One Room, Hiatari Futsuu, Tenshi-tsuki.

Shintarou Tokumitsu leads an ordinary high school life while living in a studio apartment just for himself. This changes drastically one morning after he finds something strange on his balcony—an angel from Heaven. The innocent and kind girl named Towa was sent to Earth by God to learn more about humans and their way of interacting. It does not take long for her to get attached to Shintarou, who eventually allows her to live with him.

However, the small apartment provides little personal space and privacy, and hiding Towa's real identity from the public proves difficult. As he learns to navigate his new life with Towa, Shintarou's encounters with other girls may only complicate the circumstances.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Towa Main

Toono, Hikaru Japanese

Tokumitsu, Shintarou Main

Umeda, Shuuichirou Japanese

Izumi, Noeru Supporting

Oonishi, Saori Japanese

Kagami, Sayuri Supporting

Ogura, Yui Japanese

Tsutsumi, Tsumugi Supporting

Tamegai, Hana Japanese

Manager Supporting

Koyasu, Takehito Japanese

Tsurumi, Hisui Supporting

Takao, Kanon Japanese

Tokumitsu, Mari Supporting

Kayano, Ai Japanese

Kida, Michiru Supporting

Nabatame, Hitomi Japanese

Aoi Supporting

Hara, Natsuko Japanese

Oonishi, Kenta Director

Nakatani, Nozomi Sound Director

Yasukawa, Shougo Script, Series Composition

Ogura, Yui Theme Song Performance, Theme Song Lyrics

Reviews

Jun 15, 2024

KANLen09

Recommended

Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included. - A rom-com harem with beings of the supernatural kind...that's kinda decent.

In my opinion, if there's a genre that has been overdone for many of its sub-genre creations, it would be the romance genre, right after Isekai/fantasy. And if you need any proof to see why, see the offerings for the upcoming Summer 2024 season. But back to Spring, the genre is still in rest thanks to its lack of offerings (thus far), and this season, from the same author that brought you Fall 2018's rom-com Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu mama. a.k.a As Miss Beelzebub Likes., mangaka matoba is back ... with another one of his/her rom-com works, in the form of the author's latest work: One Room, Hiatari Futsuu, Tenshi-tsuki. a.k.a Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included.

They say all the good and remarkable guys will have all of the ladies flock to them for anything they adore, and this can also happen for guys on the opposite spectrum as well. Case in point, the series's MC Shintarou Tokumitsu, who's the embodiment of the fairly typical and unremarkable high school boy who lives in a Studio Apartment alone and works part-time in a family restaurant for his wages, even though he does receive allowance from his parents. This provides Good Lighting for his home, until an angel descends from Heaven with a mission to learn more about humanity, which scares Shintarou much and forces him to accept the fact to take her into his place since she doesn't have social awareness of her surroundings, hence the "Angel Included" moniker.

As far as rom-coms go, this show will absolutely not win any awards for breaking the harem bank (100 Girlfriends already dominates this aspect much), but I have to give props to author matoba for choosing to target the rom-com genre with a touch of the supernatural to stand out from the rest of the overflated pack. Shintarou is at heart a good-natured boy, and the angel he took in, Towa, is truly the embodiment of what angels look like: the perfect caretaker who knows their master's needs and even goes beyond their natural instincts. And she's not just the only heroine of the series, there're others who are taken in by Shintarou's understanding behaviour, consisting of a tsundere, a yuki-onna, a vampire, and a kappa. All the girls, though having unique quirks on their own, are likable and have affection for Shintarou in one way or another, though deep down he already knows who captured his heart from the very start. This is what will make or break the audience watching this show, from the cuddly feelings to the pure boredom of the "will they, won't they" aspect of any plot semblance.

Everything else about the anime is just fine and nothing to write home about. Okuruto Noboru and in-house director Kenta Oonishi did decent, making the show look as pure and pleasing as it can be, as well as tagging together Yui Ogura's OP and SoundOrion's ED for a casual rom-com experience (though I really like SoundOrion's ED...just at a faster pace and not this slow-moving).

To the observant anime fan, this show is regarded as a work easily lost in the sea of many other contemporaries like it, and though I quite liked this to a good extent, I would only recommend this show if you have absolutely nothing to watch and just want to experience a decent to good time of rest of a standard, typical rom-com that's easy to pick up and hard to put down (provided you don't think much about progression).

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jun 15, 2024

PanzerIV-J

Mixed Feelings

"Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included" is a good overall anime.
However, there is an issue with it. The anime features a female MC with good character development, but it has an overly cringy and bland male MC with an uninteresting personality.

Story-wise, "Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included" has a decent plot involving a clueless angel named Towa and a slightly awkward male MC named Shintarou. The premise of an angel adapting to human life alongside a regular guy has a lot of potential. Towa's innocence and Shintarou's awkwardness could create a compelling dynamic. They pair up decently well, at least theoretically, providing moments of humor ... and charm. However, the big issue is that Shintarou remains overly bland throughout the entire series. He shows almost no maturity and has zero interests besides pleasing Towa by giving her gifts and attention.

A good comparison to this anime is the first season of "Tonikaku Kawaii" (AKA, TONIKAWA: Over The Moon For You), which features a male MC named Nasa who has a well-constructed personality. In "Tonikaku Kawaii," Nasa is shown as intelligent, hardworking, and deeply in love with his wife, Tsukasa. The producers actively show Nasa's beliefs and the reasons behind his actions, making him relatable and engaging. His actions are driven by his values and goals, which are clearly communicated to the audience. In contrast, Shintarou feels like a blank self-insert character with almost no personality. This is probably because the producers were afraid of giving him more depth that could be critiqued. As a result, Shintarou's motivations and actions often feel shallow and unconvincing.

Here's an example to illustrate this: [Tiny Spoiler] In the last episode, Shintarou buys a gift for Towa at a gift shop just because she glanced at it for a moment. This act, meant to be touching, falls flat due to its lack of depth. Instead of showing Shintarou's growth or genuine understanding of Towa, it feels like a forced attempt to create an emotional high point. Shintarou's decision seems driven more by the need for a "wholesome" moment than by any real connection between the characters. Compared to other well-crafted series, where such gestures are based on solid character development, this scene in "Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included" feels like a missed opportunity. It focuses on surface-level interactions and misses the deeper emotional resonance that could have been achieved with better, more thoughtful writing.

🗿 Overall, a tad disappointing and expected a lot more out of this anime, 6.5/10. 🗿

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jun 15, 2024

ZNoteTaku

Not Recommended

I’ve long abandoned the idea that every anime needs to aspire to artistic greatness. To think that they should is to be so consistently setting an impossible bar and inevitably getting disenfranchised, as well as to ignore that sometimes media can, in fact, purely exist for the sake of entertaining or distracting its audience for a brief time. There’s nothing wrong with that – media carries innumerable uses. Although, it does unfortunately mean that the phrase “turn your brain off” has become accepted as a default soundbite to undermine critique of a show that’s simply trying to entertain and, to the person in question, failing ... to even succeed at that level. Media does not need to “make a point” or “be about something” in order to function or even be considered good, but media also does not get a magical get-out-of-jail-free card simply because its aspirations are “lower.” Aiming low is, after all, still aiming and carries the risk of missing.

I bring this up because *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* is a show that dispels any notion of deep storytelling within its first minutes to let its audience know what they’re in for, and still manages to wilt like flowers in a basement with its bar being set so low. With its emphasis on the cute titular angel, the sugar-coated sweetie named Towa comes to Earth in order gain more firsthand knowledge about humanity. But thank goodness that she just so happens to land on the apartment veranda of Tokumitsu Shintarou, who is such a gosh-darned nice guy that he lets her live with him. And while she’s at it, why doesn’t she spruce up his place and cook him his meals? And why stop at just one supernatural creature coming into Tokumitsu’s midst when the show can throw at least another three on top of that as well?

The show’s presumption is that the inclusion of fantastical characters from varying myth or folklore is enough to carry interest. Let’s put aside any of the details concerning the differences between angels, yuki-onna, or any of the other myth creatures that find their way into the series since those are such a given. *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* has its distinctions between characters feel less like distinctions and more akin to reaching into the metaphorical hat and pulling out a character trait to assign them. It’s most evident in the material’s treatment of Towa; her inherent nature as an angel is less of a presence than one would expect, as it only ever manifests in rare moments of attempted comedy or for what is supposed to be tantamount to a big reveal. Instead, Towa’s nauseating adorableness is often trumped by her naivety of the eye-rollingly absurd variety (how else would you explain nearly getting lured by a suspicious man in her first day on Earth to a love hotel despite having studied some Earth behaviors). The other characters do not fair much better in this respect. Any references to their mythological origins are treated as window dressing rather than something that could provide more off-the-beaten-path variety to the show’s cheap vanilla taste. A blizzard being conjured or other such things make for trifles.

Tokumitsu isn’t treated much better either because he is not a person. Not really, anyway. There is virtually nothing about Tokumitsu that would instill any sense of confidence in his ability to provide anything of note within the material. He exists almost exclusively as a blank slate, lacking any singular “thing” aside from his niceness that makes the group of oddball women flock to him like flies to honey. That niceness he has might be a relief in the sense that he’s not acting like a prick and still manages to get a bunch of women to hang around him, but it does not go a long way in making him appear like anything other than an author insert (even though the mangaka Matoba is actually female). The overarching sense that colors Tokumitsu, the other characters, and the scenario as a whole is just that of no effort, pallid personalities that do little more than take up space on the screen.

And that’s the show’s tragedy – there is no effort anywhere to be gleaned here. Whether within the writing itself, the character designs, or the overall aesthetic of the show, *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* does not succeed because it does not try. When it’s not using a phenomenally bland color palette or bare-bones storyboarding, it is constantly recycling or reusing settings and backdrops that have been seen countless times with no attempt to appear different, at least to any degree that anything matters. It does not go ham with its own mythological riches beyond the shallowest ways because it clings to its own moe so tightly. It thus comes to the detriment of essentially everything because everything else HAS to adhere to that cuteness overload. The unintended consequence is, ironically, the absence of anything warm. It all instead has the illusion of warmth, feeling so cold in its seemingly unapologetic and zombie-esque clichés.

I do not blame director Oonishi Kenta or main series writer Yasukawa Shougo for what transpired here – with how equally-unimpressive the original manga is, I doubt that anyone could have taken Matoba’s concept and done anything meaningfully with it. Between this material and *Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu mama,* it seems that Matoba has a fascination with tinkering with notions of mythological characters or creatures to reimagine them as cuteness incarnate. That’s not a concept without merit – in an entertainment age so suffused or overstuffed with irony and attempts at being meta or “meta,” something good is perhaps buried here.

But here’s the thing – good media, regardless of whether it’s trying to entertain or say something profound, does not make itself. Putting a bunch of characters in a room and having them occasionally do a thing or realize something is not, in and of itself, the same as creating intrigue or fun. *Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included* seems to operate under the assumption that its characters simply existing and moving through pre-programmed motions of iyashikei / romantic comedy slice-of-life and the occasional moment of “development” is somehow enough effort to justify its creation and existence. Any such motions are too hollow to matter here. This show is an automaton – soulless and godless no matter how many angels you throw in.

To put it another way, it sucks.

Reviewer’s Rating: 1

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