The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Tying the Knot With an Amagami Sister

Uryu Kamihate has had a rough start to life, but plans to forget it all by achieving his dream—matriculating into medical school. But when he arrives at his new foster home, a working shrine, his dream of a quiet place to study goes up in smoke. Not only will he be living with the three beautiful, lively Amagami sisters—but he learns that he must marry one of them and take over the shrine.

Tying the Knot With an Amagami Sister is based on the manga series by Marcey Naito. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

Believe it or not, I'm not averse to a fun harem rom-com every once in a while (I mean, just look up my review of The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses) but these first episodes that just go down the checklist of harem clichés are rough. Honestly, there's only one thing even remotely original in this first episode—and it's the worst part: the protagonist himself.

Uryuu is the worst kind of atheist. It's not that he doesn't believe in the gods that's the problem. It's not even that he thinks it's stupid that others believe in religion because it doesn't match with “facts and logic.” It's that he uses every damned opportunity to preach his own “gospel” and belittle everyone around him in the process. I mean, come on. These girls are literally priestesses and you come into their house—right next to their holy shrine—and crap all over their most deeply held personal beliefs? You are a guest in their home, man! You don't have to agree with them but common politeness should at least tell you to keep your trap shut.

But Uryuu just can't seem to do that, even going so far as to hit the girls with his BS when they're down. Is it naive to think that the gods will perform a miracle just to help Yuna find her hair tie? Sure. But time and place, man!

Besides, it's not divine intervention the sisters are talking about. Not really. They're using their belief in the gods as a morale boost. They don't think the gods are going to magically return the hair tie (even if that's what literally happens in the end). But even an atheist should be able to understand that if the girls are driven and in good spirits, they'll have a much higher chance of finding the hair tie than if they were hopeless and depressed.

Yet, the worst thing about Uryuu is that he's a damned hypocrite. He only takes an hour in the woods to throw all his beliefs out the window and pray for divine help. This goes to show that he doesn't have any real convictions. He's just using every possible chance to lash out at the gods for not saving his mother, even if he's hurting real people by doing so. What's happened to him is tragic—and I'm sure the series is about him overcoming his pain and the hatred in his heart—but honestly, I don't care enough about him after this first episode to sit through that.

Oh, I am torn on this one. It certainly doesn't put its best boob forward – the episode opens with our hapless hero Uryu getting blamed for walking in on the eponymous Amagami sisters in their underwear despite doing no such thing; he's just there when eldest sister Yae opens the door. This is followed by a series of 90s-era rom-com standbys of the “lucky perv” variety. You know–one sister falling with her breasts on his head, him falling on the underage sister in a suggestive pose, the third sister (who keeps throwing salt at him) thinking he's pouncing on her in the night when he's not. It's exhausting.

It also may not be faithful to what the story is about. Yes, there's going to be a fanservice element, but the underlying theme appears to be Uryu's refutation of faith in favor of science and the fact that he's just come to live at a temple. The implication is that he gave up on the gods when they failed to answer his prayers as a little boy, resulting in his mother's death and his going to live in a group home. The sisters, on the other hand, resolutely believe in the gods despite their mother's passing when they were around the same age as Uryu when he lost his mom. They religiously wear the red hair cords she left them as a means to link them to her, and by the end of the episode, it looks a lot like someone is listening to them. Right now, I suspect it's a god, but it could be one of the mothers, still watching over her children. There's even a beautiful moment when Uryu sees a combination of shooting stars and falling cherry blossoms and realizes that he may not be as steadfastly anti-fairy tale as he assumes.

Then, we wrap up with the girls' grandfather coming home and announcing that one of his granddaughters will marry Uryu. It's a cold splash of water in the face after a lovely middle of the episode, resulting in this feeling incredibly uneven. It's as if the original manga creator wanted to write the middle story but was compelled by someone to incorporate the beginning and end elements. This isn't to say that the disparate pieces can't sit well together, but there's such a stark divide between them that it feels awkward, almost as much as the weirdly bug-like quality to the sisters' eyes. (I think that's the adaptation's fault; looking at manga art, I don't get the same impression.) This is probably worth another episode to see if it evens out its tone by choosing one side or the other, but I can't say that I'm all that eager to find out. I may pick up the manga, though.

Even though I went in blind, I had a feeling that the “tying the knot” in the title of Tying the Knot With an Amagami Sister would have a double meaning. Not that I'm patting myself on the back for my vast intellect, considering I have watched a metric buttload (the scientific measurement) of anime and have developed basic genre awareness. There are no surprises to be found in a basic harem series like this, an amalgam of tropes stretching all the way back to Ranma ½.

To be fair, it does do some things differently. Kamihate is out of step with his harem protagonist compatriots. While they're usually raven of hair, pure of heart, and mediocre of mind, Kamihate is conspicuously blonde, smart, and mean. He's that really annoying atheist who refuses to stay quiet when other people confess their faith and consider themselves smarter and better than others for their skepticism. While I understand his impulse, as someone constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to say that astrology and homeopathy are fake, I also understand that it's rude of him to express his disbelief while staying at a shrine. Not that he can just be a cynic – naturally he has a tragic past that caused him to lose his faith. You can be a doubter without trauma, people!

There are a few nice moments sprinkled in amongst the schmaltz, tsundere-ness, and accidental boob touches like Yuna struggling through offering a talisman to a little girl in English. It's not really worth watching for those, though, and the animation certainly isn't going to be a draw. At the best of times, it has the dull sheen and washed-out colors of a cheap, haphazard production, which also marred Drive's last ill-fated production, The Demon Prince of Momochi House. At the worst of times, the sisters are distinctly bug-eyed, their eyeballs bulging from their sockets as they point in different directions.

What's the point of watching a harem series that doesn't even look good?

I can't decide if it is a blessing or a curse to trade one creatively bankrupt pastiche of a mercilessly flogged horse corpse of a genre with another. On the one hand, Tying the Knot With an Amagami Sister doesn't feature any fate-enforcing, truck-shaped harbingers of death; its protagonists possess no silly, video-game-inspired powers; there is not a single godforsaken stats menu in sight; and so far, nobody has defined their entire personality by being the “Most Powerful” or “World's Weakest” whatever-the-hell. That's nice. I'll give this anime an extra quarter of a star for sparing me another half-hour of isekai torture. Also, on the artistic side of things, it doesn't look half bad, so it's not like your eyes are going to be sore after watching it.

Then again, all we've really done is land smack in the middle of a generic, lazy, and terminally unfunny Love Hina clone that only has some modern-looking character designs to help prove that it wasn't literally ripped straight off of some long-forgotten mid-2000s discs that ADV was keeping locked up in storage somewhere down in Texas for the last twenty years. Instead of being a hapless loser, our protagonist Uryu is more of a reserved loner type. However, he still manages to spend most of this episode finding ways to fall head-over-dick into the boobs and butts of the three shrine maidens he has found himself living with. There are the requisite scenes of Redhead Tsundere-chan beating Uryu up for his mishaps; we've got cracks about how guys must obviously be hiding porn mags under every nook and cranny of their living space, and, naturally, all of the girls end up growing quite fond of our guy before the premiere can even reach its ending credits because that's what the genre demands.

In other words, despite its meager attempts at looking and sounding like a real drama with characters you might give a damn about, the entire premise of this story relies on not one single person in the cast ever behaving like a remotely sane or normal human being to generate “laughs” and “romantic chemistry” (and note how much heavy lifting those scare quotes are doing). I can maybe see this show working as decent background noise for folks who want a show that requires absolutely zero energy to consume, but it bored me to tears and nearly put me to sleep. That's a hard pass, no question about it.