So, one kind of content I’m going to be trucking in here is stuff that I never actually finished for other places. There isn’t a ton of this, but it’s out there, and this pretty-much-finished review of shitty 2011 ecchi anime Maken-Ki is certainly one example of it!

The reason I never put this up on Anilist (where most of my full-length reviews go) is that I didn’t feel good reviewing something I had technically not finished. I dropped the series about halfway through the second season because, while the first one was bad in a kind-of-entertaining way, the second was just basically unwatchable. I was especially annoyed by it because it is possible to do this kind of show decently well (I’ve recently seen Senran Kagura Ninja Flash which I’d argue is much better than this by virtue of having a cast that are actually likable. Related point, I actually reviewed that one). This just ain’t that.

So here’s that original review, un-cut and un-censored! (Why would it be censored? I make no sense sometimes) For your reading uh….pleasure? Major NSFW warning here, by the way.

Maken-ki is no one’s idea of an artistic tour-de-force. One of the few solo productions from studio-within-a-studio Spirits of AiC before being handed off to Xebec a few years later, the harem/ecchi/action/comedy/drama/whatever dropped in 2011 (the followup, 2014) to the excitement of people who watch anime for gratuitous butt shots and not many other folks. Time has not exactly raised its profile, and while it was popular enough in its day to get that second season, and the manga it’s based on is, impressively, still running, Maken-Ki in general is the kind of thing that the layman is unlikely to have heard much about. They are even less likely to have strong opinions on it.

So why review it? Well, to paraphrase another critic, any art made honestly is worth engaging with on some level. To that end, I did go into Maken-Ki intending to give it a fair shake, and the question we have to start out asking is, for what it’s trying to do, does Maken-Ki succeed?

The good news first; the show does at least understand that it’s not going to make a grand statement about anything. Most of the series is content with being pretty low-stakes and you could, being charitable, call it unpretentious–this is not Darling in the FranXX.

But….well, it’s a harem series. Takeru, our protagonist, has some degree of character, which puts him a cut above the worst offenders in the “boring audience stand-in” category, but it’s not much of a character. Mostly, he swings wildly between trying (and usually failing) to play knight in shining armor for every woman he sees, and being brainlessly perverted. If those seem at odds with each other, they’re twice as jarring in the show itself as they may sound on paper. The less said about Usui, the only other male character of note, the better.

The girls by contrast are a bit better off. While they’re still definitely mostly pretty cliche character archetypes, they’re more colorful and likable ones. While there is a definite overtone of “pick your favorite and pre-order the figure, Otaku-san” to the proceedings, there is still a good amount of variety here. The female lead, Haruko, is the doting sisterly childhood friend type. There’s the enthusiastically lovestruck Inaho, a twintailed tsundere (Himegami), a redheaded tomboy (Azuki), and on and on. The sheer size of the cast means you’re going to find someone you at least like seeing on-screen. Personally, I enjoyed Inaho’s particular combination of “extremely sincere” and “dumb enough to be fooled into thinking a stuffed doll is the object of her affections”.

Their character designs are distinctive and colorful too, if definitely indicative of their origins in a manga from 2007.

Tonally, Maken-Ki is definitely at its best when it’s operating in dolty comedy mode. The laughs here are hardly fresh jokes, but they’re mostly the sort of low-stakes fun a show like this can specialize in without ever feeling too stale. The main misfires here are when the series fails to respect the conventions of its own genre–there’s a little Slapstick Karma going on here; a character can act like an ass to another if they’re immediately punished, but sometimes the show will just have the victim break down crying instead, which is no fun for either the character or the audience.

There’s also the show making the mistake of thinking that pointing out its own use of cliches constitutes doing something interesting with them, which simply isn’t true, partially neutering even this relatively modest strength.

Its greatest asset though is probably actually its action scenes. As a rule; they’re fun, flashy, well-animated, and competently-directed. It’s a shame then that they don’t constitute much of the series.

When Maken-Ki is not at its best, it sometimes has the arrogance to assume it can pull off any sort of seriousness, which it absolutely can’t. Attempts at the sort of dramatic gravitas that defines other action shows come across as comical because of their close proximity to the gags. Attempts at relationship drama; be it bittersweet longing or direct heart-to-heart-ness are downright offputting. Maken-Ki just does not have those sorts of chops. Likewise, when it tries to establish some broader lore and history for its setting, it’s hard to care and very easy to just tune out. These elements aren’t things that inherently can’t work together, it’s just that Maken-Ki is not well-written enough to let them.

Some episodes, especially in the second season, abandon all of this pretense entirely, basically reducing the show to softcore porn with a comedic or action-y backdrop tone. This development makes the show feel more honest, certainly, but it’s not really any better for it. Some episodes later in the show’s run truly seem like little more than an effort to see how many harem cliches you can cram in a single 12-episode cour. 

The show, depressingly, seems to actually understand that something is off about all this, but not what. Several minor villains are grody, gropey otaku stereotypes who use their powers to inflict perverted situations on the female cast. It’s not clear if Maken-Ki thinks this framing is somehow clever or if it excuses what it’s doing fanservice-wise, but it’s largely just dull and gross all around.

These all belie a bigger problem, which is that Maken-Ki does not seem to have a good grasp on who, other than maybe its original author, any of this is actually for. Its limited strengths actively work against each other. If you’re here for lighthearted fun, the plot gets in the way. If you actually care about the stabs at deeper storytelling going on, the Plot gets in the way. If you’re just here for the cheesecake, everything else gets in the way. The series has one of the archetypal problems of a mediocre anime–it tries to have something for everyone, and, consequently, pleases nobody.

At the end of the day there really just isn’t much to this series. If all you need to get you through twelve hours is female nudity and the occasional bit of nice animation, you’ll be fully satisfied. Otherwise? There wasn’t a ton of reason to watch Maken-Ki when it was new, and there certainly isn’t much of one nowadays.