A Couple of Cuckoos - Reviews

Alt title: Kakkou no Iinazuke

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lewis2's avatar
Jun 14, 2022

First off, the anime is beautiful. The colors, the opening and ending, and the eyes are very well done. I love the colors and style of the ending song. The animation and a friend got me to watching it, and the story was interesting. I thought it was going to be them working together to get out of the marrage while butting heads every now and then. All the while, slowly falling for each other. A good chill romance anime.

Then, it showed more of their characters, and my hope for this show just died. The main girl can be cute at times, but she also does a lot of things that she ends up blaming the main guy for in one way or another. The main guy, while book smart, is a potato everywhere else. When the main girl blames him for something and tells him to do this or that to make up for it, he is like okay. Just like that. He just does it because she says he is in the wrong. If he takes two seconds to think about what is going on around him, he would have gotton out of everything. I don't know if I am getting old, have seen these two characters types so many times that I am just tired, or the writer just could not come up with anything else to make a story about these two getting together. But yeah, after the third episode, my brain just can't put up the show anymore. I say if you can make it pass that episode, you should be good to watch the rest.

5/10 story
9/10 animation
8/10 sound
1/10 characters
3/10 overall
JustInCaseD's avatar
Nov 8, 2022

Very mixed feelings on this one. But to sum it up, it felt like an incomplete product: a hollow skeleton of better anime rather than being one itself.

The Positives:
In all honesty I can comfortably say that the first 12 episodes were pretty decent. While it was kinda cringey and lacking at times (every harem inevitably is) it had some genuinely good episodes that stood out and made you think that this anime was gonna build up to something special and worthwhile. There was genuinely creative artistic and directional choices used as well, which were both tasteful and compelling to keep me interested. The episode where it ends on the beach and the sand washes away the first part of "Friend" was a creative and memorable ending of one of it's better episodes, and episode 12's conclusion of "I don't like you, yet" was also a pretty good and more importantly - genuinely hooking cliffhanger. It was on the right track for 12 episodes, there was fun to be had and it felt like there was more good things to come.

However, it didn't follow through. Because what wasn't good... was just about every episode after that.

The Negatives:
The 2nd half of the season was a near complete failure and waste of time. It was so boring and uninteresting that I went from casually watching and breezing through the first half, to drudging through every episode after that. I went from watching this willingly and for my own amusement, to basically forcing myself to endure 1 episode a day to finish this, because I had already almost 2/3rds the way and I felt that I might as well just end it so I wouldn't ever have to come back to it. The drop off was that severe. But I kept going because, "who knows, maybe it'll get better, right?"... sigh.

This anime felt like a skeleton for a plot but without the meat or other important parts to fill it out. The premise was interesting, the fake relationship/marriage setup by both parties parents was very reminiscent of Nisekoi particularly. But it lacked a lot of what made Nisekoi so fun to watch. Sure, Nagi and Erika bickered sometimes - but most of the time they just felt like a married couple with very little conflict arrising. There was hardly any genuine chemistry building or push/pull dynamics you get in real relationships. While obviously few to no people would ever relate to the scenario, it needed realism in it's relationships to get people attatched. They did it well with the Umino family, but its so one sided. We hardly ever see the Amano family, or the Segawa family for that matter.

There also wasn't any danger of their relationship being found out at any point, except when the anime cheaply sells it out towards the end to Nagi's primary love interest (the Onodera knock-off). No tension means no interest. I got so bored in the 2nd half because nothing happened and it just dragged with no even a crumb of suspense or anything to keep me invested in the story.

The ending was equally damning, the conclusion of the last episode was mundane as you could make it. With no end in sight and not an ounce of tension to make me curious to want to dig more. I did not have a bona fide favorite girl by the end of it because... there was no reason to overly care about any of them at that point. The anime lost me while it was trying to make you care, in the laziest, uneventful, and most boring way possible. It almost seemed like they were intentionally trying to bring this story down into the gutter towards the end, because it takes effort (or intentional lack thereof) to conclude a romcom this blandly.

Condensed Overall Thoughts and Conclusion:
There was potential here. The first 12 episodes had their highs and lows, but it was more highs than lows and genuinely had some very interesting moments and creative symbolism. 2nd half however... flatline disappointment all the way to the end. It felt like they stopped caring about what they were doing and just pushed out this plain, uneventful, and just straight up boring product just to get it over with. This anime is an unfinished skeleton outline of an anime that could've been something great, or that unfinished horse meme where the first half is good and the 2nd half barely had any effort put in.


If this was broken into two 12 episode seasons intead of one 24 episode run, I would give the first half a 6, maybe even a 7/10 for it's creativity and fun moments that made it genuinely enjoyable and worth watching till that point.
And the 2nd half: is a 2/10. It squandered away the progress and potential the first 12 episode had given it - going from being fun and interesting, to genuinely boring, generic, and bland at every turn. I have nothing else to say about this.

If you wanna get the most enjoyment out of this, my suggestion is to watch this up to episode 12 - then drop it. It's where the series peaks and pretty much all the fun ends and interesting things. The 2nd half of this anime's drop off is such a fatal blow to it. As a whole, I honestly would not recommend. There is far worse out there, but the end result is not good. 4/10

Recommendations for similar anime:
There are so many other anime that do what Couple of Cuckoos attempted to do, far better.

You want a more compelling story and more interesting dynamics about 2 characters forced into a relationship by their parents and having to mask that relationship from everyone else, lest there be serious consequences? Nisekoi.

A plot about a complex love triangle where the girl agress the help the MC win over the girl he likes, featuring complex relationships between their friends, parents, and each other? Toradora did it better in spades.

Or perhaps a romcom where a booksmart MC has to balance being the top student while teaching very behind pupils: We Never Learn and Quintessential Quintuplets both are superior choices to this.

I would definitely recommend any of these far before I'd would CoC.

3/10 story
7/10 animation
6/10 sound
3/10 characters
4/10 overall
Sailnir's avatar
Jul 26, 2022

Ok... the premise of this show is that three girls, each with interchangable 1D personalities, all fall in love with a guy with an equally 1D personality and he falls in love with all of them... The target demographic is desperate men who have less than a 1D personality. I just wanted to see how bad the garbage fire would become. Pretty bad in fact. If that's what you're into though I won't criticize you as a person. Try SNAFU instead.

2/10 story
5/10 animation
5/10 sound
1/10 characters
3/10 overall
krofire's avatar
Oct 3, 2022

This Spring/Summer 2022 co-production by Synergy SP and Shin-Ei Animation was a big splash for the 2022 season but bogs down half way through when it starts to tread water. We expected twelve episodes but after the fourteenth we realised we were in for the long haul. Does this really have that sort of mileage? High Schooler Nagi Umino is engaged in an academic battle to be top student at Megurogawa Academy. He would be there if it wasn’t for super-smart rival Hiro Segawa who usually beats him. He fancies her and believes he will only be good enough to date her if he can beat her in exams. His is distracted on this mission by the revelation that he was accidentally swapped at birth with another baby. He is not really the poor son of parents Youhei & Namie. His biological parents are actually the very wealthy Souichirou & Ritsuko Amano who own a hotel chain. The Amano’s raised a girl, Erika, in Nagi’s place. Erika is a pretty teenage Instagram celebrity who finds that her parents have pledged her in marriage to Nagi. To add to this (already nonsensical) complication is the fact that Nagi’s (non-biological) sister Sachi has feelings for him.

The story setup is absurd but soon settles down to a romantic soap-opera in which Nagi, Erika & Hiro go to the same High School during the day whilst Nagi, Erika & Sachi end up living together under the same roof. Which girl will Nagi end up with and will he really have to marry Erika? Later in the season it manages to insert a little extra mystery as it turns out that Nagi has an absent brother yet his father refuses to discuss the matter. What is more an unknown young girl appears in a photo of Nagi and his parents that Erika notices. The girl looks like she could be a sister to Erika & Sachi. By the time this overly-long series staggers to a close we are little closer to any conclusion. It is flirting with the idea that something here isn’t right and we are all being played. What is going on? The show is enjoyable enough if you are happy with something to spin itself out in super-slow-motion like this. Its central thrust revolves around revealing exactly how each of the girls really feels about Nagi and how he really feels about them. Whilst the girls pretend to not be interested they still vie with each other and petty jealousies ensue. It is all so very super-silly but the audience quickly forgets the original premise of the show as it morphs into your standard teen High School harem set-piece. The whole “cuckoo” concept is actually quickly forgotten as the young people learn to tackle their feelings for each other. Don’t expect much emotion as it is all played for laughs with various aspects being utterly daft. Not a show to take very seriously. Its enigmatic elements are underplayed to the point where the audience simply won’t care. Too slow-moving to really make a statement. It became a bit of a drag and not a show that we looked forward to watching a new episode every week. Now that is a big problem for an anime. There simply isn’t enough entertainment value here. They stretch the entire concept rather thin. If you are not big on silly teen harem sop-operas then this isn’t worth starting with.

7/10 story
8/10 animation
8/10 sound
7/10 characters
8/10 overall
jontipo's avatar
Jun 28, 2023

Well I was expecting something better but its another great start looking like an average harem anime with some funny moments here and there. The start was good but it moved too fast in the wrong direction, there was no depth in it. A small part of me kind of enjoyed it but a major part feels like pissed. 

2/10 story
9/10 animation
7/10 sound
5/10 characters
5/10 overall