So, stop me when this sounds crazy: The show opens with two girls on a bicycle being pursued by a pair of attack helicopters, only for the biker girl to take out the helicopters (which are also operated by teen girls) with a rocket launcher and a lightsaber…
For the sake of this joke, and because I want to believe that it would be true, I’m going to imagine you’ve stopped me there. Welcome to Koi Koi 7. Haruhi have mercy on your soul.
Along the way we also see our main character (Tetsuro) trying to find the way to his new school, where on arrival he realizes he’s the only boy. He gets a load of upskirts (courtesy of exploding helicopters) and is rescued from Truck-san by a pink haired girl he immediately gets a flashback to meeting as a child (not that he realizes that) who seems to have some fairly superhuman abilities as she jumps in, saves him, greets him by name, and then bounds off without explaining herself beyond introducing herself as Yayoi Asuka.
After a very ecchi introduction to the school (courtesy of Yayoi), Tetsuro is captured by something of the head girl of the school who’s too busy being haughty to really explain anything, Miya. Yayoi, the girls who fought the helicopters, and a few others we met briefly bust in to save him, announcing themselves as the six members of the Koi Koi Seven. Miya and her lackeys bust out the giant robots, and the Koi Koi Seven fight them off with various superhuman abilities and no logic or consequences to be seen.
We also get hints of some eyepatch-wearing Rei clone who knows and mutters Tetsuro’s name, but that’s obviously for later.
We start to get individual development/shipping episodes for the girls including would-be Super Sentai Aki, robotic Otome, quiet one with magic hair Miyabi, hot-tempered delinquent Sakuya, and even our technical villain Miya, all the while having the Rei clone play a steadily larger part. However, calling these episodes actual development may be too kind. With one exception being Otome’s episode, which is much more emotional and low-key (bringing its quality level closer to par), the anatomy of an average episode is something like three parts panty shots, three parts bouncing boobs, two parts explosions, one part each senseless nudity and shouting idiots, a hint of our Rei clone, and then a half-measure of character to top it off. Some of the character half-measures get needlessly, jarringly serious. For instance, in the middle of what’s basically a swimsuit episode, a hint of Miyabi’s past shows her slitting her wrists, with a razor falling into a pool of blood with melodramatic dark lighting… and then it’s right back to trying to make us laugh with a pool party about a space elevator.
Finally the Rei Clone girl steps to the forefront. She’s revealed as a robot known as either Celonius #28 or as another Yayoi Asuka, apparently a surveillance system that was given a humanoid body and gained thoughts and emotions, mostly yandere for Tersuro. Then, as quickly as she takes the forefront… she gets turned into an amnesiac loli with her former personality completely discarded. Well, that was useless.. True, the new version of her joins the cast, but seven episodes of buildup for this intimidating super-robot Yandere with a mysterious connection to our most enigmatic main girl, our main character, and their shrouded past only for everything teased and relevant about her to get deleted after she makes one move? It’s lame. She could have been a more credible and emotional opponent than Miya and her gang, but Koi Koi 7 clearly didn’t want to be good.
It’s especially insulting because she badly underutilized what little “front and center” screen time she has singing a vaguely expository pop song. Twice. And I use the term ‘sing’ loosely. Her mouth opens and moves, but the song is very clearly pre-recorded and doesn’t even seem like the same voice while having heavy instrumentation and effects, so it’s more like she’s badly lip-synching. In the same episodes, Miya sings the intro song in-episode (canonically so badly that her karaoke is an attack capable of disabling the Koi Koi Seven) and… it actually sounds like the character is trying to sing, as intentionally poor as it is. If it weren’t for the close up on #28’s mouth while the song is playing, I would have thought it ‘fitting’ background music. The song focus means that what opportunity she had to explain her obsession beyond the most vague terms, actually attempt to connect to Tetsuro, or confront her rivals is lost.
She’s reintroduced as Gantai, and gets a moderately clean (by this show’s standards) episode for her reintegration, but since there isn’t anything of her former personality left and at most fragmentary hints of memory, this really is a new character.
And once that’s done we get another “regular” episode, the long-delayed one for Hifumi to round out the Koi Koi Seven. That episode once again gives us an out of nowhere and unsupported dark bit where Hifumi loses her memories of even her closest friends. Of course, it passes as quickly as it comes, in the sort of drive-by drama Koi Koi 7 musters.
As goofy fanservice lunacy continues, we get a new “plot” with lots of cryptic talk about someone coming and it somehow being related to the girls, but honestly there’s no reason to be invested since the show has already proved that it doesn’t really care. The penultimate episode proceeds to throw buckets of story out, while also still cranking the fanservice up to levels better described as “smut”. We’re properly introduced to shiny scary glasses man, quickly told he’s Tetsuro’s father, quickly made aware he had a past with the homeroom teacher, told he wants some space-time gateway, and then he just sort of goes and gets it. The first stage of opening the gate drives all the regular girls in the school mad with lust for Tetsuro for no adequate reason, and the second stage requires kidnapping Yayoi and crucifying her naked in the weird giant machine beneath the school. Yayoi who we’ve been getting hints the whole show is something special, yet whose specialness was the crux of the whole matter (which we’re told is a world-threatening bad thing but not how or why, nor what our villain’s motivation is to do it).
In all of this we still get chase scenes, smutty scenes, and a giant robot fight with Miya. The episode is, for once, overstuffed, but it wastes its time on stupid things rather than things it needs to do to make the story land. So forgive me if when Yayoi sprouts her wings (which she’s done before, including in the opening like it’s nothing, so it’s not exactly a surprise, nor telling of anything given the various poorly-defined nonsense powers of the Koi Koi Seven), the magic time-space door opens to unspecified coordinates for unspecified reasons with unspecified goals on the part of the opener, and another naked lady with white angel wings appears, opens her eyes, and smiles, I don’t have anything to think about it other than “Really, you drop the magic censoring lightbeams for just barbie doll anatomy?” This should be a huge moment, and it’s nothing.
It’s especially painful because the crux of the story is Yayoi. And, seemingly, Tetsuro and Yayoi’s romance, which is given a brief trial in this episode… but was never properly built. The writers established it, but we didn’t do anything with the hinted at old memories , nor did Yayoi get a character episode where we could see her depth the way the rest of the Koi Koi Seven did. Even as botched as the executions of those episodes were, I know more about the worst-developed of those girls (Hifumi, in case you’re wondering) as people than I do about Yayoi.
And then everyone is on a tropical island. The main characters, the henchemen, the token lesbian couple… Even Miya and her gang are there, wearing inexplicable plugsuits as they pilot a submarine, or possibly a spaceship (establishing shots agreeing with later data? What’s that?) for, presumably, their usual bullying. Sure enough, the submarine (as it turns out to be) deploys the giant robots and it looks like every other episode, but for less than no reason. I guessed this was supposed to be a dream world like at the end of Mirai Nikki, but it’s really badly setup, in part because the regular world is so nonsensical. So it’s not as though we can “pull the string” of logical inconsistencies, this seems completely in line with what would happen next if we just skipped the climax, lolified the two mooks that were supposed to be like the earlier-lolified Gantai, and moved on. It takes forever, too. We get all the normal ecchi beats, all the normal stupid fighting beats, a crisis with Otome involving a flying saucer, a random hot springs interrupting the rescue and a blizzard while everyone is naked from the hot springs courtesy of Miya, and no hints of the blue angel girl, door of time, or any of that.
Evil Mad Scientist Tetsuro’s Dad shows up at about the 19 minute mark, chatting with Otome, and seemingly still as consistent as anything in Koi Koi 7 with the meat of this episode, Blue Angel Girl as his maid, who is then addressed as Tetsuro’s mother before we cut abruptly back to the black lightning and combat over the door we were seeing at the end of last episode. Here the enemies have been defeated and are seizing up, but in one of those spontaneous moments of darkness the Koi Koi Seven are bloody and broken, and Mom emerges from an explosion of the door facility carrying a seemingly dead but maybe just unconscious Yayoi. Then it’s right back to the other world with the hot springs blizzard.
The blizzard stops for… I’m not sure why and Miya comes out to fight with the combining robot doing its whole combine animation and… why do we care? Why are we supposed to want to see this? Because now the Koi Koi Seven have to fight Miya and team while naked? Aren’t you going to clue us in on the other bit?
Miya’s gang end up hoist by their own petard into a volcanic eruption, seemingly defeated for good as team naked and team Tetsuro’s Parents admire the pretty eruption and… it ends.
The episode ends.
The show ends.
Miya and her friends, despite being fairly sympathetic goofball villains are presumably dead, everyone is laughing and smiling (except the ones who are dead), Otome says her catchphrase, and we never get any resolution at all to anything that was going in in the first world, which is exceptionally mind-boggling given that the show just cut back there a scene before the end to leave us on a cliffhanger!
But no, it’s done. It’s done forever. That is legitimately where we roll the credits for the last time. We never follow up. We never learn what the hell Yayoi was supposed to be, what the deal with her connection with Tetsuro was, what his father’s entire game was (we can guess, but it doesn’t all add up), why any of this happened, what was with the girls… nothing. There’s no stinger, either, no cheeky redemption. You sit through the credits, the slow little song playing you out, right to the last second of play time, and you find yourself stranded in the empty abyss of a black screen, left alone with the slowly dawning horror that Koi Koi 7, for all it’s terrible writing, inane babble, and excessive smut was able to create something far, far worse than seeing a terrible show: the realization of there being no more terrible show left to see.
I’m at a loss, really I am. I don’t know what to say. I think I’ve finally found it, the absolute most insane and nonsensical ending in all of Anime. I certainly can’t think of how you could possibly make the situation any more batty. Maybe there’s one out there, something even more staggeringly unfit and impossible to follow, but this is going to be a tough act to follow. For all its esoteric no-budget art, the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion can be teased apart, and it is a legitimate ending. The endings of RahXephon, Ergo Proxy, and other strange shows with strange conclusions, are downright normal compared to Koi Koi 7. This twisted creation makes any of those conclusions look like “And they all lived happily ever after” by comparison.
Haruhi preserve me…
In the HP Lovecraft story, “At the Mountains of Madness”, the characters Dyer (the narrator) and Danforth encounter revelations about Elder Things and Shoggoths, even the creatures themselves, which I assure you is all very horrible, but are merely shaken. However, as they fly their plane away from the titular Antarctic mountains, Danforth looks back, and sees something in the peaks that utterly shatters his sanity, some great unspeakable and unknowable evil the mind can’t handle.
When it comes to the toll things have taken on my sanity, I’ve been fairly sturdy this far. The Endless Eight? I stood as Dyer, battered but unbowed. The reality-questioning of Serial Experiments Lain? Still Dyer. Evangelion didn’t even rate, though that perhaps because I was a little warned. The ending of Koi Koi 7 finally brought me the ‘Danforth’ experience. I sat. I stared. I failed to process. I felt my sanity bleeding away. I cued up “Still Alive” and played the song over a few times in a desperate attempt to convince myself that something was, in fact, over, flailing to experience some kind of ending. I regained my grip on reality, but was left with nothing but a single question.
What the hell was that?
Folks, I could talk about the content of Koi Koi 7 more, but it’s all a lie. I feel like everything the show does is just trying to lure you into a false sense of security. I guess that’s not just for the ending: Panty shots and covered bouncing boobs give way to bare boobs and panty shots, give way to barbie doll full nudity, trying to make you comfortable with each level of smut as it ramps up its game. And of course the plot… well we’ve just heard how that goes.
There’s nothing of value in Koi Koi 7. If you want to see smut, I’m sure there are many other sources. If you want a pretty pink-haired anime girl and her guy, I could suggest maybe Mirai Nikki? Yuno Gasai has depth and intelligence and mystery and more than just tits. She’s worth watching. Yayoi Asuka isn’t. Koi Koi 7 isn’t. It gets a big fat Fail. And given where that ultimately goes? I don’t just not recommend it, I’m warning you. Stay away. Flee. If you see Koi Koi 7 coming, run the other way and don’t look back. Don’t ever look back.
You don’t want to see what I’ve seen.