Engage Kiss

Bayron City, a pioneering metropolis built on a newly discovered energy source, promises every citizen a luxurious and comfortable lifestyle. In reality, young demon exterminator Shuu Ogata's life is far from extravagant. Despite running a private military business, he often struggles to make ends meet due to reckless expenses. Fortunately, Kisara, his demon partner, is more than eager to help Shuu with household matters—albeit a little too forcefully for his comfort.

The two work side by side, taking countermeasures against demon hazards, which stand as the biggest threats to the city. With danger lurking in the shadows, Shuu and Kisara strive to grant the town's safety; however, exterminating the possessed comes with a price unbeknownst to others.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kisara Main

Aizawa, Saya Japanese

Yuugiri, Ayano Main

Lynn Japanese

Holygrail, Sharon Main

Ookubo, Rumi Japanese

Ogata, Shuu Main

Saitou, Souma Japanese

Ogata, Kanna Supporting

Kitou, Akari Japanese

Takuhaigyousha Supporting

Kugimiya, Rie Japanese

Yuugiri, Akino Supporting

Watanabe, Akeno Japanese

Hachisuka, Linhua Supporting

Oonishi, Saori Japanese

Hachisuka, Mikhail Supporting

Oosaka, Ryouta Japanese

Hachisuka, Shenhua Supporting

Uchida, Aya Japanese

Nara, Shunsuke Producer

Tanaka, Tomoya Director

Takadera, Takeshi Sound Director

Sakuma, Takashi Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Sep 24, 2022

Marinate1016

Recommended

While Lycoreco dominated the headlines and got praise for being an A-1 masterclass, I fell in love with the world and characters of Engage Kiss more and think it was the better of the two A-1 anime originals.

Engage Kiss’ very first episode hooked me. Waifus, great action scenes, Grade A hentai quality kisses, it was love at first watch. But it’s not just fanservice that kept me. The story and world are very interesting and remind me quite of bit of Toaru, Strike the blood, etc. with the island city created for research trope. It’s always a major plus for me when there’s an MC ... who isn’t afraid of women and can handle himself competently around them. Shuu is just that type of person and while he may have a bland design, I really enjoyed his personality and banter with the girls. I also loved how despite being a normal human, he doesn’t just sit on the sidelines and is an active participant in the action scenes.

Of course you can’t discuss a harem without the girls. Engage Kiss gives us 3 unique flavours of women to suit a diverse taste palate. The cute pink haired yandere who will do anything to keep her man safe. The blue haired ex gf who is still madly in love with the MC. And the blonde hot nun. While Kisara was pretty annoying to me, the other two waifus are among some of my faves in recent memory. There’s a waifu for everyone here and they’re all very well written. I really enjoyed how the show doesn’t take itself too seriously and allows for some pretty funny moments of jealousy between the girls. Nothing like a good old cat fight.

Speaking of fights, as you’d expect from A-1 as of late, the sakuga in Engage Kiss is pretty impressive. There’s some real talent working on this series behind the scenes and it showed in some of the big set pieces. Although it’s actually quite hard to tell which got more effort, the fight scenes or the kiss scenes.

Engage kiss is my anime of the season and I will definitely miss it. It’s a fun wild ride with great waifus, fights, an interesting story and a really cool and likeable MC. I have absolutely zero complaints with the show. I’ve been pushing this agenda for months and I wish more people would give the show a chance.

If you’re able to sit down and watch things without looking for Beethoven or DaVinci level art in everything, I think you’ll find Engage Kiss to be a blast.

Engage Kiss gets 10 demons out of 10.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Sep 24, 2022

Mcsuper

Mixed Feelings

Funny

Imagine taking a French fry, and putting sugar on it. Imagine getting a bowl of cereal, and pouring orange juice into it. Imagine eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but the jelly was replaced with mayo. Now grab a plate, and put all these foods together and eat it all. Are you utterly confused by what I just said? That's how much I felt confused watching this show. This recipe is what I call the “Engage Kiss”, which was a plate of every trope imaginable in the most nonsensical and dumb ways sometimes, plus a lot of plot points crammed together. Harem, check! Cute ... girls, check! Demons, check! Dumb waifu wars, check! Ecchi, check! Little sister, check! Rip-off Naofumi, check!

Say hello to yet another A-1 Pictures original airing this summer season, and once again, the animation and music did not miss. Everything else though, had its share of frustrating and generic moments. This show really does not start well in my opinion, and because of that, it really lost me for a good chunk of the series, except for a few very good episodes, which made this a passable series overall. If you were wondering which A-1 Pictures original from this season was better, it would easily be Lycoris Recoil. Funny enough, I’d thought for sure it’d be the other way around, but guess I was wrong.

My grading criteria: Story: /25 Art: /10 Music: /10 Characters: /20 Enjoyment /15 Thematic Execution /20

STORY: 9.8/25

To give a quick overview first, this show takes place in Bayron City, a rather futuristic and extravagant looking place that strives to give every citizen a lavish lifestyle. However, for wannabe Shield Hero MC Shuu Ogata, that is not the case. He struggles to make ends meet, and is taken care of by his demon partner, Kisara, who holds down the fort and takes care of chores. These two work side by side along with the military forces to take down demons who pose the biggest threat to the city. In order to gain enough power to defeat these formidable creatures, Shuu and Kisara must kiss for her to turn into a more powerful being. This arrangement comes at a cost for Shuu, and it whittles him down bit by bit throughout the story.

So this seems interesting right? So it seemed, but this show has quite the identity crisis in that instead of having some world building for us to understand how the city works and why the demons are here, it focused a lot of the romance aspects instead, of a lazy deadbeat and his harem who for some reason are smitten with him. To be honest, an exposition dump of why the demons were here would have been better than whatever was presented. In a show like this, you would expect that the romance would come second, and the story come first, but nah, let’s just have girls getting jealous for a big chunk of the show.

There are some good parts about the story, and some emotional bits too, and while the emotional scenes were honestly executed well, if everything was developed properly, it would have hit even harder. Otherwise, the plot is quite ambitious, but because of a lack of world building, nothing felt very significant, it just felt like many things crammed together in an attempt to make a good plot, but felt like a pile of things that didn’t mix well, just very messy.

ART: 8.9/10

The animation is quite worthy of praise. The action is fluid and the character designs are decent, except for Naofumi 2.0. The colour palette also works well. Lots of pinks that give the show its uniqueness.

MUSIC: 8.4/10

The sound is pretty solid too. The OP and ED were both great songs, and the soundtrack fit well in each scene.

CHARACTERS: 9/20

The character development in the show was quite abysmal, because first of all, there was so little backstory, so we had no idea how why all the girls like Shuu, and that made it hard to justify their motives. Kisara was the cute character, and helped Shuu make ends meet, and was also the military’s biggest weapon in countering the demons. Ayano was the more mature character who also played a role in fighting the demons. Some of the supporting cast felt more well developed than the mains honestly, especially Miles, who was Shuu’s caretaker when he was little.

Shuu, while he starts out being extremely frustrating to watch, ends up being a solid character in my opinion, but all his goodness came at a point where I already lost most of my interest in the characters.

ENJOYMENT: 8.7/15

There were good moments in this show, but few and far between. I did enjoy the action sequences too, but not much else. Pretty average throughout.

THEMATIC EXECUTION: 8/20

Like I have mentioned throughout, the lack of world building made a lot of the themes dull, and the plot points insignificant and I just found myself not caring a whole lot. The show attempts to make you feel a wide range of emotions, but it doesn’t work out very well.

OVERALL: 52.8/100

There is some minimal enjoyment to be had here, but there wasn’t a whole lot to enjoy except for the action. If you like waifus, go ahead and give this a try, but the dysfunctional plot had me bored at times, although there were a few great moments in this show. I don’t exactly know what we were served up here, but it ends up just feeling messy and tropey.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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May 15, 2024

BlackCrowGrows

Not Recommended

Funny

"Engage kiss" is what comes out after an anime is adapted from a fucked up story with no get-go.

After watching the first episode one would initially think that this is a erotica bundled with some fucked up sci-fi plot having just to cater the needs of lonely man and their bottom half, and well... it is exactly that. But the thing is that it fails to even do that, i.e the basic purpose for which it is made.

The protagonist of the story is a fucking loser with 0 talent and skills, but he is still able to maintain a harem of women head over ... heels over him just because of his fictional privileges. Not only that, but even the side characters just revolve around the MC and have no self care/ decision making abilities. And on top of that the MC is an asshole and a hypocrite who's basically living controlled by his dick each turn.

The fight scenes and the art being the only good thing about this garbage is what made me to stick around till the end. Otherwise, this is an absolute boring piece of trash not worth even looking.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: Engage Kiss Episode 13 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Sep 24, 2022	133 replies	by SorryDaSlayer »» Mar 13, 6:53 PM
	Poll: Engage Kiss Episode 6 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Aug 6, 2022	101 replies	by rettamon »» Jan 30, 11:58 PM
	Poll: Engage Kiss Episode 7 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Aug 13, 2022	89 replies	by KingOfPneumos »» Jul 6, 2024 5:05 PM
	Poll: Engage Kiss Episode 5 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Jul 30, 2022	136 replies	by KingOfPneumos »» Jul 5, 2024 6:47 AM
	season 2, just a thought (frieren continuation to engage kiss) weeaboo5008 - Jun 10, 2024	4 replies	by Wrongful_ »» Jun 11, 2024 1:42 AM