Another reverse harem time travelling heroine story.
Reverse harem anime are becoming a fair staple of the seasonal line up with a handful of them coming out each year and the time-travelling heroine is starting to be a recurring theme. Meiji Tokyo Renka doesn’t bring a single new idea to the table as we have our standard heroine (meaning one with little personality outside of wanting to help all the guys she meets) getting transported back to the Meiji Era and each of the guys is more or less standard fair.
That doesn’t make this anime necessarily bad, and those who followed my conversations with Arthifis around this will know that we both kind of found it charming and fun, but if you are looking at the vast sea of anime, this one is certainly not a must watch or even one that needs to work its way to the top of your list anytime soon.
For me, I really liked the parts of this anime that dealt with Mei’s gift and the spirits she encountered. It had a kind of spirit of the week feel early on and some episodes threw in a bit of Ghost Whisperer flavour. These supernatural elements did help set Mei a little bit apart from previous heroines, gave the boys genuine problems they could not have overcome without Mei’s assistance, and were also just charming enough stories in their own right.
However, the bits in-between these charming ghost stories were largely filled with the usual kind of fluff of eating, encountering issues with the new time-period, or were tied up with Ougai Mori and Shunzou Hishida who were the two main male characters that Mei interacted with given she was living with them (yeah, we had the wonderful moment where Ougai just declared Mei his finace and they never really do clarify that).
None of these interludes are particularly bad. Some are amusing, some help us learn a bit more about one character or another. No the issue is mostly they are forgettable and even now only a few months later I’m struggling to remember even the names of the other characters or anything particularly noteworthy about the series.
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Visually it is largely unimpressive. Hardly a train wreck or an eye-sore but it just isn’t worth discussing. The opening song is suitable boppy and entertaining (actually almost addictively so) but the overall soundtrack is again, nothing special. That includes Mei’s song about electricity that she spontaneously breaks into during one of the episodes in the later part of the season.
The ending is also largely unsatisfying given the final decisions made by Mei seem incredibly out of character and without purpose and the story doesn’t give any time to justify these.
Basically this anime functions and has potential. The characters are largely fun and cute and each of the events that occur along the way are fun enough, but as an overall package this one sits decidedly on the average side of things. While I don’t regret watching it I’m definitely looking back now and feeling that this series was just kind of filler in between other shows and while there was potential for Meiji Tokyo Renka it never really did much with it.
Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James
- Episode 1: Alert! Time Travelling Heroine Surrounded by Pretty Boys!
- Episodes 1 – 4: Friendly Talks With Arthifis
- Episodes 5 – 9: Friendly Talks With Arthifis
- Episodes 10 – 12: Friendly Talks with Arthifis
- Meiji Tokyo Renka Series Review
- Images from: Meiji Tokyo Renka. Dir. A Daichi. TMS Entertainment. 2019.
Is there a really good time-travel reverse harem? That sounds like a genre I’d like.
I think all the ones I have seen are pretty average to not so great. Last year we had Sengoku Night Blood which in addition to not being a good time-travel reverse harem also threw vampires and werewolves into the mix and was still generic and at absolute best an average kind of story.
Yeah, it just seems like those two genre can’t quite match up together. As they say, “I like catsup and I like ice cream, but I don’t lie catsup on ice cream” 🙂 Thanks.