Perhaps due to my low expectations, I ended up rather enjoying these shorts, finding the episodes to be silly and fun.
But what is Hakata Mentai about?
Uhh, I'm not entirely sure I can describe the premise properly. From what little information I could find, the show is supposedly based on a shopping district in Fukuoka's Hakata district. The main character Pirikarako is some kind of ... fairy ... thing? Who, along with her companions - a red blob and three floating strawberries - goes around and ... does weekly weird stuff ...... Look, the plot doesn't matter okay? I'd no clue what the heck was going on at first, but I found it's easy to move past that and just sit back and enjoy the zany humour. The setup might be strange, but the individual stories are coherent enough to entertain.
Over the course of the series, Hakata Mentai features various food items that I presume the real life Hakata district is well known for. The series can come across as a thinly veiled advert for the local attractions, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I remember when I used to watch traditional TV a long time ago, I often enjoyed some of the adverts shown during the breaks for their creativity and sense of humour ... at least for the first five times or so that I watched them. Well, Hakata Mentai is a bit like those. Most of the entertainment value stems from the amusingly random nature of the show and the often well delivered punchlines at the end of each episode. For sure, some of the episodes are significantly funnier than others - in particular, a few of the episodes in the middle were duds - but with such short episodes, there's barely enough time to be bored before it's over.
The animation quality is about as cheap and static as you would expect for a series with such short episodes. It has a fittingly bright, childish colour palette, but beyond that there's not much more to say here.
Having watched it, I'm a bit surprised by the low ratings garnered by the show. It's true that no sane person's gonna unironically declare this as the epitome of anime, but I personally found it to be a charming, amusing romp. If you've got a few spare minutes, you could do worse than spend it watching an episode of this.
Personal rating: +0.5 (decent).
