You should know that as I’m typing this review, I learned that this show is getting a second season. Whether I want to watch it or not for my Otaku Theater column is something I haven’t decided yet. So I’m just going to dive straight in on this one: did I enjoy watching The Quintessential Quintuplets?
Well my first problem in this review post was typing out both ‘quintessential’ and ‘quintuplets’ without the spell checker going off. It worked, by the way, and so I can type out The Quintessential Quintuplets as many times as I want. But I’m sure you’d rather hear about the adventures and mishaps of the quintuplets themselves – Ichika, Nino, Miku, Yotsuba, and Itsuki. Each one of them are both the same and very different; I suppose that’s fairly normal when it comes to twins, or rather quintuplets. But as I watched the opening episode, and got to watching more of the story, I started to notice something that I’d seen in another recent show I’d been watching for the Otaku Theater column: We Never Learn.
In that show, we had one Nariyuki Yuiga, a well-educated but poor third-year who discovers that he’s to get a scholarship at a top university, that effectively pays for his entire college education. The one catch is that he is required to tutor three girls at school who are geniuses in their own fields, literature, science and athletics, who want to pursue their own different careers. A pretty easy plot for a harem comedy show, but it was the character design that made me enjoy it so much. I don’t usually have much to say when it comes to harem shows, and so for something like that to have an effect on me must mean something.
Now here, in The Quintessential Quintuplets, the plot goes on something fairly similar. High school kid Futaro Uesugi is academically gifted, but he has a lot of baggage. His mother has died, he’s lost all of his friends, and his father has shamed the family by being in a large amount of debt. This all changes when the incredibly wealthy Nakano family come in, and their quintuplet girls all transfer in. Because of his outstanding grades, Futaro is quickly brought in to be a private tutor for the five of them; the only thing is that all of them have abysmal grades, and have no desire to learn anything at school.
Each harem show is different to one another after all, and so is The Quintessential Quintuplets. Here we have five girls who all have interests in some things, but fail miserably in others. After watching these episodes, I began to see the notion that the combined knowledge of the five of them make one. Futaro makes it clear right from the beginning that he wants them to actually enjoy their studies via what they are interested in already. For instance, we learn pretty early on that Miku is very interested in Sengoku warlords, but feels like she can’t tell the others as she is well aware that that is all she knows, due to scoring the lowest out of all of them. Later on, we discover that Nino has an interest in becoming a chef, yet simply does not want to interact with anyone she doesn’t know. Maybe it is my own real lack of ‘experience’ when it comes to harem shows, but as I watched the show, I couldn’t help but feel…annoyed somehow. What annoyed me even more is that I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was exactly that was annoying me.
Past harem shows I watched have been the type to have the male lead be this average and unremarkable guy be forced into an unlikely and inescapable situation, usually with too much ecchi and fanservice for its own good. I suppose that was one reason why I like We Never Learn so much, because the male lead was such a unique guy compared to the average joe. Here, Futaro is that same unique guy, but his blunt and no-nonsense attitude is what makes him really hard to like, compared to the five girls. In time, the girls warm up to him and decide to knuckle down and study, and this being the harem show that it is, all of them develop feelings for him. How, I have no idea, because Futaro can often be a real jerk.
As I brought up earlier, the girls’ late mother adopted the philosophy of five things to make one whole as she raised them. Ichika, Nino, Miku, Yotsuba and Itsuki are all totally different, which makes Futaro’s job even harder. While some welcome the idea of having someone come in and help them with their grades, they are, for the most part, more interested in wasting away their youth. This originally led me to the idea that the five of them immediately assume that their rich daddy will throw money at their problems to make them go away, so no matter how bad their grades are, they can just live in luxury without a care in the world. We can see straightaway that this is something that frustrates Futaro. Being the most responsible member of his family (his moe younger sister is too busy being moe, and his free-spirited and lazy father doesn’t seem to want to make any effort to pay off his debt), he wants to drive the idea of bettering oneself into the five girls’ heads. Eventually it pays off, and so it’s just that journey that we end up watching here.
While some tiny little plot points and character designs stand out slightly, most of the things I’ve mentioned are things that are, well, pretty standard for harem shows. And that is precisely what the show is: pretty standard. We don’t get anything too original in the show, the five girls are all written well and all have traits that we see in so many other harem shows, and the story/plot doesn’t dive into anything strange or weird that would put off the viewer. Yes, the male lead can be a Marmite character, and his father has to be one of the worst father figures in any show I’ve seen. And yes, the animation itself is nothing to write home about either. I suppose it’s better to get a few things right than try and do everything in a less-than-average way. The Quintessential Quintuplets is a show that we can watch at our own pace, and not have to be too concerned about it going in a direction that can divide the fanbase…too much. Maybe my ‘pretty standard’ critique is a little too harsh; could be because I’m not, and have never really been, typically the type who would immediately run to a harem show.
