Okay. Stop it. Really. These names are getting annoying. This anime, which is called in the west as “My Mental Choices Are Completely Interfering with My School Romantic Comedy” (and “Ore no Nounai Sentakushi ga, Gakuen Lovecome o Zenryoku de Jama Shite Iru”in Japan) is basically what it title says, but with a twist. I will call it Noukome as everyone else does (because of course only lunatics would refer to it with its full name) and I will try to dissect this simple, yet enjoyable harem comedy.

Noukome is centered on Kanade, a boy with a curse. This curse is a wicked thing, making him randomly choose bewteen doing two options that are always both terrible. He cannot escape it, he cannot avoid it. If he doesn’t make a choice he is torn with pain, yet when he does he is struck with shame. The curse comes from god, and from god also comes a quest to get rid of this curse, a quest which he can complete with the aid of a girl sent from heaven: Chocolat.

It’s very, very forced

The basic idea of Noukome is giving Kanade two ridiculous choices at some random moments. For example, when finding a porn magazine in the middle of a park he must choose between smelling it or eating it. It gets even worse when the quests from gods come to play, which happens to be something related with acting like a pervert around the school girls. Even Chocolat, his aide sent from heavens, turns out to be a cute girl with the behavior of a dog. It’s a lot to take in, a lot of insane and awkward ideas.

And that’s why it works

Yes. The anime industry does its best when it gets okay with being absurd, and Noukome goes with the flow. Kanade may be a basic protagonist, but everything and everyone around him is completely fucking crazy. Chocolat acts like a dog, his best friend is an insane prankster acting all mature and evil, the other friendly girl is completely nuts and hyper-active, and so on. There is no sane soul here except perhaps for the regular boy protagonist, but he cannot act normal because of the random choices popping in his head.

And it’s a full ecchi comedy

Well, that’s the idea. Noukome never tries to be a drama such as ecchis from the past, it never tries to build tension or thrill, it never even tries to sound complex and mature. It is simply a crazy ecchi with the most absurd scenes for its setting. This choice is a major positive point though, as the non-sense comedy kicks in at every second and you get a major deal of pantsu and blushing.

There is a catch, however: this is everything you have already seen. Although the crazy ideas can fuel a lot of scenes out of nowhere, in the end Noukome deals with the very same tropes we have seen since Love Hina or even earlier. This means you may get tired of it, and not because they are overused on Noukome, but because you have seen something similar throughout past years.

The simple art

Noukome also suffers with its production. Diomedea give us girls with such big, childish eyes and deformed heads it gets hard to see them as the teenagers they are. For an ecchi, this means you have an issue with a major point of it. It doesn’t get better with other areas, such as the simple backgrounds, lack of detail, and a somewhat average sound direction. There are times where it shines, where the girls can get cute, but these happen perhaps only when you get close ups on their faces, which destroys the objective of making them sexually attractive.

Noukome is an enjoyable harem show with a lot of ecchi moments. It is absurd, it is simple, and it works. There is no attempt to make it deep, there is a plot going on to move our protagonist forward, and there are plenty of crazy moments built around the curse of multiple choices.

Besides the craziness, however, everything else is far too common. The deres types, the loli teacher, the “neutral” protagonist, and the perverted actions demanded by god are just reusing past tropes of the ecchi genre. If you have seen past ecchis, very little will be new for you here. It can still be worth it though.