Kanojo no Kagi wo Akeru Houhou

tl;dr: A solid, though cliche, ecchi focused rom-com with a tsundere main heroine. The basic premise of this manga is that Hirose is living in small apartment that his grandfather owns while attending high school when a girl named Hayamine moves into his apartment building as the new housekeeper and Hirose immediately falls in love with her. Hayamine is working as a housekeeper because her father apparently owed Hirose’s grandfather a great debt that she has to pay off, which she seems to resent, and thus she feels like she can’t allow herself to fall in love with Hirose. Thus, she’s a tsundere that actually hasa reason for maintaining she hates Hirose despite falling for him. This plot thread ultimately goes nowhere and the resolution to it is kind of dumb to put it simply, though long before that it seemed to not really matter and the dynamic between the two was just standard tsundere stuff. Still, their relationship was solid enough for what it was and ultimately led to a reasonably satisfying conclusion to the manga overall. It was also kind of strange that this is a harem series considering that the protagonist falls in love with and begins actively pursuing the main heroine immediately with the other heroines added afterwards. Hirose tries his best to stay loyal to Hayamine, though he’s a massive pervert so he certainly wasn’t perfect. Still, while it generally is clear who the main heroine is in most harem manga, it being so in your face did lead to the relationships between Hirose and the other heroines having a kind of weird feel to them. It also felt like the two other heroines were never originally planned to be heroines but were kind of forced into it to keep the manga interesting. One of the heroines, Mai, was originally just Hirose’s favorite gravure idol due to looking a lot like Hayamine and only showed up when Hirose or other characters were looking at her in magazines, but eventually became a core character. The other, Asumi, was the class president and didn’t even have a name for like half the manga. There’s some development with Asumi and Hayamine in the typical friendship conflicting with love way that’s decent enough. Still, overall there wasn’t much substance there. There were other characters that were also added here and there but none of them were really interesting enough to really stick or have much of a presence. Ultimately, this is a very cliche manga that relies entirely on tried and tested gags and situations. There’s a decent amount of comedy there but it generally has a very narrow range with the comedy centered around each character being limited to a certain type. Similarly, while the art is good and the ecchi situations are pretty constant there was definitely some struggle in keeping them interesting as it seemed to not want to go too far. The addition of more characters helped in creating more variety overall that helped with keeping things enjoyable for most of the manga, but after not being able to pull in any new good characters for long enough the manga started getting repetitive towards the end at which point it just kind of fizzled out wrapping whatever it needed to wrap up in a pretty rushed manner.