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, Episode Director, Storyboard

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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Jan 26, 2023

Ionliosite2

Not Recommended

Engage Kiss, also known as Project Engage as the very Japanese Wikipedia page calls it, since it is a mixed-media project that got an anime, a manga and an announced game at the same time, this is definitely not the first time you see something similar to a mixed-media project that works exactly this way, and if you were tuned in for the Fall 2021 season then you should have heard of Tatk Op Destiny, I think I learned that too late. So, for a short TLDR, when you give a semi-interesting plot to an insufferable cast of characters you get what Engage Kiss is.

Shu ... is probably one of the least likable MCs I have seen in a while, when watching him for the first time you can see that he is some kind of lame scrounger guy that everything he does is beg people for favors and apologizing to them while being also extremely poor for making the lowest bets possible in demon hunting which irritates the other demon hunters. But then you discover he is a scrounger that is fine with leaving everything behind including his memories as long as he can know the cause for his parent’s death and to save his sister that he thinks that is still alive due to some dreams he has, doing all of this without caring about the girl that he himself admits to love (even if it doesn’t seem that much, but more about that later) or literally not caring if he remembers anything at all because the thing that powers up Kisara is losing part of his memories.

Also, I wonder if this series can stop for a second to show me how much of a Casanova Shu is really, first we get that Ayano is Shu’s ex-girlfriend and that he lived with her, not long after breaking up with her he got into something with Sharon having sex with her but after dumping (read as: poisoning) her he got Kisara who he named by the name of the first girl he kissed. Also apparently he had sex after drinking and paid the hotel he and the girl stayed in with Ayano’s credit card and probably many more that weren’t mentioned, this series really went through such lengths to mention that he was with any girl on existence. And for some reason girls like Ayano are still crawling on their feet to be with Shu that she goes on her way to have sex with him again because he is just that “awesome” to have girl after girl going for him, I want to say that I feel bad for her but she is the one that is trying to keep going with that no matter how many times Shu disappoints her. No, showing your character having sex doesn’t make him suddenly good or cool, I don’t need his sexual relationships thrown down my throat as if he were a hentai protagonist.

I started watching this series because a friend of mine said “hey, you like Date A Live watch this series, they are similar”, so I decided to take a watch because why not? And by the end of the very first episode I realized that this series is not like Date A Live at all. I don’t want to engage in too much DAL talking, but since it was basically what made me watch this series I’ll make a little point, just take a little comparison to the main character of Date A Live, Shidou and the main character of Engage Kiss, Shu. Shidou is a guy that lives with his sister, they are basically alone since their parents seem to always be busy, he is the one that takes care of domestic labor in the house, his power is to kiss a Spirit and seal their powers, he is a playboy that keeps around his girls to have them happy. Meanwhile with Shu the girls he knows have to do everything for him from cooking, paying his debts, etc and this is not only done from 1 girl but for 2 girls, his contract with Kisara makes it so that she gets stronger with a kiss, he is also a playboy but one who has basically no problem dumping the girls he has been with if he already did his objective with her. Now, I’m not saying that I want every MC to be like Shidou or that he is a masterclass protagonist, but really, he is far better than what I’m watching in Shu.

I think the funniest joke of this series was in episode 12 when they said that Kanna, Shu’s little sister, never matured emotionally past the age of 3 and wants to kill the girls that are around Shu because she was apparently connected to him all this time in his dreams and saw how he had sex with them and that's why she is angry at them, it was definitely hilarious... but then I saw how everyone on screen was dead serious on that, I had to stop the episode for a moment to realize that it was actually 100% serious and that it was sadly funnier than the other jokes this series did.

Now, now, not everything is bad, the part of the story that addressed Miles and Shu’s relationship was pretty good, I think it was nicely done the way they showed the bond between people that are not blood-related but who can have a parental relationship. The animation is also of nice quality with the sakuga going around across the fights, and the kiss scenes are really well done and animated, as I supposed you should expect from a series that has kiss in its name.

Engage Kiss tried to be a normal romcom with action at the beginning, then it tried to be more serious with its plot but it failed miserably doing so by the point that even at the final battle they are making terrible jokes and even the serious stuff being unintentionally funny. The characters alone make me not want to take a look at this series since aside from Shu’s lameness and his harem they were pretty vapid to me, there’s a reason I didn’t even touch the side characters on this review, they might as well not exist and not much changes. Really, the only thing you will get from this series is some eye candy with the cool animation, but at the end of the day this is just a 3 hours commercial for the game that is still waiting its launch at the time of writing this.

Thank you for reading.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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	Poll: Engage Kiss Episode 9 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Aug 27, 2022	94 replies	by CandyXCandy_ »» Oct 17, 2:29 PM
	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