One day, a poor high school second-year named Futaro Uesugi comes across a private tutoring gig with good pay, but his pupils are his classmates. In fact, all five are quintuplets, each gorgeous but also on the brink of flunking out of school. – ANN
Streaming: Crunchyroll and Funimation
Episodes: 12
Source: Manga
Episode Summary: Futaro Uesugi’s family doesn’t have much money, so he’s learned to pinch pennies wherever he can. Luckily for him he’s a pretty smart student, so the fact that most of the other students look down on him isn’t as bothersome as it could be. One day he ends up fighting for a seat in the lunchroom with a girl named Itsuki who he doesn’t recognize. They get off on the wrong foot and sling a few jabs at one-another. It isn’t until later that Futaro learns that she’s transferred into his class, and his father has gotten him a job tutoring her for a very high price.
Futaro soon learns that this is no normal tutoring job – Itsuki is one of five quintuplet sisters, and each of them is in danger of failing their high school classes. Each of the sisters has their own unique personality and they all have their own special ways of weaseling out of Futaro’s study sessions. Once Itsuki gets a taste of Futaro’s living situation (and meets his cute younger sister), her perception of the situation starts to change a bit. This tutoring job may be more difficult than anticipated, but Futaro will make sure that all the sisters pass their classes, if it’s the last thing he does.
Impressions: For a long time, harem comedies were my bane as a reviewer. The very basic idea of a young man interacting with (and eventually choosing from) a veritable buffet of beauties, each one different in a single, very conveniently-written and identifiable way was very irritating to me. Doubly-so since the reverse-gender situation seemed to be so relatively uncommon for much of my tenure as an anime fan. As time went on, both reverse-harem and straight up beefcake entertainment managed to gain a greater foothold in the anime market, and while things still have never been quite equal in terms of which fandom contingent is being marketed to, it’s definitely an improvement over the very sparse pickings of yesteryear.
The other side of the coin is that the type of material that’s being aimed at straight male consumers seems to have been getting more extreme and mean-spirited over time. The “little sister” trend is still going strong, there have been a few anime now with “slavery” as a selling point, and isekai power fantasies are common-enough that even more casual viewers are noticing. It’s definitely a different world out there for anime genres, which is why, in comparison, a straight-laced, mildly fanservicey harem romantic comedy like The Quintessential Quintuplets seems so pleasant and quaint in comparison.
The story of a less-fortunate kid being thrust together with a group of hapless rich girls by convenient circumstance seems taken straight out of an old-school anime playbook. The fated (and awkward) first meeting between the characters, their mild, low-level hostility to one another (that will surely be transforming into romantic tension at some point), and even the in-universe explanation for the girls’ same-face character designs (they’re literal quintuplets!) is sort of a pleasantly predictable known-quantity in a world where the next mean-spirited gross-out could be just around the corner.
Lest I give the impression that the only good part about this episode is that it’s not actively terrible, I should also mention that despite it not really being my style of a story, it’s still pretty entertaining. I can appreciate the character comedy even though the characters themselves aren’t yet very fleshed-out. I think my favorite of the characters so far is Yotsuba, the bubbly outgoing sister who seems willing to indulge Futaro’s tutelage even as she seems resigned to her own inability to care about her grades. She is concerned with manners, however; there’s a humorous scene where she follows Futaro throughout the school so he can thank her for picking up an item he dropped.
The episode is also pretty tame as far as fanservice is concerned, which is probably what surprised me the most; the sisters are all typically busty and attractive in their own ways, so I would have expected that to be exploited more heavily (though, fair warning: the preview for the second episode gives the impression that there may be more salacious material to come). Perhaps the closest the episode comes to crossing a line is a scene in which Futaro is trying to convince the slovenly sister Ichika to get out of bed, and she’s barely able to stop him from tearing away the covers, underneath which she’s not wearing any clothes (as you do). The moment is downplayed with an eye-roll and an irritated “tch” from Futaro, and we never really see that much nudity, but I found it noteworthy to mention.
The one major oddity of this episode is that it feels almost like it’s setting up for some kind of game or branching-choice visual novel; I actually had to confirm multiple times that it wasn’t based on that kind of source material. The episode begins and ends with a flash-forward to Futaro’s wedding day, where it’s clear that he’s marrying one of the quintuplets (her face is obscured so we can only guess which one of them it is, and the suggestion is that it could be any of them). The sisters each have their own personality traits for Futaro to navigate, and likely each one has specific academic challenges as well; it seems like an environment in which focused attention and choice navigation of conversation trees could define the final outcome. The fact that the show isn’t based on this sort of source material and yet feels very informed by them results in what feels like a heavy-handed storytelling style. It’s a small issue that’s still distracting to a point.
Winter season always seems to be kind of a grab-bag of anime that arrives without much pretense or fan-fare. Much of these lower-profile series are pretty forgettable when compared to their high-profile siblings, but there are occasionally a few unpolished gemstones mixed into the group. I’m not entirely willing to make big claims about this particular series yet because there are still a lot of ways it could go astray, but it is a lot more fun than I would have expected and it avoids many of the pitfalls that its genre tends to have. I feel like it might at least be worth another episode or two.
Pros: Avoids some of the nasty habits its genre sometimes indulges. A lot of the comedic moments are actually funny.
Cons: Its narrative feels very beholden to visual novels and games even though its source is a manga.
Grade: B-