--- The premise
The protagonist and his friends are all members of the “food research club”, a useless club where they do nothing but eat food at the expense of their high school’s budget. Enters a girl whom I will refer to as “serious girl”, because who cares about the names of stereotypes. Serious girl is a candidate in the election for the next student council presidency, and she wants to reform the high school and disband all of the useless clubs including the “food research club”. To save his club, the protagonist has no choice but to run as a candidate for the election and win it. But as it turns out, the electoral campaign is just a bad excuse for the usual visual novel crap of learning about various girls’ backgrounds and traumas.
--- High school politics
The whole high school politics thing is completely ridiculous and unbelievable. After a few episodes we are told that the high school is actually its own little nation composed exclusively of students, with the student council being its government, and as such there are elections, electoral campaigns, budgets, manifestos, reforms, bribes, conspiracies and even spies… Goddamn it, this is high school, a place where people aren’t older than 18. On top of that most of the characters don’t act mature at all, they act like children rather than people who are supposed to participate in politics. In such conditions, how can you take this seriously? And yes, it is supposed to be serious, at least most of the time. There are even murder attempts and abductions for political motives. There are some moments where it tries to be satirical, but it just ends up being unfunny.
In their electoral campaign, the “food research club” gets advice from the current student council president. He explains them how campaigning works, which could have been interesting. But it turns out that to win an election you just need pretty girls politely asking guys to vote for you, along with cosplaying and yaoi role-playing in front of horny girls. Media apparatus? Why would we need that?
--- Standard visual novel stuff
This is what the show is actually about. After a few episodes the show starts diving into the girls’ personal problems and traumas, one girl at the time. The vast majority of adaptations of visual novels do that, as they try to glue together all the character-specific arcs (“routes”) in one story. Every character-specific arc finishes when said character’s personal problems have been fixed by the intervention of the protagonist, after some boring flashback involving childhood traumas, childhood promises and the like. But the problem is that since the series is only 12 episodes long, character-specific arcs are rushed. Hard to care about characters when their character arcs are wrapped up in less than two episodes. Hard to care about characters who barely even appear on the screen before the time for their character arc has come.
As in any visual novel, the “comedy” is childish. It is irritating rather than funny. There are also dumb excuses for fan-service like showing panties and thighs (le funny camera angle has arrived), groping boobs and... sniffing armpits.
--- The characters are all stereotypes
… stereotypes such as the “kuudere”, the “tsundere” childhood friend, the serious girl, the not very serious teacher who drinks a lot of beer (how uncharacteristic!), the energetic (energetic meaning annoying) short girl, the gay dude who is constantly sexually harassing the protagonist, et cetera. Yes, the only gay character is a sexual harasser who can’t help but remind that he’s gay (“yaoi sticks”, “I’ll take the bottom” [emphasis on “bottom”, in case you didn’t get the allusion]) and wants to have sexual intercourse with the protagonist every five minutes: “You were so cool I almost came”, “his body already belongs to me”… bruv calm down your hormones. Seriously, there are “jokes” like these in almost every episode, sometimes several times. It’s not fucking funny. It’s just sexual harassment on top of being homophobic since it’s picturing gay people as harassers.
The characters’ motivations? They are dumb. The whole anime is about preventing a useless club from disbandment, so that the club members can keep hanging out and eating food in the club room, when they could be hanging out in the cafeteria or after school like everyone else! How is the viewer supposed to root for them when they have such stupid motives? And why would the teacher help them?
By the way there are also too many characters to remember about. There are eight members in the “food research club” and two of them are clones of each other. Not only this, most characters all look the same, with hair color and haircut being the only way to tell them apart.
The serious girl may be the only decent female character – by decent I mean not utter shit – since she has a reasonable objective, and is not childish or overly cute. But she alone can’t save the show.
--- Average visual novel protagonist
The protagonist has a generic character design seen hundreds of times in recent anime and visual novels. Take any visual novel made in the last ten years, there’s a 90% chance that it’s the same character design. What about his personality then? He’s a visual novel protagonist, what do you expect? He has no charisma, no personality, he is lazy and passive. He does practically nothing on his own, most of the time he is forced by other people to do things. Despite that, all of the girls around him – his teacher included – want his dong, but of course he doesn’t do anything about it. He helps cute girls because he wants to bang them and says that he likes bumping into pretty girls, but he doesn’t notice his childhood friend who is basically throwing herself at him. In short, he is a terrible protagonist that you can only hate.
--- The romance
This anime is an adaptation of a visual novel of the dating simulator type and as such, its main purpose is romance (and the H-scenes, of course!). Since the characters are utter garbage, it comes as no surprise that the romance between these characters is also of low quality. The worst thing is that the plot-writers didn’t even pick the best – or should I say “least worst” – girl and went for the psychologically deranged one instead.
--- Not saved by the production value
Though there aren’t any big face inconsistencies or things like that, the animation isn’t great. I have already mentioned how generic the character designs are. The art-style is not ugly but pretty unoriginal. It reminds me of Katawa Shoujo, you know, that visual novel where you bang disabled girls. The backgrounds look like your typical soulless visual novel backgrounds, but less detailed. Some don’t look good and are very basic. Ugly CGI is also used for cars, machines and moving objects.
On the sound department, it’s even worse. The background music is standard visual novel stuff. It is not very well placed, and doesn’t always fit the situation. The voice-acting is exaggerated. Most female characters have irritating high-pitched voices, making them even more annoying. The opening is generic and deserves to be skipped.
--- Verdict
This is a very bad anime series. The story is standard dating simulator bull-crap mixed with high school politics that you can’t possibly take seriously. The characters are stereotypical and annoying, the protagonist in particular. The romance, which is supposed to be the main purpose of this type of anime, is also of low quality. The sound and animation are very meh. This series is not even entertaining. It belongs to the trash can.
