Review: My Friend’s Little Sister Has It In For Me! (ImoZa) vols 1–3
To get straight to the point — the light novel series My Friend’s Little Sister Has It In For Me! (or ImoZa (or ImoUza) for short) might be one of the worst things that I have ever read. Nowadays, whenever I start a light novel series, I try to reserve my judgments for it until at least the end of the second volume. That’s the equivalent of the ‘Three Episode Rule’ when watching anime. In my experience, the first volume of the series is generally the worst. After that, depending on the direction of the series, and the author’s talent, the series gets better. That doesn’t happen at all for ImoZa. It gets worse and stays bad.
The general plot of ImoZa is this: The main character, Akiteru Ooboshi, is the ringleader of the amateur game development team 05th Floor Alliance, along with programmer OZ, who in real life is his friend Ozuma Kohinata, illustrator Murasaki Shikibu-sensei, who in real life is his pedophile teacher Sumire Kageishi, an anonymous voice actress (it’s a REAL TWIST once you find out who they are) and the scriptwriter Makigai Namako, whose real alias is also a TWIST bound to leave you in shock! The reason why they’re called the 05th Floor Alliance is because the characters whose real identities that we know all coincidentally live on the same floor of the same apartment complex. I know every series like this has its coincidences, but goddamn ImoZa has probably the most coincidences per page of any series I’ve ever read. At a point, I started to realize that the author didn’t put in these coincidences because they wanted to throw the reader in a loop — they did it because they’re not a good writer and needed these asspulls to connect points A and B.
Akiteru’s whole thing is that he lives his life in the most efficient of ways. From making above average grades in school but not focusing on one subject, finding the fastest way home, to avoiding romance and love because it’s ‘a waste of time’ (he’s just like me!). Also apparently ‘every girl he interacts with shows him nothing but scorn’, but there’s no actual evidence of this happening in the three volumes I read. The main two girls are Iroha Kohinta, who’s Ozuma’s little sister and likes to bug the shit out of Akiteru. She’s written as a ‘teasing girl’, but she has none of the charms that makes one funny. Somehow she still manages to be the most likable character. The other girl is Mashiro Tsukinomori, who Akiteru has to pretend to date after he makes a deal with his uncle in exchange for 05th Floor Alliance having the opportunity to work at Honeyplace Works, one of the biggest entertainment companies in Japan in this series. So yeah, he has to pretend to date his cousin for a sweet gig.
ImoZa has some of the laziest writing that I’ve ever seen. It’s clear by how many coincidences happen, but the prime example of this being a part of the climax of one of the volumes involving a character not being to arrive on time because ‘they rain into a series of pregnant women who were going into labor and needed them to call an ambulance for them, lightning striking one of the buildings near the train line and setting it on fire, the roads being so packed that they couldn’t even hail a taxi, and it raining in sheets and the wind ‘blowing stronger than ever’’. Reading paragraphs like this makes me think that this series is an elaborate joke that I’m not in on, due to language barriers. But the thing is that it isn’t. This series doesn’t have many fans in the west due to it being a light novel that only started being translated this year, but from what I know, they treat it like any other normal series. It makes me wonder what they see in the series. Do they actually enjoy it, or do they just want a girl like Iroha to fuck with them every day? While light novels are typically not the most well-written thing, they still have the quality of being enjoyable while being an easy read. While ImoZa is an easy read, I didn’t find any joy in reading it.
To be perfectly clear, this series is not meant for someone like me. Enough people dig it for it to be getting an anime series that’ll come out sometime in 2022, which is something to look forward to I guess. If there’s one good thing about this series, it’s that the art quality is great (which I have a suspicion is a reason why the sales were good enough to warrant an anime). The first three volumes are available to be bought digitally on J-Novel Club — I wouldn’t recommend this series to you, due to it not even being good kuso, but it’s your money and time.
20/100
If you would like to watch my video review of ImoZa while walking in the woods, you can check it out here
