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This show is interesting in that it fails in a thought-provoking way (two ways, actually). Fail number one is being in the wrong medium. Hensuki is a confused visual novel which does a good job of highlighting that different mediums require different storytelling devices to work. The first four episodes are essentially a long-ass bait-and-switch sequence of School Days/Doki Doki Literature Club variety (although not even remotely that dramatic). They unfold like a gal-ge script written by a neural network - a bland highschooler MC given a harem of bland archetypes just because, going through a bucket list of bland romcom situations. There is even a male friend advisor - a straight-up date-sim gameplay mechanic. But all this schmaltz is just a way to set up what the MC expects out of his school life - and what he doesn’t get, because each and every girl is actually one of the female pervert archetypes - it was an ecchi comedy all along. And this doesn’t work in an episode-once-a-week show because the audience still has to trudge through a month worth of boredom, supposedly to get to “the good stuff,” but there really is no reason to do that.
Fail number two is not knowing what kind of story you are trying to be. Basically, our generic self-insert is assaulted by multiple Darknesses - but not in a fun way. It is played completely straight, because he’s neither blissfully oblivious, nor chad enough to just roll with it, like you would expect from the two main species of harem protagonists - he’s genuinely dumbfounded and creeped out. And his situation just keeps getting worse. If the show took itself a little bit more seriously, it would’ve been a great psychological horror about a male teenager being harassed by female perverts. However, it insists on being a comedy - which in turn, is not funny because of the way too serious atmosphere. The comedy here follows your basic setup-punchline structure, but it’s a twenty minutes setup for a single punchline per episode.
4/10. If you like the premise, watch OniSuki for literally the same exact show except done right.
