Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included

"Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included" is a good overall anime. However, there is an issue with it. The anime features a female MC with good character development, but it has an overly cringy and bland male MC with an uninteresting personality. Story-wise, "Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included" has a decent plot involving a clueless angel named Towa and a slightly awkward male MC named Shintarou. The premise of an angel adapting to human life alongside a regular guy has a lot of potential. Towa's innocence and Shintarou's awkwardness could create a compelling dynamic. They pair up decently well, at least theoretically, providing moments of humorand charm. However, the big issue is that Shintarou remains overly bland throughout the entire series. He shows almost no maturity and has zero interests besides pleasing Towa by giving her gifts and attention. A good comparison to this anime is the first season of "Tonikaku Kawaii" (AKA, TONIKAWA: Over The Moon For You), which features a male MC named Nasa who has a well-constructed personality. In "Tonikaku Kawaii," Nasa is shown as intelligent, hardworking, and deeply in love with his wife, Tsukasa. The producers actively show Nasa's beliefs and the reasons behind his actions, making him relatable and engaging. His actions are driven by his values and goals, which are clearly communicated to the audience. In contrast, Shintarou feels like a blank self-insert character with almost no personality. This is probably because the producers were afraid of giving him more depth that could be critiqued. As a result, Shintarou's motivations and actions often feel shallow and unconvincing. Here's an example to illustrate this: [Tiny Spoiler] In the last episode, Shintarou buys a gift for Towa at a gift shop just because she glanced at it for a moment. This act, meant to be touching, falls flat due to its lack of depth. Instead of showing Shintarou's growth or genuine understanding of Towa, it feels like a forced attempt to create an emotional high point. Shintarou's decision seems driven more by the need for a "wholesome" moment than by any real connection between the characters. Compared to other well-crafted series, where such gestures are based on solid character development, this scene in "Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included" feels like a missed opportunity. It focuses on surface-level interactions and misses the deeper emotional resonance that could have been achieved with better, more thoughtful writing. 🗿 Overall, a tad disappointing and expected a lot more out of this anime, 6.5/10. 🗿

Tenshi-Tsuki isn’t anything new. Teenaged hs student who somehow lives alone meets beautiful girl who ends up being an angel on the way home one day, she moves in, she acts as the perfect mother/wife figure to him, other girls join harem etc. We’ve seen this set up dozens of times, but where Tenshi-Tsuki separates itself is in execution. The girls are all cute, likeable and the story is really about them all coming together and forming a friendship group with the MC at the center rather than just competing with each other for the MC’s affections. They all genuinely care about one another andit makes for a very lighthearted and enjoyable viewing experience. It really ends up playing out more like a traditional wholesome CGDCT slice of life with the harem aspect in the background. The added spice of each girl having supernatural origins and struggling to connect with other people as a result was a cool twist. Really enjoyed seeing all of them gradually come out of their shells and be accepted for the first time in their lives. The show is also really damn funny. It plays on some tropes heavily, but I just thought the jokes landed well. The girls all have their dumb blonde moments and they’re just so earnest and pure you can’t help but giggle when watching them. Like most MCs of this genre, Shintaro is a little annoying with how flustered he gets and how he acts at times towards the girls, but he’s not the worst by any means. He’s actually pretty reliable and knows exactly what to say and when to say it. Room for improvement, but he’s solid. Fanservice is surprisingly not a big thing in here. Yea there’s a beach episode and some occasional shots, but it’s nothing crazy and definitely mild compared to other harem shows, so if that’s something you’re not into, you may appreciate that. For me it was a little disappointing since I love fanservice, but hey, can’t win em all. Bottom line, this is a fun show that surprised me. Thought it would be the generic harem of the season and ended up giving me some of my fave characters and moments this season. Gorgeous art, designs and a nice seiyuu line up. I’ll miss it a lot. I will certainly be reading the manga. Tenshi-Tsuki gets 9 wings out of 10.

It's pretty easy to rag on these kinds of nothingburger romcom shows. The absolute lack of plot, utterly unimpressionable protagonists and cliché heroines certainly don't do them any favors, for the most part these are the embodiment of slop. However as someone who typically enjoys these kinds of shows I understand their appeal most of the time. Generally speaking they succeed so long as they're able to cultivate an easy going atmosphere with natural gags and a cast with some semblance of chemistry. Unfortunately this is not a success story. More or less, this does everything I previously mentioned that earns these kinds of showsthat slop moniker. This is best seen in the cast which has next to no chemistry or impressionability whatsoever. The main character, Shintarou, ends up being one of the least proactive or personable protagonists I've seen. In some sense it fits the kind of a low presence NPC type male that these guys get shoehorned into but this ends up working against the show because a relationship is entirely dependent on the interactions of the characters. Shintarou occupies so little space in any scene that you could probably end up removing him and there wouldn't be too much of a decrease in quality. He really doesn't have any hobbies or personality quirks and doesn't interact with the girls enough to really warrant any kind of romantic flags. The bar is REALLY low and he still doesn't even jump. The girls are equally at fault here because they also don't put much effort into selling themselves. Anyone who watches these kinds of shows only really watches them for the girls anyway so it's kind of an issue when they don't end up being all that interesting. They don't even play into the supernatural elements (the entire gimmick) all that much, aside from Towa flying around every now and then. They all end up stick to one or two personality quirks and don't make any real effort into appealing to the viewer. Towa is a maid that's clueless about the world, Tsumugi is normal, Lilishka is a chuuni, Noel is an otaku, and Hisui is shy (she also barely shows up). The main issue is that most of these characters don't have enough time to showcase their personality, which is an issue because this is a comedy first and a romance second so the personality should be their entire appeal. Noel is the sole exception to this as she jumps all over the emotional spectrum and is clearly having the most fun out of any of them. All her interactions with Shintarou are extremely fun and her completely out of touch perspective of normie life is fun. It's almost as if she was written by an entirely different person because she steals any scene she's in while the rest are left mostly on the sidelines until they're the focus of the episode. And that's another issue, the girls don't really interact with each other all that much. While they do pair up occasionally, they're usually put into one off situations with Shintarou until it's their time to swap. When it comes to harem comedies like this it's far better if the group is able to interact as a whole rather than segmented off. It allows for all of them to shine and opens up far more comedic potential as their personalities are forced to interact with each other. If their sole partner is Shintarou, who almost never emotes or says anything outside of stock phrases, it becomes extremely difficult for any of them to gain any foothold and hinders the viewing experience immensely. Despite entirely ragging on the show, it doesn't actually dig too deep into being *bad* it's more so just really mediocre. There's a pretty tried and true formula for these kinds of shows by now but that means that they have to really sell the heroines or the comedy in order for them to really stand out. This show does neither and ends up feeling really stunted for the most part. It's a shame because they clearly show they can make a fun character in Noel but the rest of the characters come far from measuring up.

Obligatory TMT. One Room, Hiatari Futsuu, Tenshi-tsuki (or Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included if you prefer the localized name) is a feel-good anime centering around the lives of Shintaro and Towa, and in all honesty, that's about it. It's a great-looking, feelgood, substance-less show whose primary good points come from it's production. The plot is haphazard, because it's not meant to be much of story told as much as it resembles all of the working parts of a basic romcom. The heroines, for the most part, are interesting characters (sans Hisui who I have some grievances with) who work as fun foils for one another -even with a surprisingly mature scene with Noeru. I think it's safe to say that I did enjoy watching this show. My biggest criticism is that a lot of the more serious heart-to-heart scenes are downright eyerolling, and a big example of this I feel is Hisui. Hisui, as a character, feels like unnecessary bloat to the cast at best, and a romcom plot device at worst. For how much screentime is dedicated to her, she fails to stand out as a particularly interesting character, and especially not one that I'd rather see have screentime or development over the other heroines. For all of the attention the plot draws to her, there is very little meaningful payoff be it comedic or otherwise. My worry is that this may be a precedent for a hypothetical (though definitely not happening) second season - if they introduce new characters just to develop them slightly and take away from the currently implemented cast, the series will likely be worse off for it. Please just let me see more of the chuuni-vampire. Another nitpick that doesn't affect the score of the show but does reflect the current status of the anime industry is the localized subtitles on Crunchyroll. I understand that not every western viewer is gonna know what a "JK" is, but localizing it to "zoomer" just makes me frown. It's not offensively bad like the dubbing of Dragonmaid, but come on, man... All in all, though, that's just my opinion. If you want to watch a 12-episode anime with a great production value and a solid cast with decent humor, this anime is for you. If you want something more, I'd recommend looking elsewhere.