OneRoom – Anime Girl Speed Dating

 

Every so often there comes a show that tries to push the boundaries of what’s possible in anime. It introduces new concepts and tries to come up with new ways to tell a story. For the medium of anime, that show is OneRoom.

The main character of OneRoom is you. Yes, you, the person reading this very review. I don’t know what your name is, but you’re the main character. (Now I wish I’d held onto this review and released it on April 1 like I did when I reviewed Akikan!) And yet you couldn’t have any less agency if you tried. You see, an anime must still have a plot and things need to happen, so you’re a passive observer of the events around you, almost like you’re the player character of White Knight Chronicles, where you spent over an hour creating your personal character to look just right, but then once the game starts you find out that the character you spent so long designing is going to just sit in the background watching everything happen and not actually contribute to anything.

The anime is set up so that the characters address the camera, with the assumption that the camera is from your point of view. And at first, this seems like an interesting set up for a show, but the trouble comes when you as the viewer expects the anime to commit to it. However, OneRoom struggles against its own premise every step of the way. From the very first episode, immersion is broken when the camera suddenly shifts angles and you’re looking at the character from the side, from a Dutch angle, even from within the frame of a trestle bridge in one episode. Am I the protagonist of a harem anime or a member of the Q Continuum, and while I’m jumping around the environment, does the girl even notice me teleporting?

A few episodes even feature several time jumps between scenes, and for episodes that are only four minutes long (including end credits, so the actual meat of the episode is three and a half minutes), that doesn’t give a lot of time to allow for any meaningful kind of character interaction. Case in point, episode nine of the second season, “Amatsuki Mashiro Is Searching” has you taking her picture outside, meeting up at the elevator with her accidentally, meeting up on an overpass somewhere accidentally, seeing her at your door asking for help, flipping her breaker to restore her apartment’s power, and sitting down for a drink, all in the span of three and a half minutes while she constantly calls you Hentai-san, or “Mr. Pervert” as it’s been translated. I’m pretty sure that unless there’s something seriously wrong with me, I wouldn’t normally experience those kinds of time jumps without someone noticing that I’m sleepwalking through life. If I were to somehow acquire and use Adam Sandler’s remote control to get through life like this, I’m sure those around me would be able to tell when I’m actively engaged in my life and when I’m just fast forwarding through the boring parts.

And boring is the best word to describe OneRoom. Despite the short running time and the twelve episodes per season and the fact that each storyline takes only fourteen minutes to watch (plus end credits), this is an anime that I couldn’t be less engaged with. I think it’s because it’s supposed to be me interacting with the girls, but the situations I’m in are also assuming my reactions and are largely getting them wrong. I feel like I’m getting to know the characters only a little bit but am supposed to pretend like I’m super close to them by the end of each story. Within the same span of time that you get to know a girl in OneRoom, you can run a quick dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV, prepare and stir fry a delicious meal of meat and veggies, enjoy a warm shower or watch fourteen minutes of a better anime.

The time skips are the biggest issue here. As the main character, I’m supposed to be close to these girls, but fourteen minutes per girl is too short a time to spend getting to know a character, especially with how little that actually gets done in an episode. It’s assumed that most of the “boring” work in the relationship, like helping Yui with her studies, happens off camera, but that misses the point of the anime happening to you. We don’t have Adam Sandler’s remote control. We’re supposed to be actively engaged in each relationship but we’re only really getting the highlight reel, and most of the girls don’t show much character beyond what they show you, with very little room for actual growth before you’ve moved on to the next girl.

There is only one exception in the series, and I think that this is largely because I’ve been really into music-based anime lately (and not just me). We get to watch Moka, the third girl from season one, performing her music in the park a couple times and it feels like there’s more to her than just someone who talks with the viewer for a few minutes. She’s a stronger girl than Yui and older than Natsuki, so she was my favourite girl, but the second season continued Yui’s story instead and then introduced us to Minori, granddaughter of a bathhouse owner, and Mashiro, a former gymnast who has decided that you’re a pervert because you’re a photographer.

OneRoom is promoted as a “virtual anime”, as if you’re watching it while wearing a VR headset, but the thing about experiencing it like a video game is that in most first person games, the camera doesn’t immediately shift focus away from the important bits of a scene the way the camera does in OneRoom. That’s the issue here. If it were actually me, I’d be watching the girl speak, not glitching my camera out, especially if the girl has some way to tell if you’re not looking in her direction.

But if you treat the anime like a game, it still falls short. I know you can’t expect an anime to be as long as a video game, and if I were to take an anime based on a visual novel and experience both, the visual novel would be longer, but most of those anime consist of full 24 minute episodes and allow for a lot of character interaction. The visual novel also gives you a lot of time with each character to get to know them and depending on how the game is programmed, you can either naturally gravitate towards the girl you favour and the game automatically lets them win your affection, or you are given a choice and if the game’s written well, the choice is very meaningful to the player.

Another aspect of OneRoom that is unclear is whether or not it’s meant to be the same protagonist in every scenario or if you’re playing out very different lives in each one. At one point, your sister shows up (Natsuki) and helps you take care of yourself while you’re trying to deal with being overworked. Meanwhile, you have enough time to help tutor someone (Yui) and you apparently have a pipe dream of being a published writer. You also live and work in a bathhouse at one point, but also go to school and are part of the Gardening Club. Wow, I guess you’re Mr. Perfect. You do it all!

I feel like OneRoom is an anime full of missed opportunities. Girls stick around long enough to get what they want, but most of the meaningful interactions are left out. We don’t actually sit there beside Yui and give her encouragement as she struggles with a difficult concept in her studies, or nurse Moka back to health when she gets sick. A lot of the heavy lifting in the series seems to come from telling and not showing, It’s the sort of thing that I didn’t like about Brave Story: New Traveler. In an otherwise great game, the justification for the main character getting Narnia’d was to save his best friend from an unknown sickness. We don’t get to experience this kind of bond, we’re just told it exists because the main character has to get to the adventure as soon as possible. It meant that at the very end, even though the main character had family and friends he left behind and clearly belonged back home, we had bonded with the characters in the alternate world and from our perspective, the main character belonged in this alternate world.

That’s how it feels like in OneRoom. We’re the main character from Brave Story: New Traveler and although we know academically that we’ve got this close bond with all the girls in the show, we spend so little time actually experiencing their stories that it just feels mostly empty. I don’t know if this anime is supposed to be for the general anime-watching audience who enjoys shows such as Toradora and Clannad or if it’s meant for a different audience, one that’s a bit more lonely and is willing to go along with a show like this to bring them a little bit of meaningful human interaction. We like to portray these individuals as sad and pitiful, poor excuses for men, but it’s quite likely that there are some very good reasons that they have trouble with real girls and need a show like OneRoom to help get over that. I don’t know, maybe I’m giving the show too much of a benefit of the doubt here, but I’m trying to figure out what the justification is to have a third season, when excellent shows like Spice & Wolf are only allowed two.

I also can’t help but feel like there’s something here, something potentially brilliant if only it could be developed a little more. Instead of four minute episodes with time jumps to get to each important scene and four episodes to get to know one girl before jumping to the next, what if each episode was the standard length of a regular anime episode (24 minutes) and took place in real time? I’m talking sort of like 24, but also in first person like what OneRoom is supposed to be, and lock the camera in place. No bridges to occasionally hide in, no random side angles, every shot should be exactly where the main character is looking at all times. Each episode is a 24 minute slice of the growing relationship between you and one girl. It’ll be the same girl over the course of the entire series, and the episode count will be left be up to whoever makes this version of the show. Even a thirteen episode season should be enough for meaningful character growth.

An episode might consist of cooking a meal with someone as they open up to you about some of their problems, another might consist of you at the park watching them perform and interacting with her between songs (yeah, you can tell which girl I think is the best girl). And so on. If it were carefully written so that a story arc could develop over the course of the season, it might work as an anime. Or it might fall just as flat as OneRoom and be even more boring, I don’t know. I’m just coming up with ways in which I would attempt to improve the series, I don’t know if it would actually help.

I think this is the main reason why I had such a negative reaction to OneRoom. It seems like it should’ve been a kind of visual ASMR anime, but it turned out to be more of a standard anime that sometimes remembers it’s supposed to be told in first person. I’ve experienced many ASMR videos on YouTube and I find that I like the ones with a little bit of a story to them. No surprise there, since I listen to a lot of podcasts. (There are also ASMR podcasts, and an entire genre called ASMR on Spotify.) My favourite channel so far is the PonyASMR Project. The videos take a long time to make, so there aren’t that many on the channel, but they’re very nice to listen to when relaxing during other activities or even when just dozing. There’s a first person perspective scene that plays out during a large part of the video, whether you’re sharing a picnic with Fluttershy or you’re visiting your teacher, Princess Celestia, and then the rest of the video consists solely of ASMR-inducing sound effects as you, the protagonist, drifts off to sleep. In a sense, it’s similar to OneRoom, but there’s nothing there to pull you out of the immersion and remind you that you’re watching anime.

The third season of OneRoom is currently being broadcast and is simultaneously being uploaded to Crunchyroll. So far, it appears that season three is exactly the same as seasons one and two, with randomly jumping camera angles in a first person anime, frequent Adam Sandler remote control time skips and very short episode lengths. I don’t know if it’s a plus or a minus, but there is also a companion series available called Room Mate where instead of girls, a group of guys interact with a female first person character. So if you’re female or you want to feel feminine, there’s that. Otherwise, you’d likely be better off playing an actual visual novel or listening to some ASMR videos.