Kaguya ... and Miyuki construct scenarios where they can trap the other into confessing their love for them, so the two can date since they are too proud to admit it themselves. Both are clever, scheming, and intelligent, well, supposedly. They concoct situations where every they have conceived every possible outcome, ensuring the other has no room to maneuver. Well, sort of. It's an excellent premise if the characters weren't so generic and the execution hollow.

In an early episode, both Kaguya and Miyuki pretend not to have an umbrella so they can share the other's, a staple of anime romcoms. Since both planned ahead, both pretend not to have an umbrella and now have to trick the other into admitting they have one. Kaguya walks through how Miyuki knew it would rain so he took the train rather than rode his bike, which she knows because she did not see his bike at school. Which, if Miyuki had a modicum of intelligence, would let him know Kaguya looked through the bike rack to trap him, so she too had planned ahead. But rather than have any real battle of wits, so the characters act how we're told they should be, Chika suddenly appears to offer Kaguya her umbrella. We're given a cheap way out of a poorly contrived scenario.

These characters can't act like real people or there wouldn't be a plot. It's at best boring, and for a show revolving around the antics of the two leads, the characters are shallow and generic. It's astounding just how popular this show is for how dull it is.

† GPT-3 is a a machine-learning model that produces realistic output, and can be applied to many things, such as writing code snippets or news articles.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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