If you thought that you're having a close resemblance of WotaKoi while watching this show, you're exactly right, though in some good and bad ways. This is mangaka Miyuki Tonogaya's Koori Zokusei Danshi to Cool na Douryou Joshi a.k.a The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague, which is just Wotaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii a.k.a Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku, but fantastical like ... because of how the premise is set up. It's been close to 5 years since WotaKoi dressed up to the 9's towards the anime scene, and people still to this day, gush about its greatness in many a certain way, though not as much right now with how so many seasonal anime are pumped out these days. That said, if you are looking for a close alternative to WotaKoi through watching this show, hear me out before you make a decision.
Adult-casted workplace series are a dime a dozen, but in context to this show, it's considering modern-day classics like WotaKoi, or even as far back as the Working!! a.k.a Wagnaria!! franchise back in the early 2010s. You might say it's just a narrative plot on how these are usually set up with the characters anchoring the series, and I can agree with you on that, though the execution depends on whoever you ask if it's either decent or not. Such is the case of this show here, which features people whose ancestors were spirits. The main couple (as you can tell) are dubbed the Ice Guy and the Cool Female Colleague: the Yuki-Onna a.k.a Snow Woman descendent Himuro and the regular human that is Fuyutsuki, with a calm and collected spirit. Himuro, for better or for worse, shows his feelings through snowstorms / blizzards: the stronger the blizzard, the greater the affection. The both of them were hired by the same company and starting off a new job, and it's the basis of this interaction that Himuro slowly falls in love with the somewhat oblivious woman who loves flowers and cats, and has a cat named Nyamero. You could say that she is a descendent of a cat spirit, and I'd like to believe so that she is just the calm and cool human that she is, just hanging around with the bunch of regular and spirit-descendent humans. Himuro has a younger sister named Yukimin, and she is the idol streamer that has her fanbase as well, though she lives off with her seemingly innocent older brother.
The side cast of the show are also what makes and breaks the series, and I'm just both glad and disappointed that they were not shown much to create the same diversity and effect as WotaKoi does, or maybe it's that I input in myself a modest expectation going into this show. Like the main duo, there are both regular and spirit-descendent humans: the typical Saejima, the playful Fox spirit Komori, the outlandish Phoenix spirit Katori and the manager Otonashi, and not forgetting their department boss and company president, which as you've guessed it, is also a spirit-descendent of the Buddha and the Nurarihyon (yokai). Saejima is a sharp guy, and Komori's the playful woman, so these two are peas in a pod of self-awareness, especially since they are close towards Himuro and Fuyutsuki, with the former being lovestruck whenever Fuyutsuki appreciates him at every corner to let them have their own lovey-dovey scene. For Katori and Otonashi, I love how Katori is this unhinged man shining like a star at everything, owing to his Phoenix descendent traits, while Otonashi is just playing along with his traits like a mother caring for a child. I especially loved how WotaKoi got the side cast formula right the first time, so being full of expectations and looking towards this show for the exact same, I quickly learned that shows like these need the side cast for the series to perform at its best, and though WotaKoi aced the execution, this show was mild on that portion, choosing to bias for the main couple instead. That's not to say that the main couple are uninteresting, because they really are forging the humans, both typical and spirit-descendent together in its own way, which I am totally fine with the interactions of the character cast. But the diversity of the side cast is just as equally important, and somehow this show missed the mark, at least for me. You can love or hate it the same way it's presented here.
The production side is an interesting one to say the least. A collaboration between Zero-G and Liber, it's a decent effort for a rather rom-com like adaptation that has its moments, especially with Himuro's constant blizzarding and snowman-ing of feelings objected towards the people around him. Even more so, the staff are not really that known for their prowess in such a show like this. Director Mankyuu kinda suffered a long drought where he didn't direct anything else other than the iD@LMASTER franchise of SideM and Cinderella Girls, and this was way back before the 2020s. Scriptwriter Tomoko Konparu last worked on last year's Love All Play, before then also suffering the same drought where shows like Nil Admirari no Tenbin and Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi were the rage back in Spring 2018. This is Miyako Kanou's first time doing character design work, before all of her prowess in the animation space as mainly key and more recently directorialship, and it's got a style that I kinda quite like though. Music composer Ruka Kawada helmed shows like the Kiniro Mosaic and Gochuumon franchises a few years back, and you can quite tell that it was definitely geared for a more girlish-centric OST since this manga was made for the Josei a.k.a adult woman demographic. In many a sense, there's not really that much to direct this towards its best, but all the effort here shows that they just need to do a good work, and they did it.
The music here is what I'll give praise to the show about. Takao Sakuma's "Frozen Midnight" for the OP is very catchy, alluring and comforting to the musical senses, and I would say that it's one of the better OPs of the season, in a slew of not a lot of standouts. This is the same for Nowlu's ED Rinaria, which after coming off from last season's "Fuufu Ijou, Koibito Miman.", has struck gold again with a song that's lovely with the tunes, as it is to listen to no end.
Overall, for a show, which Crunchyroll advertises as the "heartwarming workplace where a snowy-white romance blows in like a blizzard", I definitely didn't feel like the descendent of the Cupid that constantly gets my heart love-shot for rom-com shows like these. If anything, the show tries to play it safe since it's coming off from the manga, and this is a safe show where you could just pick it up and relax to, no problems at all. It's just that you have to manage your expectations for this show being a lesser WotaKoi, but yet with the same amount of whimsical fun that only this show has its flex on the docket.
It's a decent chill pill, but hey, you may like it.
