“I don’t know if you’ve ever talked with a teenage girl before- definitely DO NOT start now” fucking killed me. Great job

I think the thing that kills me most about this series is that the elite magic academy looks like a completely normal high school

The fact that this guy basically has six genie wishes in his pocket and women literally lining up for his baby batter and is STILL considered a loser is Peak Anime.

Imagine if the main character decided that the "might makes right" society he lives in is bad, and that the hoarding of power by a select few is evil... so he goes and bangs every single person who will let him and spawns an entire generation of super mages who upset the status quo. If only

Ok, a lot of this is really stupid, but I will say, the idea of a ghost getting evicted from the house she's haunting is pretty funny.

Wait a second: The teacher is not in the harem and secondary male characters who do things actually exist? It's like observing a fossilized ancestor of the current trash harem shows!

I'm amazed that the fact the teacher is a vampire is barely acknowledged, apparently irrelevant, and never expounded on. It might've been a joke. I honestly can't tell. It's kinda great.

Eugenics comes up as a main plot point in anime a lot. It’s almost as if Japan has some serious issues to work through with a therapist

i thought there was gonna be a plot twist that his spell count is actually infinity and not eight but he never notices because he doesn't use spells because he has so few

Pity there was no mention of his actual family tree. I cracked up when at the end I saw it laid out showing all his ancestors, including one "H. Potter"...

Hearing “I’ll escort you to your roomy room” in a southern accent is unironcally one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

Wait... wait... there are hot springs that increase your spell count by staying underwater for 2 years.... and the main character has reality warping wish spells... even using 1 to just let him safely stay underwater for 2 years would be at least a way to break even or to get a net gain. Why doesn't he do that?

As a 1980s era weeb, let me assure you "expensive box set" was better than "perpetual expensive long distance phone calls to obscure BBS communities looking for someone who had an episode you were missing and could mail you a VHS dub of it," which typically ended in having eight episodes in the original Japanese with French subtitles, and the other four dubbed in German with Italian subtitles.

10,000 spell casts seems like a lot. It is not, at least when you look at how casually the characters use spells. Fun fact that I learned from some random teen drama manga- you live 6,000 days by the time you are 16. So you can burn through all your spells in like 8 years if you cast 2 a day. For example, casting a spell to fly to school and back. All I'm saying- tsundere is not surviving highschool at the rate she comically blows things up.

5:12 - "This month's goals: Don't use attack magic in the school". That plot hook sounds way better than the rest of the series.

After a quick search, the novel didn't split him into 10 clones. He got revived with a SUPER magical body that could cause great calamity to the whole world if he uses magic. Oh, and sometimes it leaks magic and causes minor or major misfortune.

The sad thing is that the concept of only having a limited number of spells in your life sounds really cool. Too bad it was squandered by bad, horny writing.

"Anime Dark Ages huh?" Sounds like someone has paid $40-$50 for 4 episodes of an anime more than once in his lifetime... I'm here for you my brother

Surprising that all those powerful families are risking their daughters failing to attract this guy rather than pressuring or paying protag-kun to make regular visits to a sperm bank. Artificial insemination was already a well-established medical practice at the time.

"It's bad, but it's not _Final Fantasy Unlimited_ bad." How _DARE_ you insult my favorite anime from the 7th grade with this completely accurate and irrefutable statement!

So I realize that I'm completely missing the point, but I can't help but notice how these kids are casually using their magic like it's nothing but if the best of them get only 10000 spells in their life then using just one spell a day would kill them in 27 years.

What's wild is the premise of a world where your lifespan is basically however long you can hold onto your last spell is a very interesting premise that could make for some very dramatic story telling. Too bad it was only used for this.

5:50 Imagine the reactions of the heads of those magical dynasties when they heard he McFucking killed himself BEFORE knocking up any of their daughters If they, you know, actually existed "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN HE KILLED HIMSELF?!"

"Another secret lurking beneath its waters:....Baseball Zombies." I F-ing LOST it and burst out laughing! Peeeeeerfect example of the Mad Libs style of writing Geoff was putting on display with those plot descriptions!

Two of the potential love interests are textbook abusers, one is a child that probably got groomed by her family, the school is full of the Junior Capitalists of Japan, the teaches are almost criminally negligent ..Someone should have called Protag Protective Services for this guy yesterday.

The actual background for the story is actually interesting: like, hey, there's magic, but everyone is only able to cast a certain amount of spells in their lives. That's actually kinda cool when you think about the different kinds of stories you could write with that concept and the situations you could put the characters in. But then they just decided to take this intriguing concept and put it into a harem anime. Definitely not the genre I would have went with.

Step 1: Use reality bending powers to give yourself the ability to breath underwater and heat resistance Step 2: Convince someone to throw food in hot spring sometimes or if you have a spare cast, create infinite bag of water proof snacks Step 3: stay under water for 2 years Step 4: profit

So if Kazuki's magic can literally do anything, why can't he, like, give himself a higher spell count?

I am frankly shocked they didn't go the route of after protag-kuns 8th cast of his God magic, he actually DOESNT insta-die like he should, and upon rechecked his magi-count it comes to rise that his count hasent gone down at all, for you see his magic cast limit was not a measly 8, but in fact, INFINITY I swear on my life I thought that was 1000% gonna be the twist when you mentioned he specifically was only ever born with '8 casts' of magic on his limit And frankly I'm disappointed they didn't go down that route

Something that occurs to me after watching this video and dealing with the resurfaced memories of this series: you can take the stock harem anime setup and turn it into a surprisingly effective psychological horror. We've seen series that deconstruct the genre by turning the male lead into exactly the kind of scumbag who would actually try to engineer this situation, but I don't think anyone has tried to do the opposite. Keep the main character a hapless doof getting led around by the nose, but turn all the girls into cold, manipulative sociopaths who are only pursuing him because he has something they want. They can't just take what they're after and have no other source of it, so they pretend they're in love with him. They're all powerful enough that they can prevent him from escaping even if he becomes aware of the situation so the only obstacles they have are each other, hence the fighting. It even gives the side cast something to do. Some are working for a given girl and try to assist her, and some are actually his friends who've realized what's going on and are trying to help him escape. It even justifies the trope of a girl becoming violently possessive since they don't really care about his well-being beyond how it affects their goal. They try to minimize any harm he suffers at their hands but accidents happen, and it explains their overall tropey personalities. They're emulating archetypes to make themselves more appealing.

Listening to this on the side while the internet blows up about the queen dying when suddenly 'Said Ghost is named Elizabeth' hits me out of NOWHERE.

That gag at 27:00, that VA understood the assignment. Rest of it looks like hot trash but dang that gag hits

My mom, upon reading the title of this episode: "Whatever this man (Geoff) makes, it is not enough to cover the psychological damages."

At the time of writing this, this video has 71,535 views. Assuming each one watches exactly 38 minutes of it, we have wasted (as said at the end of the video by Jeff himself) 5.17 YEARS of combined time on this show. Also assuming young Jeff watched every minute of every episode and each episode was exactly 24 minutes in length, that would only add up to 576 minutes, or about 9.6 hours SO, he has wasted at least 4,719 times more well.. time than this show ever did to him. Who's the real monster now?

I will say, one thing that got a chuckle out of me was the sign saying "This Month's Goal: Don't use attack magic inside the school." It's self-aware, but not in an obnoxious wink-and-nod kind of way.

The one time I remember the jealous sociopath classmates being funny was from the Baka and Test series. They really cranked it up to the eleven there though by having all of the single boys forming a KKK-style cult that punished any male that dared to have a girlfriend. The story even acknowledge how messed up everyone in class F was by how everyone only really cared about themselves and were more than happy to throw their fellow students under the bus to forward their own goals. Several of their crazy plans against much stronger opponents worked because the other classes couldn't believe how willing they were to disregard each other's safety. There was one hilarious scene where the Tsundere love-interest got taken hostage and when main character heard that she got caught because she was worried about him, he immediately said that she had to be a fake and ordered a charge against the surprised hostage-takers whom were stunned that they charged uncaring of her safety.

"It's just a bunch of random stuff happening until the episode then the show are eventually over." Sounds like my type of show right there

A comedy built on the premise of "guy from esteemed families is just kind of a loser and has to fight (and fail) to survive a hoard of magical batshit fucking lunatics" could be great but sadly that would require a writer who could think with the head on his shoulders and not in his pants.

5:25 That line immediately gave me flashbacks to one of the first doujins I ever read way back in middle school. It was called "My Balls." The MC had Satan trapped within his balls, and he couldn't "release his frustrations" without also releasing her and throwing the world into thousands of years of darkness.

"The onsen episode turns into the sports episode because Baseball Zombies" sounds like a setup that deserves to be in basically any show better than this.

I feel as though half the problems in this show's story could be solved by Kazuki just continually donating his seed. Like a one-man sperm bank, if you will.

"And while the little guy's magic may not be all that potent, HIS little guys are as potent as they come!" That is gold. Solid gold.

I actually think the guy literally dividing himself in order to be with each of his harem components is actually a really fun idea to work with, as long as you focus on the comedic side and try to soften the existential horror. I would be very interested if an anime used this concept as the premise of the story.

The world building of this show actually sounded like it had a lot of potential for really interesting exploration until you mentioned the superpowered genetics part.

this shit became so mass produced that we can slot those girls not just into single drawers but into "variant" files. It's like a goddamn fast-food restaurant or catering business. "Yes, halo sir? another girl for your harem? Wonderful! We have a full palette. Which one would you like? A silent violent type? Good and what hair would interest you? We have purple, green, liliac, violet...whole rainbow really...." I can picture an employee just browsing through files or clicking on some character making software and then printing the girl in 3rd printer XD with what little personality she is supposed to have

According to Wikipedia: "In the novel, the side effect of Kazuki's restoration was gaining a special magical body that can cause disaster to the whole world if he lets out his magic powers. Another side effect of Kazuki's restoration is the overflowing of his magical powers every now and then causing minor mishaps and sometimes great chaos." So, it sounds like the anime just made up the ten Kazukis thing, and the novel's thing that happened was even more stupid and boring.

Damn, people really thought they were doing something new when they said "solve the love triangle with polyamory" completely unaware of ghost harem horniness from 2005 huh

34:45 i agree wholeheartedly that this fight is better and all, but what the haruhi-loving FUCK is going on with that music

In all of these "eugenics we got to have that guy's children" series, I always wonder why they don't just have him bust one out and store it like a sperm bank(If it's a girl then things are more complicated, but let's be real, it's always a guy for some reason.). Especially in ones where it's a life or death situation and the guy is trying to keep his virginity or something, like just humor the dude and have him do that and everything is done. That's especially important if the girls throwing themselves at the guy are becoming a big problem, which they always are, eugenicists tend not to be very good with romance... Or anything related to human emotion for that mater

Maburaho ran so Peter Grill could fall head first down a flight of stairs.

There’s something I don’t get here. Yuna and Brunette Childhood Friend-or BCF for short-both have high spell counts, and Yuna at least can afford to be very reckless with her magic, as evidenced by the fact that she’s casting a dozen spells per episode and hasn’t died yet. If they wanted to see snow way back in the hazy, forgotten childhood friend memory, why did they just sit there moping instead of using one of their apparently infinite spell slots to make some snow themselves? They didn’t need Kazuki to do that for them!

I think the best thing to come from this show (aside from this hilarious analysis of the early 2000s harem formula) is all the comments from viewers saying “here’s how I’d use the “limited spell count per life” setting in a dramatic story”. If just _one_ of these ideas can become a fully realized book/manga/show, then all that time “wasted” will have been worth it.

OK, points taken, but the bit of him running around with the blonde one clinging on him and her flying out the window when he takes a turn at 23:46 is hilarious

28:50 you mean to tell me the brother of one of the harem girls is introduced, turns out to be a werewolf, is fought, is killed, and his soul goes to the moon in one episode.....and this doesn't change anything???

NGL I completely forgot about the Monks being one of the few things in this show that were legit funny. Also shocked you didn't mention that because everyone is covered in ashes, that means they haven't showered in weeks. It's not like it's fucking God of War...wait is it? Also yes Girls Bravo is GOATed

I read a very short synopsis on this when I was fifteen. Being the hopeless romantic that I am, I thought that this was a really wonderful setup for a romance anime. And it certainly could have been. "Boy brings joy/wonder/hope to others with his few charges of magic" could have been an amazing romance tragedy. I feel sorry for the potential that this anime wasted.

Okay so we have casual rape, racism, pedophilia... The only thing keeping this from being one of the most problematic animes ever is the lack of incest!

Ah yes this show, in high school my ace butt was just trying to figure out why he didn’t just sell his baby batter for a fortune a cup. He’d be rich enough to never miss not being about to use magic, his kids would be titans of industry and he could marry (or not) the person he wants to.

What if there was like, a reverse harem anime, where the focus is all the waifus and we see everything *except* the time spent with their prospective love interest, and never meet the protag-kun

"What if the person secretly playing gameboy in class was the teacher?" I can tell you exactly what happens when it is the substitute teacher. Cause it was me. And the highschoolers loved me. Except for the one time I got too bold asking on of the special needs students to fetch me some headphones so I could hear the audio from my PSVita and the little shits ratted me out. Fortunately, my punishment was the principle basically saying "just try to be a little more discreet." This is really the only way to go as a substitute teacher imo. You are not going to get the kids to work. You will not earn their respect. The best you can hope for is to earn their cooperation. Most of the time, I just blatantly made deals with the class along the lines of "I am going to make a token effort to get you to work, you are going to lie to me and say that you will, then I am gonna read/play phone games. As long as you don't get too loud to where a teacher or admin comes in to check on us, I don't care what you do. But if a teacher does come in, I am throwing you all under the bus and saying I tried my best but you refused to cooperate." I was a selfish lazy scumbag, but I will be damned if I didn't have the most well behaved classes in the county.

I’m ashamed to say I watched this show and wholeheartedly love watching it because I was a lonely 15 year old who this was directed towards so why wouldn’t I…. and it was here on KZfaq because I doubt anyone cared that it was here lol AAAAND I hated the end because it was such a let down…. Even my no taste 15 year old self knew the ending was awful lol

25:50 You see, a smart person would use their literal reality warping spell power to make it so they can breathe underwater then set up a system where they get fed every day for the next 2 years to increase said spell count. Of course there is the problem of exactly how much it increases your spell count, and how anyone would in a harem anime have the mental capacity or patience to let someone with literal godly power not die before he can pass on his genes.

It's amazing just how many profoundly mediocre stories I could solve by dimension-hopping about these world and introducing them to the turkey baster, which was clearly never invented in any of these worlds.

Never mind that it is also clearly stated that the main harem target in this anime, has gone through this entire process of making his wishes, turning to ash, and returning back to life without memories quite a few times, and it is implied that he is actually hundreds of years old since the dorm manager and the ghost collector were in fact obsessive love interest of the main character but when they were living in feudal japan, and that is why the ghost collector both wants to keep his ghost so she will never be apart from him since she still very much loves him and has loved him for centuries, the dorm director also loves the guy enough that it is implied that she considers herself his widow, but because he will always return after using all his spells after getting back his ashes means she will forever be dressed in funeral garb, because like the ghost collector she too has loved him for centuries.

I will say, that bit with Kazuki running with Kuriko hanging around his neck and then he hard stops, causing her to fly out the window is actually a pretty funny visual gag. Decided to rewatch the video and wanted to share a story. I had a strangely similar experience discovering this show way back in the day. Saw it in a magazine, and then watched it. The difference is that I watched it via an anime channel On Demand while my Dad was getting our house remodeled. I actually had to stop it whenever my family was around since well... I was like 10 or 11 when I first saw it and didn't want to get in trouble. Later in my life I watched it via KZfaq back when they were less strict about copyright stuff along with Love Hina and Negima.

Wait if he has 8 reality warping dragonball wishes, why doesn’t he wish for the girls and their families to forget his superpowered genes exist so he can live a normal life away from these psycho wives?

I love how your description of everything pre-isekai still applies to the letter, it just takes place in a generic fantasy world setting now. Truly there is no original thought under the sun.

Honestly I’d love to see a comparison between harem anime targeted towards women and harem targeted towards men now. I always feel like harem anime targeted towards women or reverse harems, while usually using the same bland protagonist everyone can see themselves in still allows the male cast that compromises the harem to be more complex characters, while the harems targeted towards men really only allow its female cast to be a trope they don’t develop themselves much further than. I don’t know, it just seems very interesting to me.

He used one if his spells to reverse time to save a bento box? I don't know if this guy should be the one everyone's aiming thier eugenics plans at, he clearly deserves the Darwin award.

Okay, that Girls Bravo scene with the protag getting repeatedly injured was god damned hilarious. It got a big laugh from me, which I did not even remotely expect.

I usually avoid harem anime as a matter of principle, but you've honestly convinced me that Girls Bravo is worth checking out because I can't stand not watching something full of really good action sequences.

I actually watch this show in its time. I only remember the ending that felt like a cope so the author doesn't have to take a decision. A lot of harems of different qualities do share that problem.

Not sure if anyone knows this but the MC of Girls Bravo was voiced by Yuri Lowenthal. Who is most famous for voice Sasuke in Naruto and most recently Dainslef in Genshin Impact.

This really makes me appreciate how far dubbing has gotten

I’m Japanese and I’ve never even heard of this anime series. I can say I learn more about these types of midnight anime series from you than living in Japan.

This sucks because the idea of the main character’s classmates doing so many shenanigans that they kill him for the rest of the show (and he just keeps going to school dead) is potentially very funny.

I unironically enjoyed this anime when I found it. The anime is objectively awful, but its like watching a train wreck. You can't look away.

As an man who also had the “luck” of buying that same exact dvd set, all I can say about this video is, thank you.

I remember one of the biggest things that stood out to me was how absolutely insufferable EVERYONE in the show was.

That video game (think its a movie) at 26:30 is a pretty solid sight gag. Its cover is a parody of Pretty Woman and the title is Pretty Uma because Japanese people tend to pronounce Woman as "Uman" (oo-mahn). It's not like haha funny but it is a passable one

I think the thing that hurts the most might be that the premise - the stuff about limited spells - is sort of neat. It could make for a pretty interesting system to base some sort of battle anime about. Maybe everyone has the same magical energy to spend over their lifetime, with the difference being how much they let out each time they cast a spell, so the fewer spells you're limited to using the more powerful each one is. So you wind up with everything from people who can nearly endlessly spam weak magic bolts to people who can drop a nuke once a lifetime. Maybe, if you want to go this way, there's discrimination on both ends of the spectrum - people with too many spells can't do anything useful with them and are basically magicless, but people with too few spell are considered dangers to society because of how powerful they are and are persecuted in some way, while simultaneously also being unable to use their magic too often and thus basically having the same problem as people with too many spells where they're basically muggles. You figure out what an interesting number to give your protagonist is - maybe like 50 to a 100, so each spell is significantly powerful, but they're not instawinning every fight and have to conserve spells as much as humanly possible so every cast feels important. You then populate the party (maybe a heroaca style police force dedicated to fighting magic crime?) with different people with different numbers and explore what that says about how they fight - maybe there's an agile thief-type with a very high spell count who rapid-fires weak spells like daggers, or someone with a very low spell count who's got to fight without magic and is mostly there as a desperation measure - a last-ditch, single-use "we win" button for worst case scenarios. (maybe they have to do a heroic sacrifice by using their last spell near the end of a big arc, they could be the first-arc mentor figure who dies to set up the villain, even). Maybe there's an old vet who's super experienced and smart but is down to their last few mediocre-powered spells from a lifetime of crimefighting, so they're there in a support role. If you want to do social commentary, maybe they're now seen as useless by command, and are constantly barely dodging being fired and left with no prospects because they've destroyed their magic for an organization that only sees them as a body to throw at the enemy. Just think of all the thematic resonance here - literally throwing away your life force for power, inching closer to death with every use of your magic, a society which demands that you use your limited and precious life force if you want to be able to be competitive and productive. Up until now I was envisioning a Heroaca-like superpower battle show, but you could also give it a darker bend and do something with the tone of Psycho-Pass (maybe even give it a Shadowrun cyberpunk-but-with-magic type aesthetic), where society only looks like it's doing good because they're casting away the people who don't neatly fit into the system or aren't willing to sell their literal life force to their employers. And that's just the barebones series of ideas that immediately come to mind. There's so much to flesh out here and so many cool concepts, this could be a legit good shonen or even seinen. But no. It's an excuse for... This show to happen.

"Once you cast your last spell, however, your body instantly crumbles to ash." This sounds more like the premise to an anime like Guilty Crown than Love Hina.

This era of anime was just... something else. Thank you for the stretching scene. I get everyone was trying to learn a new medium, but it's amazing just how many steps back in quality they took entering the digital age

7:10 Audio: "new waifus are added every arc or so" Captions: "new waifus are added every *hour* or so" [emphasis added]

ya'know it just dawned on me the whole gender standard thing of anime. you got the male pervert that is often just a scummy person that invades women's privacy, stalks them and makes unwanted sexual advances... and then you have the female characters that just outright assault the MC. yeah, women have the female pervert but not only is that not as common as the male version but when a male attempts to assault someone they usually get their shit pushed in. reminds me of that whole male teach and female teacher thing

This was actually one of the first anime I intentionally watched online. At the time, I thought it was amazing...because I was 14 and never watched anything like it before. Then, after watching dozens of other shows that are basically the same, I realized that it was actually generic trash. But dangit, it's nostalgic trash.

15:11 ok, you’ve sold me

For those wondering? Yes. Growing up as a Canadian kid who loves anime leads to what could only be defined as desperate scavenging and leads to finding some... mistakes.

Ah Maburaho. Together with Girls Bravo this was one of the shows that introduced me to the harem genre all those years ago

I love that you either A) Instinctively kept that same box of Maburaho, as if you knew you’d need it one day to destroy it, Or B) You didn’t keep the original box, but bought another copy just out of spite Either version of events is amusing to me

I'm like 80% sure some high school friends and I did an amateur joke dub of the hot spring/baseball zombies episode and it's still floating around on KZfaq somewhere. It looks INCREDIBLY familiar, but I never watched the show itself at all so I had no idea what we were doing voices for until literally while watching this.

33:50 Killed me

Oh, Maburaho... that sure was a show.

When you said "existential horror", I _honestly_ thought the memory erasure thing would be what actually happened, and that would be the horror in question, because it's arguably at least a partial death of identity and is that worth it? I should have realized that would be too interesting.

3 1/2 years after the roast of MORBOE in which we were promised Maburaho would "get its day", we finally get the promised roast!

You're hitting me with two entirely different fronts of childhood memories. On one hand you're reminding me why I'd forgotten I've ever seen this anime and on the other the Custom Robo OST going in the background is making wanna dust off my GameCube and play that all day. Either way thanks for an entertaining use of about a half hour of my time

13:23 “Look, guy who wrote this, I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to a teenage girl before, DEFINITELY DO NOT START NOW” this fucking floored me

For once, I would like a harem anime where at least one of the MC's male friends doesn't get violently jealous and petty at the MC's success with women and is actually a total supportive bro about it

You actually did it, Geoff. You made me want to watch Girls Bravo

I once met two of the voice actors that worked on this story (not at the same time.) Both of them said they really didn't like working on this one at all.