Renai Flops

In the near future when technology has significantly advanced, a famous AI TV fortune teller seemingly foresees high school student Asahi Kashiwagi's day with pinpoint accuracy. On his way to school, he encounters Aoi Izumisawa, Bai Mongfa, Karin Istel, Amelia Irving, and Ilya Ilyukhin. Despite meeting them for the first time, Asahi suddenly receives love confessions from all of them at the end of the same day, perfectly aligning with the fortune teller's prediction.

As if that was not enough, Asahi soon learns that these five individuals are actually candidates to become his bride, and they have been invited by his father to live at Asahi's home. Left with no other choice, he reluctantly allows them to stay, resulting in a bawdy turn of events that brightens up his average high school life.

However, as Asahi spends more time with them, forgotten memories gradually resurface. While uncovering the hidden truth, Asahi begins to believe that his fate with these potential partners might be more than just mere coincidence.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Renai Flops was released on Blu-ray in two volumes from January 25, 2023 to March 24, 2023.

The Renai Flops Rajio Oideyo! Asaichi program hosted by the series' voice actors has streamed on the Onsen internet radio station since October 11, 2022.

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Adaptation:

Renai Flops

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Izumisawa, Aoi

Main

Itou, Miku
Japanese

Bai, Mongfa

Main

Kanemoto, Hisako
Japanese

Irving, Amelia

Main

Taketatsu, Ayana
Japanese

Istel, Karin

Main

Kouno, Marika
Japanese

Ilyukhina, Irina

Main

Takahashi, Rie
Japanese

Kashiwagi, Asahi

Main

Oosaka, Ryouta
Japanese

Izawa, Ai

Supporting

Itou, Miku
Japanese

Lovelin

Supporting

Izawa, Shiori
Japanese

Ijuuin, Yoshio

Supporting

Fukuyama, Jun
Japanese

Feynman, Yoshino

Supporting

Fujii, Yukiyo
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Oowada, Tomoyuki

Producer

Tanaka, Shou

Producer

Nishimae, Shuka

Producer

Wada, Takuji

Producer

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Opening Theme

"Love? Reason why!!" by Konomi Suzuki

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Ending Theme

	"Flop Around" by Aoi Izumisawa (Miku Itou), Amelia Irving (Ayana Taketatsu), Ilya Ilyukhin (Rie Takahashi), Mongfa Bai (Hisako Kanemoto), Karin Istel (Marika Kouno) (eps 2-7)
	"Lost in the White" by Miku Itou (eps 8-11)

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Reviews

Dec 28, 2022

Marinate1016

Recommended

Renai flops came out of nowhere and became one of my fave shows of Fall 2022. While the first half follows the usual path of a generic fan-service harem rom com, it becomes something more substantive in the second half and truly won me over.

If you’re someone with a short fuse and low tolerance for non-sense, I can tell you right now Renai Flops won’t be for you. Its first episodes are intentionally trope-y and very generic. But if you’re too quick to drop the show, you’ll miss out on seeing how the show actually deconstructs some of these generic tropes. While the first few ...

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Dec 28, 2022

Flyingsparks1130

Mixed Feelings

Funny

Ahhh another rom-com type show for me to watch and review… How bad could this show be? Renai Flops sure made my heart flop. Not in a good way… for at least the first 6 episodes. We’ll get to that way later…

Before we begin, let me backtrack to the beginning… the very very eye stretching beginning… Renai Flops (at least the first half) is what you get when you put together all the possible rom-com tropes into one show and press copy and paste 1000 times. True Insanity… For example the guy (let’s call him Steve) “falls” down a set of stairs only to “accidentally” ... pounce on an unexpecting girl walking by. Sound familiar? If you do know what I mean, you know what happens next in the story… Oh and of course there is “accidental” groping in this rom-com and I don’t know where to begin with the other crazy shit that I saw here… So original… And yes this is basically copy and paste for the first couple of episodes. Holy shittt… It really was hot shit with no set storyline. I felt like I was drunk watching the show even though I was sober the entire time. Not good… 🙁

It was almost uncanny sort of bad. Too trash to be true... Like the whole show is supposed to be geared towards Steve, a teenage dude going through that rough patch in his adolescence with his hormones. *wink* *wink*. The first half of the show feels engineered like it's supposed to be a fantasy world to help a certain someone escape reality, a certain someone like Steve… Maybe…. Who knows? Do you know because I dunno. Are we humans living in a simulation? Are anime and manga just a figment of our imagination? Yes… Who knows which question I could be answering above? It could be one of them… all of them… none of them…Thiz werlde iz notslddl;fksd’;f’asdadksdd;’
ddsfdlfllk,rsdlvksedlvkadkvldsk………………………………………………..

*Error…* *Error…* Error…*

*Brain Overheating…*

*System Rebooting*

Sorry about that, I had a mental system error there. Had to restart my brain… Basically that’s how abrupt the plot twist hit me when it occured during the show. I won’t tell ya what happened or when it did but oh boy did it change the tone and really gave the show points for creativity and dedication to the storyline. Still very trippy though.

All I can say is that Renai Flops flopped but in a somewhat good way. The show’s slow start and confusing story in the beginning is what turned off the show for many viewers, and I can understand why viewers felt that way. However, real show showed its true colors during the second half, and you MUST watch it all the way through if you decide to pick this one up. The concept of Yin and Yang are everywhere in our world, so you must watch through the painful and bad beginning to enjoy the latter half of this misunderstood title. Balanced.

I’m not saying it's great, it’s not even that good either but it ain’t bad for a rom-com show. 5 out of 10 for me.

*Disclaimer* I have nothing against any Steve or Steve’s in the real world. Steve was the first name I could think of. Using the MC’s real name is boring… Steve is more relatable imo… Sorry in advance if your name is Steve. Anyways, what are you still doing here… Go watch the show… or not… ok bye…

Overall: 5/10

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Dec 28, 2022

KANLen09

Mixed Feelings

Spoiler

Renai a.k.a Love, is the name of the game. Cliché, is the story of the premise and its setting. Plot armour, is the plot of the simulation. And when you add all up together, it becomes a Flop. No, not what it actually stands for (though it is a much prevalent theme in the story itself), but rather, the entire original-made anime felt like a whiplash of emotions, both good and bad enough that it honestly, really isn't even worth the meaning of its given name (though slightly I'll presume). And this guilt trip in Renai Flops a.k.a Love Flops, it will take you through ... layers of dimensions that the human mind can barely understand, yet comprehend, all in the space of 12 underlying generic-but-not episodes that'll boggle the freak out of those who dare watch this show. Spoilers be warned.

Arguably the most generic show of the season at face value, Renai Flops does look and sound what it feels like: a stereotypical romance that compares to the likes of the most akin of rom-coms: Gotoubun no Hanayome a.k.a The Quintessential Quintuplets, only except that this show races to the finish line right in Episode 1, like blazing Speed Racer record time. The main character in question, the unassuming Asahi Kashiwagi, is your typical low-ball male that's honestly nothing to write home about, and within the flashing space of time present, encounters 5 girls that all suddenly lunges towards him, only to confess their love in the most generic of ways of how rom-coms have always done this over the years that it already feels tropey to begin with. Of course, how would you expect the virgin to understand what's going on with all of the womanly madness that is strung like the Red Thread of Fate strewn towards him, and even then, he's not given even a minuscule's worth of time to even digest this illusion that doesn't feel like one at all. As the show settles into a plot that is just like the recently relased Netflix show Romantic Killer, character aspirations are learnt, motivations are heard and their reason for living, while stereotypical, feels like there's heart put into it that I just could not understand how it was able to pull it off so elegantly. And then there's the plot twist that changes EVERYTHING, taking an extra dark turn into psychological horror being the gyaru game harem version of said show. And Oh, My Freaking God, never have I seen such a ballsy move that it got everyone, including me, thinking that it's all gonna warp into a time-space continuum involving actual memories in the coined term of "Flops" a.k.a "FLoating-point Operations Per Second" going into the subterranean to finally put all of "illusion" to rest.

There, see what I did? This is the TL;DR for the show, because why would it use cliché to show us something generic that's only like a clause (or rather, a disclaimer) in the show's terms & conditions, where it is built upon a more sinister path of its origin story, giving birth to such contrived story plots like these, but in a Doki Doki Literature Club a.k.a DDLC-like fashion. It's so overly cliché it's bad, but I've gotta give credit to 1st-time lead series composer Ryo Yasumoto penning this absurd script for this original show, given that it came from the production committee as a collaborated project.

The characters though, they also subvert expectations by initially being the stereotypical cliché character trait, only to be revealed that they're just like the Flops in memories, or more specifically, memory caches that are all birthed and stored in a processor, only to be picked up again when it is refreshed. That being said, Asahi's introduction to the 4 girls plus a woman: the classmate Aoi Izumisawa, the exchange student Amelia Irving, the tomboy Irina Ilyukhina, the foreign teacher Bai Mongfa and the model Karin Istel, certainly gets a bad rap initially when it felt like an overwhelming clusterfish proportions of Asahi's luck coming true with a fortune-telling program on TV determining his compatibility. But as it turns out, it's actually quite nuanced that their personalities begin to shine and take hold of their place towards Asahi's life, save from whatever backstories that all 5 women came from that felt over-the-top with defying levels of logic and belief. And when it all comes together when the central system goes haywire, it all clashes like fireworks: the damning indictment of a world that takes advantage of its growing technology and whatever program that this "simulation" of sorts is meant to bring to the masses, with Asahi being the guinea pig test model aided by his good buddy pal Yoshio Ijuin overseeing his progress to define its version of Japan in a futuristic nature.

Believe me, it sounds like ass, but mark it when I say that as inclusive as it is, it just really works with feelings and emotions running wild, like penguins scuffing up an iceberg to avoid being eaten in water. Like I mentioned, I don't know how this was pulled off so shockingly well that it elevates the anime out of its bad rap as the series progresses, and it certainly earns the mark of a death-defying stunt that's just speechless, that you'll only know how all of this wraps up right at the end of the TRUE route's finish line.

Of all of the directors chosen to lead this original anime, I for sure did not expect Nobuyoshi Nagayama to be in for the taking, given that the last few shows he directed (Uramichi Oniisan, Runway de Waratte a.k.a Smile Down the Runway etc.) was so far away from the diverse expertise, when compared to this show. That being said, as the men of culture studio chosen, Passione hasn't let us down in the recent years, regarding to the shows they adapt that has the ecchi theme, from the likes of Ishuzoku Reviewers a.k.a Interspecies Reviewers, Mieruko-chan and Isekai Meikyuu de Harem wo a.k.a Harem Labyrinth, so it's definitely surprising to see that Renai Flops has some kind of censoring filter that's quite unlike the studio's ethos. It's certainly something that has to be taken into regard of why this the case was initially, only to realize that the story beats is the highlight of the show that it takes precedence over everything. And for that I can understand why it's done quite like so that it soon doesn't become a hindrance to the overall production quality which is astoundingly consistent all the way through.

I'll be frank here: Konomi Suzuki's comeback after what seems to be a rather lengthy year-long hiatus (if talking about any kind of noteworthy show from the likes of last year's Higurashi's remake/reboot and Deep Insanity: The Lost Child), I felt that the once-prolific Re:Zero OST Anisong singer has gradually lost her touch once all the heavy titles were taken away and the concurrent nature of generic ones come in. It's clear that with the stagnating quality of anime that we get now, people like Konomi Suzuki get the short end of the stick if their songs do not fit the mood of the source materials adapted, and even then, songs like her OP here are just mediocre to decent at best. On the ED side of things however, this is easily the most obvious of the show's changing arcs with the 2 ED songs, especially with Miku Itou's 2nd ED song being the most soothing, yet heart-wrenching song ever to grace the show thematically. This is one show where the ED truly matters more than the OP, which actually is a good way to foreshadow future events in the episodes to come without giving too much away. It definitely was a calculated risk, but a good risk paid off in full.

If I can mention ANY kind of pre-warning before dabbing your toes in this show, it's that the 3-episode rule DOES NOT apply here. Forgo reading the show's synopsis wherever you see this (because it spoils the main story plot) and go in blind, and I can promise you that whatever the hell that this show is trying to do, it certainly does to the endeavour of a one-trick pony. It definitely will not win any awards (except for the topmost contrived cliché shows of the year), but it's technological whimsicality will have you feel so much that as much as it starts to get ever so confusing, it pulls you back to where it wants to be: Back to the starting origin point.

Being easily controversial for its take on the rom-com and harem genre, and though it's nothing special, there truly is some entertainment to be had. And so be it, that this love/hate relationship that the show gets from now on, there is one thing for certain: Renai Flops, no matter how good or bad the series was intended to be from the get-go, it certainly isn't a Flop at all.

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Poll: Renai Flops Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) Stark700 - Oct 12, 2022	198 replies	by princessoftrash »» 2 hours ago
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Renai Flops

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Bai, Mongfa

Irving, Amelia

Istel, Karin

Ilyukhina, Irina

Kashiwagi, Asahi

Izawa, Ai

Lovelin

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