Anime Hajime Review: Masamune-kun’s Revenge

***Warning, the following may contain spoilers for Masamune-kun’s Revenge. Reader discretion is advised.***

Series Synopsis

Masamune Makabe (voiced by Natsuki Hanae) has two simple outlooks on life.

First, he believes one must do whatever they can to be attractive. As he sees it, if you have good looks, you might as well have the world.

Second, come hell or high water, Masamune will get his revenge on Aki Adagaki (voiced by Ayaka Ohashi).

Both of these goals stem from Masamune’s childhood; a time in his life when he was a lot chubbier. He grew tired of everyone picking on him due to his weight. But worst of all, he has never gotten over how Aki, his once closest friend, tossed him away like trash.

Now in high school, Masamune and Aki have been reunited, despite the latter not realizing it. Masamune has transformed himself into every girl’s dream guy, and Aki has built a frightening reputation of severe cruelty towards men.

With the stage set, Masamune plans to have Aki fall in love with him so that he can smash her heart when it's at its most vulnerable. However, there is just one thing that can throw Masamune’s revenge into peril: he may still have lingering feelings for his current target.

Series Positives

After watching the first episode of Masamune-kun’s Revenge, I can honestly say I didn’t think this show was going to be awful. But, I also didn’t think it was going to be anything great either. No, from what I saw, I expected this series to be middle of the road. In both the best and worst case scenarios, this was going to be serviceable.

I’ve gotten to the point where a first episode can serve as an accurate indicator of things to come. If a show grabs me at the start, it’s not going to be easy for it to lose me later. Alternatively, if a show fails to peak my interest at the beginning, it will have some catching up to do. In the case of Masamune-kun’s Revenge, it leaned more towards the latter of these two extremes.

But I review anime series, not episodes.

Are my first impressions of a series right one-hundred-percent of the time? Absolutely not. There have been shows that have started off strong only to end up self-destructing. There have also been shows that have stumbled out of the gate, yet managed to find their stride as they went along. Again, Masamune-kun’s Revenge was more the latter.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Masamune-kun’s Revenge became a masterpiece. Through and through, this show was a standard romantic-comedy anime. But it was a standard romantic-comedy anime that had a handful of really good things in it.

That said, I don’t want to wait until the Series Negative section to hit Masamune-kun’s Revenge with this – the first episode wasn’t the most gripping.

To you, the person reading this review, I’m going to assume you don’t have the time to watch every show you come across because you have actual things you need to get done. If you sit through the first episode of Masamune-kun’s Revenge and think this is not the series for you, and thus, move on because of that, I won’t blame you.

To be frank, if you do decide to give this show more than one episode’s worth of your time, you will see a lot of stupid nonsense. And it will be the kind of nonsense that would make any series not merit the effort.

For example, Masamune-kun’s Revenge was guilty of employing unnecessary fanservice. There wasn’t a lot of this, the story didn’t rely on it being here, and to this show’s credit, the fanservice that was here was balanced. Both female and male characters found themselves in revealing outfits.

However, this doesn’t change the fact that the fanservice in this series was forced in. Also, there was the huge problem of everyone being in high school. No matter how you look at it, that is still a massive point against this show.

But as I said, this wasn’t a great series, and I’ll get into more of the problems later.

Nevertheless, Masamune-kun’s Revenge managed to surprise me. When this story decided to be clever and out of the ordinary, it did precisely that. On more than one occasion, this show was nothing short of impressive.

There was a scene in Masamune-kun’s Revenge that was, without any exaggeration on my part, phenomenal. And since this scene came out of nowhere, I don’t intend to go into too much detail regarding what happened in it. I also don’t plan on pinpointing when this scene took place in this series. But what I will say is this:

Masamune-kun’s Revenge, in this one instance, put everything into perspective. For a few of this show’s characters, notably Masamune, this scene gave reasons to otherwise shallow actions. Masamune going out of his way to purposefully crush someone’s heart, regardless of whose heart it was, wasn’t the most respectable of character motivations. But then this series gave us the all-important “why.”

This scene did not put Masamune in the right. But what it did do was make his mindset understandable.

Moments like this are why I will sit through every anime series from beginning to end; for there is a reason why we learned as children not to judge a book by its cover. Yes, sometimes our first impressions are dead on accurate.

Not every time, though.

If you decide to give Masamune’s Revenge a full shot, you might end up like me and find yourself with a pleasant little surprise on your hands.

All that notwithstanding, I feel compelled to go into more detail about this show because Masamune-kun’s Revenge was still an average, albeit, slightly better than average, series.

The Characters

If a character is a bit despicable at the beginning of their story, that shouldn’t be an automatic mark against the rest of the story. But if a character stays despicable all the way through to the end with no justification, then yeah, that would be a problem.

And if there was one thing Masamune-kun’s Revenge did well, it was giving justification to its characters’ motivations. Therefore, there is no better place to start than with the titular character himself, Masamune.

There is no getting around this: Masamune was unapologetically vain and smug. One of his core beliefs as a person, at the start of this series anyway, was that hot people could do whatever they wanted to do since they were hot.

If you need me to explain why that might get a tad irritating, then I don’t think you and I can be friends.

That aside, if you think about some of the past reviews I have written, Masamune should have infuriated me. The reason he didn’t was because this show knew how to use him.

Only on rare occurrences did Masamune openly flaunt the idea that he was better than the people around him. This was impressive since he actually had a bit of a leg to stand on. He was a strong student, he put in the work to lose his weight, and he was very good at getting others to like him through his genuinely kind actions.

This didn’t make Masamune’s worldview any less wrong, but this did allow him to be way more tolerable than similar characters like him.

Not only that, I could see where Masamune was coming from -- to an extent. Regardless if he was right or wrong in doing so, Masamune’s reasoning for wanting to seek revenge on Aki made sense.

As to not let my meaning get misinterpreted, I have to get a little more spoiler-y than I usually would in a review.

First off, I was never on board with Masamune’s revenge plan. Him crushing Aki’s heart was self-serving, and it wasn’t going to solve the larger issue -- why did Aki reject him?

And this is the thing I want to make as clear as possible.

Masamune wasn’t butthurt because a girl rejected him. Had that been the case, I doubt I would have been able to like Masamune even in the slightest. Fortunately, that was not the angle this show used.

Instead, Masamune was hurting because a person he saw as a close friend, someone who didn’t treat him like garbage and who didn’t try to take advantage of him, turned around one day and became like every other bully that had ever tormented him.

Perhaps it looks bad on me, but I get why someone would want to retaliate under these circumstances.

Along with that, Masamune believing being attractive would solve all his problems was a poor interpretation of what happened to him. However, the path to that interpretation was well-marked and didn’t come out of nowhere.

Another character whose actions also weren’t random was Aki Adagaki.

Like Masamune, Aki had a character flaw I usually find to be annoying. Aki was incredibly mean-spirited. From the first episode, her level of nastiness was apparent. This came in the form of how she responded to any boy foolish enough to confess to her, as well as, her treatment towards her “friends.”

For the former, Aki was cutthroat and very public about her rejections. The first time she did this in the series, Aki went so far as to layout the equivalent to her would-be suitor’s entire Internet history.

For me, this exchange called into question two things:

One, why did people keep confessing to Aki when public humiliation was a guarantee?

Two, although I doubt they required the extent she took them, Aki’s rejections may have been warranted.

The guy from the first rejection scene, we only saw during his rejection scene. And this was true for every guy from every rejection. Who knows what happened to them afterward? Due to that, as far as I know, these guys could have all been pricks. Hell, some appeared to be smugger and more full of themselves than Masamune was.

To better prove my point, the first episode actually had two rejection scenes, and the second guy lost all sympathy the second he pulled a pair of scissors on Aki in retaliation.

Given Aki’s well-established hatred towards men, any guy must have had a pretty big ego if he thought he could woo Aki with an out-of-the-blue confession. But once we learned why Aki had her jaded view of men, like it was with Masamune, this didn’t excuse her viciousness, however, it did put her situation into perspective.

That said, Aki’s master-slave relationship with her friends, particularly with Yoshino Koiwai (voiced by Inori Minase), I can’t and won’t try to defend. In this instance, she was just a brat.

Lastly, I want to bring up Neko Fujinomiya (voiced by Suzuko Mimori). There was a good chunk of this series where I didn’t like her. And it was the kind of dislike that I would have listed as a negative. That was until, again, Masamune-kun’s Revenge explained the reasons behind her motivations.

It started with the outstanding scene I mentioned earlier, and it continued to the end of the series. Neko went from someone I felt was a drag on this show to suddenly becoming my favorite character.

I would love to discuss why this became the case, but a huge part of why I now like Neko has to do with the unexpected direction this series took her character growth.

Masamune-kun’s Revenge may have been painfully predictable at parts, but it succeeded in doing something not many romantic-comedies do nowadays. This show did something I didn’t see coming.

Series Negatives

There wasn’t one major problem with Masamune-kun’s Revenge. Had there been, it would have made writing this section a whole lot easier. And having this part of the review come right after I spent a decent amount of time detailing why this show was a lot more clever than it let on, I’m afraid that I might be creating a false idea of what this series was.

Although there were a number of elements from Masamune-kun’s Revenge that impressed me, those elements impressed me as much as they did because they existed in a show that was otherwise unremarkable.

Masamune-kun’s Revenge carved out a small bit of identity for itself. I can’t imagine this series will be leaving my memory any time soon. And believe it or not, I’m going to say that's an issue.

This story set itself up for a continuation. There was no resolution, and this show just sort of ended. I will not pretend that the finale to this series was even the least bit satisfying. That sucks because I have zero confidence we will ever get a Masamune-kun’s Revenge 2. This series was too generic to allow such a thing to happen.

Adding to that, whenever this show decided to have its more engaging moments, it still wasn’t willing to forgo its comedy long enough to allow the atmosphere it was creating to have its full effect.

To my surprise, Masamune-kun’s Revenge got a few solid laughs out of me. This series was very strong with reaction-based humor.

Too bad that humor wasn’t always warranted.

There was an instance in this show where a character was baring out their heart. It was a really heavy moment that was working. Why then did this series feel it necessary to cut away to a joke?

The prize was right there, and Masamune-kun’s Revenge swatted it away for a bit of slapstick. And it did this all the time.

This was a grounded enough series that could have allowed comedy and drama to coexist. But, unfortunately, this show never wanted to let go of its more lighthearted side, even when it needed to the most.

And to go along with this series’ standardness, Masamune-kun’s Revenge made sure to check off every overused trope one might find in a romantic-comedy anime.

In no particular order:

1. There was the aforementioned awkward fanservice.

2. Two childhood friends reunited.

3. There was the sudden appearance of a love rival.

4. New characters got introduced into the series a few episodes before the end.

5. There was the obligatory swimsuit episode.

6. There was the obligatory cultural festival.

Every single one of these points I have not only seen done before, but I have also seen each of them done way better. Yes, that includes the fanservice.

Even while this series was setting up for its possibly-never-going-to-happen second season, the next thing Masamune-kun’s Revenge hinted at was the future school trip episode -- because of course there needs to be one of those. For this series that meant this cast would be going to Paris, but no matter – Wait. What? Paris!?

When I think of school trips in anime, I think Kyoto -- or Okinawa if a show wants to go exotic. But Paris? That’s different. That’s super different.

Why the hell didn’t we get that episode?

What’s the point in promising bigger and better things when a series has yet to establish what it currently has?

This was the biggest problem with Masamune-kun’s Revenge. It wanted to do all these grand things, but it was never willing to leave the safety of its comfort zone.

Final Thoughts

In case I didn’t drive home the point earlier, this show was not a masterpiece. It didn’t redefine the romantic-comedy genre. Instead, this series stayed well within established boundaries, and only occasionally dipped its toes into something a little deeper.

That said, when this show did decide to take that next step, that was when things started getting really good.

When I started this series, there were certain things I didn’t think were going to happen. But happen they did. It’s a shame this show didn’t embrace what it had, because what it had was the makings of something worthwhile.

A solid ninety-percent of Masamune-kun’s Revenge plays its safe, making the whole thing serviceable. But it's that special ten-percent that makes this series recommendable.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? Have you seen this show? What would be your advice concerning Masamune-kun’s Revenge? Leave a comment down below because I would love to hear what you have to say.

And if you liked what you read, be sure to follow me on my social media sites so that you never miss a post or update. Also, please share this review across the internet to help add to the discussion.

I’m LofZOdyssey, and I’ll see you next time.

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