My First Girlfriend is a Gal

Episode 7

So far each episode has generated a fair amount of opportunities to be sexy, but while past episodes have mostly opted for visual fan service, this week takes a different approach. To be sure, there's still some visual fan service, such as a couple of undergarment shots involving Yui and some flashed cleavage, but the heavy effort here is more on the audible front, with each of the girls taking turns reading lewd scenes from trashy light novels, with varying degrees of embarrassment. Yukana and Yui don't handle it well, but Ranko and Nene actually seem to be getting into it. Adding to the humor, the identified novels are all ripoffs of prominent fanservice franchises like High School DxD, The Testament of Sister New Devil, and Hybrid x Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia (which is used unaltered, perhaps because these anime share at least a director if not other staff), and the descriptions of each sex scene are all gloriously awful. If you're aware of Reki Kawahara's much-lambasted Chapter 16.5 for the first Sword Art Online novel, the scenes the girls read are about on that level.

All of this comes about because Junichi and all the girls wound up getting summer jobs at a maid café – him as a kitchen worker, them as the waitresses – and the manager has a twisted take on a special event where the waitresses are supposed to read for the customers. Otherwise, the maid café segment is pretty standard stuff, except for the incident where one customer makes the mistake of getting a boner around Ranko. At least as interesting are the briefer segments that show what Junichi's friends are up to. SHINPEI and Keigo wind up working as a Toranoana store (a chain of doujinshi stores in Japan), where SHINPEI shows a not-too-surprising hypertalent for store operations, to the point that the manager briefly lets him take over as temporary manager; he may have a career in management awaiting him. Meanwhile, Minoru proves once again to be one of the most noxious anime characters in quite some time, with comments like “I can't express my real feelings because they'd be criminal” to little girls at the daycare where he works.

This episode is largely mundane, but it does have two other things going for it. The different ways that everyone marks the anticipated trip date on their calendar is neat, and the scene with Junichi and Yukana at the end of the episode is well done. It's a simple, sweet, and thoroughly ordinary scene about a couple discussing the things they want to do together, but that's also the point. Yukana may be a gal, and Junichi may be a timid otaku, but they're talking like a normal couple. While I wouldn't mind a bit more sassiness from Yukana, they're increasingly making an appealing pair. That dynamic helps carry the series through problems like the wholly uninspired artistic effort or Minoru's unsavory predilections.

Rating: B

My First Girlfriend is a Gal is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.