Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai is a show in the slice of life school genre which is focused on a high school club of people that for whatever reason or another have some trouble making friends. Hence the name of the show. Its also a rather thinly veiled excuse at a harem romance comedy as well. With regards to the technical aspects of the show they are for the most part rather good. This is a well drawn anime with good music and sound effects. The voice actors do a good job with the characters and have a decent range of emotions so that this feels like a pretty good production. The fact that it was a light novel adaptation and ended up with a second season says something about the shows success and relative quality as many of those do not get reupped as they are pretty poor. The show stands slightly above many others in the genre due to the strong personalities of the characters. Most of the main characters in the club have difficult personalities that make them hard to get along with. A lot of the fun of this show is watching the characters interact overreact and maliciously and jealously push each others buttons repeatedly. Two seasons is also enough time for there to be some development of the personalities and back story for many of the main cast as well. As much as the main characters have trouble getting along they do eventually end up becoming if not friends at least comrades and their opinions of each other evolve quite a bit. One could make the argument that most of the characters do lean quite a bit on certain character tropes but as the series goes on there is enough hints of development that it can be overlooked and you begin to enjoy the characters more. The show doesnt quite make it into the greatness tier because it is held back by taking an interesting concept of a club of misfits and turning it into a harem fantasy comedy as the show goes along. While there isnt anything necessarily wrong about this the show could have been even better had it stayed a bit more on the topic of terrible personalities trying to navigate social issues and making friends with a few more dudes thrown in to balance things out. At the risk of some spoilers hint spoiler alert While many people discussing the show tend to have a strong opinion on who should win the MC bowl here I sort of ended up wishing that the main character would ignore all of them indefinitely. Unfortunately that becomes very hard for him to do. Beyond my personal opinions of how the romance angle is handled this show is one of the better entries in the slice of life genre. It is genuinely entertaining to watch and is silly enough to make for a nice guilty pleasure or easy to watch show. One of the major things that I look for with regards to whether or not I should rate a show well is whether or not Im genuinely enjoying it and I can say that it was a fun show to watch. The second season is also a bit stronger than the first season and I found myself really enjoying the show more by making the full investment even if the ending was a bit abrupt as they didnt catch up to the light novel which is typical for a show of this type. Beyond that there is some value in a show like this in understanding that even people who have trouble getting along with others still seek companionship and relationships even if forming and maintaining them becomes hard. Many of the shows characters personalities make their friendless predicaments pretty easy to understand but the fact that everyone in the show does want to belong to something and have friends that they can talk to is something that I think anyone can relate to. Being a bit of a misfit is not easy certainly not so in the rigid culture of Japan so there may be a bit of a cultural commentary going on here. However Its hard to get too philosophical about a fanservicey school rom com through so your mileage will definitely vary on this. Personally I think that if youre looking for a somewhat better show in the genre and like the misfit friends angle Toradora is a somewhat stronger entry. However Boku wa Tomodachi Sukunai can be very entertaining if you can look past its shortcomings. You could certainly do a lot worse as there are a lot of boring mediocre entries in the genre. In my humble opinion its worth a watch.
72 /100
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