Anime: Masamune-kun no Revenge 4zw5n

I might be exaggerating but this is honestly the worst anime I've ever seen.

It has all of the same old, boring romance tropes, and it adds absolutely nothing to the genre.
The MC is bland, unfunny and not memorable at all, while the two main love interests should be isolated from the society forever. The side characters are not as bad, but they are not interesting enough to sway my opinion of this steaming pile of garbage even a bit.

The art and animation is fine, there's nothing I can complain about, and the sound is okay for the most part, although sometimes the tracks are overly dramatic or just not fitting.

The story... The 'story' has an okay premise, a boy once rejected by a girl seeks revenge after years. Sadly, the premise is the only interesting thing, because the rest of the so called 'plot' is so ridiculously bad, you'd be better off reading gay naruto fanfics written by a 12 year old. Right at the end, the anime has the audacity to even bait the viewer into thinking a pair of characters will get together.

I like to finish what I watch. I respect content, I don't want to judge things unfairly because everything is created by someone. Someone's effort goes into making anime, writing and drawing manga, so I always try to put myself in the author's shoes, and I think I'm fairly lax when it comes to rating stuff. BUT, but. This is the first time I have felt genuine disgust towards a show.
It might be just my pent-up frustration, I might be biased since I've seen this show's formula done many times, but better, but I have to say, I wouldn't recommend this show to anyone.

If you like getting blue-balled, watching shows without any real ending or coherent story and you enjoy seeing a bad show get even worse with each ing minute, this should be right up your alley.

Review
Masamune-kun no Revenge (Masamune’s Revenge) kicks off with an interesting idea for a comedy slice-of-life, especially when you put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist. This is, as the title implies, a tale of a sweet revenge of a boy who was previously a chubby no-one and his previous crush, a cute tsundere that humiliated everyone trying to date her. It would be a fulfillment to see the new version of this boy, now a handsome guy, crushing the dreams of the arrogant girl, right? Well, it would be.

Masamune’s Revenge, however, loses a lot of its power when it simply forgets what it is about and dives head-on into your basic ecchi comedy set in the goddamn high-school. Instead of seeing a tale of revenge, what you get is mostly the very same romance with your girl-magnet protagonist and the deres templates of our everyday shows.

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1. A wasted potential
   Masamune’s Revenge gets its share of comical parts, surely, but its wasted potential is immense. The reason is simple, instead of making comedy with the revenge itself, the show ends up creating an assortment of minor childish elements that completely changes the heart of this tale. It turns the snob tsundere whose heart we initially want crushed into a secretly comical glutton. Our vengeful protagonist ends up being your everyday protagonist incapable of dating girls. Even secondary characters such as the teacher end up being the very same ridiculous childish adult.
   
   No Revenge?
   Yeah. There is nothing making you care for this annoying protagonist and hoping to see his revenge. He is a bastard, our same light novel guy who keeps being a dick yet everyone cares for him in some way. We get overwhelmed by cute girls and none of them end up being a tool to the very concept of this show.
   
   Your everyday comedy
   Masamune’s Revenge ends up only with the elements every other comedy show has. Flat-chested jokes, blushing situations, some rare ecchi scenes, harem, and so on. It can get able with that, especially because the show offers a wide array of deres and characters, and it manages to not overflow the screen with the very same ones throughout the show. There are a few arcs where new people are introduced and some situations created by these secondary cast can be on the upper side of a comical genre.
   
   But oh... the cast
   Ok. You can get funny scenes from the cast, but damn. A show can hardly get more generic than this. Each and every character here fits the shoes of our industry-standard templates. There is no escape from it even if the show tries to present them as something else. Aside from our boring protagonist and tsundere princess, there are cute deres, genki deres, silent deres, frail deres, and so on. As I mentioned, even a forty-something years old teacher is a cute chibi loli. Jeez, I would be certain this is the by-the-books cast of a light novel, but incredibly the source material is a manga.
   
   At least is nicely done
   Well, even if there’s little to savage in regards to scripts and designs, the Silver Link studio delivers these deres with a decent quality and consistency. They often look damn cute and you may want to hug them, but that is only until most of them start speaking, which is when your eardrums may get painful and you may back away and put on some earplugs to save your hearing. Yeah, standard stuff.
   

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Comments
I don’t get it. How the hell did I manage to watch this fully? Gods. Masamune’s Revenge is a condensed soup of your everyday annoying tropes and standards and it offers basically nothing besides an interesting starting idea that is quickly lost. I was expecting to see a guy dating a girl just to ditch her, but instead this is a gruesome romance going through the same path as every other of the genre. It has the blushing, the deres, annoying attempts to force comical personalities to the cast such as gluttony, fujoshi, and absurd air-headedness. Yeah, nothing new. Nothing.

I could recommend this though, but that’s only if you have an insatiable desire for cute lolis and the high-school setting. Well, at least the community score is more spot-on than our seasonal hypes.

Masamune is a health-obsessed narcissist driven by his obsession with getting revenge on Aki by making her fall in love with him, and then breaking her heart. Aki is a man-hating bully whose nickname in high school is "Cruel Princess" for her public deconstruction of boys who confess to her or ask her out. Masamune is intelligent yet naive, blinded in a sense by his obsession. Naturally, Masamune finds a way into Aki's world by stalking her until he stumbles upon her in the gym storage room. She's busy eating an incredibly large portion of food, which she does in secret lest she be branded a glutton. With that little bit of cover, the courtship begins...

For the most part, this show (and the manga it's adapted from) is relatively template with predictable plot points, but the characters are just interesting enough and the various plot elements just surprising enough that there's a real story that gets told. Both Masamune and Aki have interesting stories to tell (though Aki's story isn't entirely told in this 'first season'). Masamune, as a younger child, was an overweight spoiled rich kid who wound up being bullied by the neighborhood boys. Aki befriended him and protected him from the bullies. Then one day she gives him the nickname "Pig's Foot" and rejects him. Desperate for revenge, Masamune undergoes an intense life transformation in a secluded rural area with his grandpa. He loses his extra weight, builds muscle, and returns to his hometown dead-set on revenge. The real underlying mystery, which isn't entirely resolved in 'season one' is why Aki's such a manhater. Exactly what happened in those days of their youth?

The antics in this show are template but fun. Yoshino, Aki's servant and Masamune's "Shishou", decides to help Masamune in his revenge plot. In the mix as well are Masamune's various classmates. Here on AniDB, this show is classified as a harem, and though this really isn't true, there are some various love rivalries that pop up.

What irks me about this show is that it's only "season one", and as of the date the last episode aired, I hadn't heard anything about a second season being picked up. So nothing is actually resolved in this season. Also, the latter half of the manga (presumably the 'second season') is more interesting than the first half because the characters' stories get fully told. Masamune, Aki, Yoshino, and even Kanetsugu (introduced late in the show) all have interesting stories.

If you don't like open-ended show endings, then this show really isn't for you, at least not until (if) a second season comes out to complete the story. But if the open end doesn't bother you too much, you may find this show interesting or even amusing. Although a template romcom, this show has just enough uniqueness that it's fun to watch. Masamune is naive but he isn't an idiot. And Yoshino, Aki's attendant, is oftentimes quite delicious.

Level of Ecchi/Fanservice/Taboo - Surprisingly little, really. The first few episodes have some gratuitous panty shots (presumably as a hook), and there is of course the required beach episode, but this show is quite tame in that regards. A few panty and chest size jokes (required by the genre) can be found as well, but I believe there is little else that might offend people of a 'general audience'.

Intended Age Range - This is pretty solidly a typical high schoolers' show.

Art & Animation - 5 - Perfectly average. Nothing stands out about the animation or the art. It is exactly what one would expect from a romcom.
Sound - 5 - Perfectly average. Nothing particularly noteworthy, bad or good.
Story - 8 - Although the plot is predictable, I found that I rather like how the story is told and how various details progress. The manga is better, and the latter half of the manga, which will presumably be in a season two if they make one, has a much more interesting story. That said, I like how the predictable plot was written and presented here. There's something... refreshing... about a slightly 'off-template' approach to templates.
Character(s) - 8 - Aki's known as a "cruel princess" because of how mean she can be, but there is actually some complexity to her character. Her story doesn't get revealed until the latter half of the manga, meaning that it isn't revealed here in the anime. Likewise with Yoshino, who is a lot of fun. Masamune is just a pretty boy, but he isn't an indecisive idiot like most leading males in romcoms. His goal is to woo Aki and he has his fair share of both successes and failures. Kanetsugu, introduced later on, is also an interesting character... whose story isn't really told until the second half of the manga (thus not in the show). And so on. My 8 rating here for Character is skewed because I can't see the characters as 'just what is shown in season one'. Since I've read the manga and know their real stories, I have no choice but to weight my vote here based on what I know that has yet to be revealed.
Value - 6 - A 'generic' romcom, which does rely on some unique plot points in order to provide a sense of normalcy to the situation. Overall, I think the presentation is good, and I'm very relieved that they didn't try to just 'end' this show in twelve eps. I really hope there's a Season Two.
Enjoyment - 7 - Sadly, there isn't a whole lot to say here. I like this show because of its somewhat unique approach to otherwise template plot points. The characters aren't bad either. Watching the show through is fun enough. But I preferred the second half of the manga, meaning that a 'season two' of this show would really help to round things out. I'm keeping my rating and my hopes high for a second season.

Conclusion - 7 - Ultimately, this is a show that will only appeal to romcom fans. And as a romcom, it really is only about average. But it has the potential to be better than average if they produce a second season to close up the story and conclude all the build-up they did in this 'season one'.