Love Flops Complete Collection Review

In Love Flops, we’re introduced to a near-future world where AI has become society’s cornerstone – news, weather and train timetables are now reported by AI avatars, autonomous cars are the norm, and the fortune tellers you used to treat as a joke are scarily accurate. With his birthday chosen for that day’s fortune, high schooler Asahi Kashiwagi is presented with a list of words that supposedly hint at lucky situations, but as he walks to school, they all turn into humiliating and embarrassing encounters with a variety of strange girls. When he arrives at school late, he is surprised to see that all those girls have joined his class as transfer students, and the woman that fell asleep on him on the train is now his homeroom teacher. What’s stranger still is that they all suddenly start confessing their love to him! Something seems off with the whole situation, but he can’t figure out why that is, nor why he seems to have mild amnesia. Nevertheless, these girls remind him oddly of someone he shouldn’t have forgotten, and he’s going to have to romance them all if he wants to uncover the truth.

It seems quite rare we get anime original series these days with isekai adaptations continuing to rule the roost, so Love Flops is quite welcome even if it is a little bit weird and hard to get into.

The initial setup is an ecchi harem scenario, where you’ve got these five luscious ladies all vying for Asahi’s attention. It’s half lucky pervert and half wholesome rom com as it flip-flops between Asahi getting boobs thrust in his face or being found in a compromising situation with his nether regions out, to sweeter moments where he actually connects with each of the girls. There are some funny moments in here, but a lot of this is stuff you’ve seen a million times before, and it’s all highly derivative to the point where it’s directly referencing other shows.

The first couple of episodes are perhaps the hardest to get through as it’s where the ecchi stuff is very in your face and it’s very easy to toss it into the fire as ecchi trash number one million and one. Yet when it actually starts investing in its characters, like in the latter half of Episode 3, it suddenly flips a switch and becomes a surprisingly decent romance show where you can see characters bond and try to help each other past their shortcomings. Like here we see Amelia (who like most of the other girls is a foreigner) struggle with learning Japanese and Asahi starts helping her out, no questions asked. Sure, Asahi might be the light touch, self-insert kind of protagonist, but even if he gets into some perverted situations, he still comes off as a sweet and genuine guy.

Of course, you can’t just show Asahi being nice all the time, so from here we move to the typical format of giving each of the main girls an episode or so to make a statement on the show. I’m thankful that the show has already established a more science fantasy setting as the next few episodes are just all over the place as it tries to shove Asahi into some bizarre and outlandish situations, each paired with its own kink. How about shibari with a muscled robotic mobster? Or hordes of giant castration devices flying through the sky?

Despite how weird these situations may seem, they still offer up some entertaining episodes or character-building moments. The former for example turns into a solid action set piece with teacher Mongfa as the star, while the latter offers up some saucy magical girl hijinks that help Karin understand that sex isn’t the be-all and end-all of a relationship.

Each scenario works surprisingly well in rounding off the characters and helping you discovering who they really are. They do follow standard tropes, but I found the writing good enough to make you want to believe in each individual character, which becomes key towards the end of the series.

Mongfa I probably liked the most as underneath her initial ditzy teacher vibe is a strong and mature woman who knows what advice to give to people at the right time. Amelia is the tsundere who likes to throw around a lot of bravado but is sweet and hardworking. Karin is the loudmouth, horny chatterbox who hides her naivety and immaturity behind dirty jokes. Irina has some major daddy issues where she dresses and behaves like a boy to please him, while Aoi is the silent but deadly yandere.

And it’s Aoi that really is the dark horse as she triggers a seismic shift in the series that turns it from a middling ecchi romantic comedy into a more nuanced science fiction piece around the dangers of AI, because yes, we are touching on the topic of the day!

It’s there right from the start so the twist isn’t that much of a surprise as you’ve always got the feeling that something is off, yet I quite like the way this was handled as the rug is pulled out from underneath both you and the characters. It’s hard to go into this much without spoiling the entirety of the twist and the plot for the second half of the show, but it massively transforms it to the point where this could have been a very effective discussion on one of the most hotly debated things this in technology this decade. Yet its ecchi origins make it fall short of the mark, and it needed a bit more setup in advance to let you know this was the direction it was going in.

I still felt rewarded here though, as it does well on pulling on the heartstrings and getting all the emotions out in the open as Asahi faces losing the connections he has made with not only these girls but also the one he was truly searching for. The tears flow and it gets a bit soppy, but there’s a lot of good messaging in here about moving on and striving for the future, even after a traumatic event.

My only nitpick really is that it doesn’t fully commit to what it’s trying to say and cops out at the ending. It’s a happy one, for sure, but when it had just resolved both itself and Asahi to move on, it drags him back forcefully into the show’s original harem setup and it leaves everything feeling a bit cheap.

Love Flops is animated by Passione and directed by Nobuyoshi Nagayama (Happy Sugar Life, Smile Down the Runway), and has some decent visuals with a cute and colourful art style. The setting is fairly limited and doesn’t branch out too much between Asahi’s home, the city and the school, but they all paint a picture of idyllic and comfortable city life. The second half of the show gets a little more ambitious but it knows just how much it can handle, doing just enough to convey what’s going on. As is par the course for a harem show, male character designs are rather bland and generic (apart from our big cyborg mafia boss) while the female characters get the most attention with strong designs that are distinct and easy to pick out, each reflecting their personality in both design and signature colour.

The series’ score is composed by Kenichiro Suehiro and it offers a fairly decent soundtrack for the show, getting across the tone of scenes quite well, from funny to seductive to tense. I do like how the show switches up its ending theme based on the events in the show; the fun and flirty “Flops Around” punctuates the comedic first half, sung by all the main female cast members, but when the plot twist happens, we get an instrumental version of that before it changes in the following episode to “lost in the white” a ballad full of sorrow and reminiscence sung by Aoi’s voice actress, Miku Ito.

Speaking of voice acting, the Japanese side of things comes off really well with some accomplished talent taking the reins here like Ayana Taketatsu (Azusa in K-On!, Suguha in Sword Art Online) as Amelia, the aforementioned Miku Ito (Kokoro in BanG Dream!, Miku in The Quintessential Quintuplets)  as Aoi and Ai, and Ryota Osaka (Tanikaze in Knights of Sidonia, Stan in The Devil is a Part-Timer) as Asahi. In comparison with the English dub it’s a bit harder to pick out the girls’ individual personalities just by voice  and there are some minor dialogue changes to fit the mouth flaps or add extra context (e.g. “Help me with breakfast” becomes “Help me with breakfast, I need a hand”) but it’s still a fine way to watch the show. You’ll notice familiar names from other Sentai dubs like Natalie Rial (Chained Soldier, Call of the Night) who plays Aoi or Juliet Simmons (Assasin’s Pride, Made in Abyss) who plays Irina.

Love Flops is brought to us via MVM as a standard edition Blu-ray set featuring all 12 episodes of the series in both English and Japanese with English subtitles. The subtitles here read fine with no issues to note. On the second disc you’ll find episode previews, the original promotional video for the series and clean opening and closing animations.

While it’s initially difficult to get into and its first half is a bit all over the place, I was surprised to find that Love Flops is a decent romantic comedy with a satisfying and relevant sci-fi twist halfway through that upends your expectations. I think if it had been firmer with setting this out from the start instead of focusing on its ecchi hijinks it would have come off a lot stronger, but the way it develops its characters is still pretty satisfying across the series. It’s far away from the best in its genre, but this is one I’d maybe recommend to fans of ecchi and romantic comedy shows; just give it time to cook up until that mid-season twist as the outcome is pretty rewarding.

Our review copy was supplied by MVM.