Anime Review: Osamake: Romcom Where The Childhood Friend Won’t Lose Episode 1

Osamake: Romcom Where The Childhood Friend Won’t Lose

Studio: Doga Kobo

Genre: Comedy Anime, Romance Anime

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Ever watch an anime and mourn how the childhood friend of the main character always ends up getting forgotten in favor of the new hot girl? Well, then this is the anime for you! Suehara Maru is the protagonist of Osamake, and following the trope of other romance anime in this vein, he’s head over heels in love with the school’s resident celebrity, Shirokusa Kachi. When he finds out the girl in question however is dating an older actor (also famous in the world of showbiz), he is devastated… enter Kuroha Shida, his childhood friend with her master plan – get revenge. As it happens, Kuroha is also extremely cute and popular in the school and previously confessed to Suehara, and her plan is simple – pretend they’re dating in order to make Shirokusa jealous. Suehara eventually agrees to this plan, but it’s pretty clear that fake dating his childhood friend is going to be fraught with emotion of its own…

This is the premise for Osamake: Romcom Where The Childhood Friend Won’t Lose and it embraces many of the popular tropes of other anime romantic harem comedies. Because, yes, judging from the opening animation, this is going to end up going down the harem route. Based on a light novel originally, this looks to be a pretty casual show, relying heavily on the comedy and interactions between the characters. The first episode does manage to be reasonably funny and very watchable – but overall though there doesn’t appear to be anything particularly stand-out about the series. It’s not bad at all, but it’s also just rather generic and something that’s been seen before many times. The main protagonist is extremely dramatic, his painful overreactions the main source of the show’s comedic punchlines, but everyone makes a big point of saying how he’s a nice guy (especially when you compare him to most of the other males shown). A reveal towards the end does make his over-the-top actions make a little more sense thankfully, rather than just as an attempt at comedy. Shirokusa Kachi is the typical beauty with the cold exterior, but with a hidden softness. The real star of the show here is Kuroha and she really is the most interesting in the first episode too – flirtatious, teasing, but ultimately rather sweet. Her interactions with Suehara are easily the most interesting and you get the definite impression that Kuroha knows exactly what she wants and will stop at nothing to get it, though this does lead to some rather uncomfortable positions for him. One scene, in particular, felt very over the top, and I actually felt kind of bad for Suehara – Kuro is very clearly taking advantage of him and I feel like if it was the other way around it would raise a lot of red flags.

The anime itself has gorgeous visuals – lots of bright colors and shiny character designs which is fairly common for rom-com series but everyone looks particularly polished in this case. The background music too is pretty good and the opening is typically catchy and bouncy which fits the genre. I really wasn’t a big fan of the main protagonist though, although a reveal towards the end of the episode did reveal a more interesting side of him which I hope will be developed further. He otherwise just seemed rather generic and entitled, and that didn’t really warm me to him overly – his ‘nice guy’ thing just made him come across as quite passive and he converted to Kuroha’s revenge idea extremely easily. Whilst it’s nice to see such a dominant female character in Kuroha, it mostly just sounded like Suehara had little agency in the end, other than in rebuffing her advances. Honestly, I struggled to like many of the characters introduced so far – even Kuroha felt like she could switch so fast between being a sweet kind person to being overly aggressive. There was a nice emotional moment though between her and Suehara after his heartbreak which I felt was really well done and really made their friendship shine.

Osamake is a light romantic comedy series that looks to rely heavily on the ‘fake dating’ trope going forward – I’m not expecting anything particularly ground-breaking in this one but there were some fun moments and some heartwarming ones also.

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