The 100 Girlfriends Who Really Really Really REALLY Love You

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really Really Really REALLY Love You (君のことが大大大大大好きな100人の彼女) is a 12 episode romantic comedy based on the manga of the same name by Nakamura Rikito and Nozawa Yukiko.  The first season of the series aired during the Winter of 2024.

 

     Aijo Rentaro is rejected for the 100th time on the day of his middle school graduation.  Out of desperation he prays for a girlfriend at a local shrine.  The shrines god grants him the wish, but tells him an error was made at the time of his birth.  Instead of finding one true love, he has 100 true loves and he has to love them all equally.  If not, those he does not love as much as the others will die prematurely.  At the dawn of his first year as a high school student he begins his long journey to finds his 100 true loves.  For all of them he expects to experience a noticeable spark of first love and then its up to him to convince them to go out with him as well as be cool with the idea of not being the only one.

    He starts off with girlfriend one and two at the same time, a tsundere named Inda Karane and a buxom beauty Hanazono Hakari.  He is able to convince both of them that its true love, helped along by the spark of love they all felt.  Their love for him is over whelming and so is their competition for his affection.  He does the best he can to convince them that there is no need to compete.  Before the dust can settle, girlfriend number three appears in the form of socially inept loli bookworm Yoshimoto Shizuka.  He quickly wraps the shy girl into his harem and she is quickly accepted by the other two.  The fourth love, kuudere Eiai Nano is a harder nut to crack given her extremely logical and emotionless existence.  She too falls prey to Rentaro's unassuming charm and self sacrifice.  Without skipping a beat, he absorbs another childlike weirdo into his circle in the form of chemistry nerd Yakuzen Kusuri, who also has the ability to become a buxom weirdo.  With this core beginning circle they face challenges together as he collects more loves like hes a Pokemon trainer.

    I tried to ignore this series, uninterested in a harem male fantasy pile of garbage.  I was convinced that the series was heavy on the comedy and more a way to make fun of shonen romances.  Its a little bit of both.  The strong points of the story are the absurd comedic aspects.  It gets ridiculous and out of control a lot of the time.  It bounces back and forth between standard shonen romance tropes to teen approved eroticism.  Each of the girls fits a specific and easily identifiable dating sim archetype.  Don't get the wrong idea, this series is absolutely designed for the immature male fantasy but its comedy and character interactions is rather enjoyable.  It does have little real value as a story though, given the idea that the entire plot is the ever increasing difficulty of him gathering all of his girlfriends.  Sometimes it borders on the plot depth of a porno.

    There is a well defined end point for the story, but given how easily that end goal can be stretch out, there is no really understanding of how long this story can go.  I hate to admit it, but the writing is actually pretty good at least in how easily the story moves and the different personalities of the different girls.  Rintro has about as much depth of character as Kazuya from Rent A Girlfriend but is significantly more likeable. This story does share some similarities with that other harem-lite story but really feels more like Golden Boy than anything else.  I hatr to admit it, but I did have fun for most of the first season of this ridiculous anime.  The fanservice, beyond the unnatural character designs (an aspect even brought up at one point by Rintaro), wasn't out of place in most instances.  Given the level of abuse an terrible decisions that could have been made over its course, this was pretty well written...but oh boy is this quite perverted.

The series was simulcast on Crunchyroll and is also available in English dub.