The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Rent-A-Girlfriend Season 4

Summer has come to an end, and with it comes many changes. However, the relationship between Kazuya and Chizuru remains precarious. After the death of her grandparent, she was finally able to break down in front of Kazuya, but does this mean that the gap between the two will finally get smaller? What about Ruka and Kazuya? What will become of their relationship?

Rent-A-Girlfriend Season 4 is based on the manga series by Reiji Miyajima. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

To open on a positive note, we got the OP for Rent-A-Girlfriend season four with the release of the second episode of the season! Transporting some of the most important characters to a fantasy setting inspired by a myriad of Western folk tales, it's lavishly produced, set to a catchy and high-energy song appropriate for the series, and is jam-packed with visual allusions and references that build on past themes and story beats in the anime. This OP is also far too busy and overstuffed with distractions from the main appeal of Rent-A-Girlfriend, which I now fear will be an issue across the entire fourth season.

This episode not only sees Chizuru accept Kazuya's lunch date invitation from the previous episode, but also has her being more casual around Kazuya than ever. Lunch turns into drinks, and by dessert, Kazuya is a little buzzed and Chizuru is fully in her cups at 1:00 pm on a Saturday. While Kazuya is too in his own head about what this “date” means and is so obsessed with Chizuru that he can't be fully present during this moment, I can appreciate this scene! Seeing Chizuru go a little too hard on drinking during what she's decided is a day off feels believable, given how serious and hardworking she usually is; she's intense about everything, including having fun. This also feels like a believable college date! It perfectly captures the feeling of a small, beautiful moment where two people who have been in each other's lives for a while spend time in a more intimate setting, and their relationship finally blossoms into something more.

Except Kazuya doesn't say anything when Chizuru asks if he loves her! He has the chance to be with the girl he's been obsessing over for three seasons, and doesn't say or do anything because he has low self-esteem and doesn't think he deserves to be with her. I understand that many people self-sabotage themselves and their relationships in real life, but that's a disappointing source of conflict in stories; if not outright frustrating here, considering how long this will-they-won't-they storyline has carried on.

Kazuya works up the nerve to tell Chizuru how he really feels on their walk home, but his dumbass friends interrupt his confession to drag him to a party where he once again wallows in his own self-pity and aggrandizement of Chizuru. It's here that we learn that Mami Nanami is talking to Kazuya's grandmother and clearly has a new scheme going to disrupt Kazuya's life and relationships, but the show doesn't make me care about this plot development. Kazuya isn't likeable enough that I'm actively rooting for him, so Mami's place in this story as an antagonist is weird, especially since Kazuya is repeatedly framed as his own biggest enemy. Also, I need Rent-A-Girlfriend to give Mami more interiority! I know enough guys with ex-girlfriends who have turned into stalkers to believe that someone like Mami exists in the world, but without getting more of her perspective and motivations, she just feels like a sexist cliche of a vengeful former partner.

As the end credits rolled, I felt nothing but anger and apathy for this episode, Rent-A-Girlfriend, and the series at large. The season two premiere gave me a glimmer of hope that this show would transform into the most interesting version of itself, but it looks like season four will also be filled with time-wasting tangents and a main storyline that seems to take one step back for every two steps forward. Even outside of this being a stacked season of anime, Rent-A-Girlfriend's fourth installment is rapidly becoming a show that I wouldn't even recommend to fans of rom-coms. However, it's still far from being the worst-looking or most problematic anime of this type that I've watched.

Who put all of this plot in my Rent-A-Girlfriend!?? And by “plot,” I mean the progression of character arcs and character dynamics, and not ironic internet slang for fan-service (though there are a handful of lavishly produced images of Mini, Chizuru, and Kazuya's barely-clothed erection in this episode). By the end of this episode, Kazuya has rejected Chizuru's attempt to refund him for a date that she disrupted with earnest emotional vulnerability, thereby cementing that they've grown past their “client and rental girlfriend” relationship. Kazuya even asks Chizuru out to lunch at the end of their coffee meet-up, which, while not anywhere close to a confession of love or even a formal date invitation, shows both character growth and a marked change in their relationship.

Should it have taken four seasons and an incredible number of tangents that didn't progress the crux of Rent-A-Girlfriend's story to get here? No, absolutely not! However, this feels like maybe the strongest start to a sequel season that Rent-A-Girlfriend has ever had, and I'm hopeful that it builds quickly in subsequent episodes. There's always been a kernel of something interesting and relevant to our current social climate in Rent-a-Girlfriend. Can Kazuya, a person who has turned self-pity into essentially his entire identity, become a person who is healthy enough to sustain one of the romantic relationships he over engages in? Moreover, can the relationship he forms with Chizuru via a fairly tame form of sex work help him escape the depressive cycles that have him so downtrodden?

When Rent-a-Girlfriend focuses on the themes at the core of its story, it feels like it's touching on a lot of issues we're grappling with as a global society; namely a supposed “male loneliness epidemic” and discussions around sex work have become more commonplace as a growing number of people joined adult content creator websites during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people today are grappling with whether parasocial relationships can evolve into more substantial relationships or if their lives can be improved through these connections. While Rent-a-Girlfriend would rather allocate its time towards boner and masturbation gags than exploring these issues further, it at least does a great job putting a viewer in the headspace of people experiencing these circumstances.

That said, pacing issues and unnecessary tangents have hindered past seasons of Rent-a-Girlfriend, and there are already signs of this being an issue in this season. While the opening third of the episode, which focuses on Kazuya returning to college and catching up with people, works well as a framing device for the start of the season, it also devotes a significant amount of runtime to characters who aren't relevant to the story. The show hasn't made me care about them. In fact, any time spent on Kazuya's network of peers and acquaintances makes him a more frustrating character. It's hard to root for Kazuya if he spends most of his time whining about not having a girlfriend when he quietly ignores the sizable community (featuring a growing number of cute girls who inexplicably want to talk to him) around him.

Even if the anime should have reached this point sooner, it's encouraging to see this season of Rent-A-Girlfriend open with what seems to be a lasting change in the main characters' relationship, and I'm curious to see where the season goes from here.

(Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that Nick really should be the one writing this and that I'll miss his hilarious and insightful takes on this season of the show.)

We are finally getting some solid plot progression in episode two of this series, so consider me impressed. I thought Rent-A-Girlfriend was going to spin its wheels for just a little bit longer before it got to the very obvious confrontation: Chizuru figures out that Kazuya is actually in love with her. Ignoring how that it's one of the most self-evident developments on the planet, it's nice that Chizuru gets something to think about. She's still in a very emotional place right now, and she seems to trust Kazuya enough that she is willing to let her guard down. She's always been someone who wanted to prioritize business in her career first, but now she's in a situation where everything is hyper-emotional. I don't blame her for wanting to go out for lunch and have some afternoon drinks as a sort of distraction, but it also highlights the comfort she feels around Kazuya.

This is tricky because the only reason Chizuru could be considered a problem is that she's overly emotional. Kazuya was there for her during this situation, and maybe Chizuru's character is about realizing that she could have both a career and a healthy relationship? It's hard to say what exactly her character arc is supposed to be throughout the show. Maybe it has something to do with her lightening up and realizing that there is more to life than her career? Or maybe her character arc is about learning to be vulnerable around people in general? It's hard to say, but I hope whatever arc she goes through during the season is a bit more defined because she is such an established character in the show that it wouldn't feel right for her to suddenly start falling for Kazuya without her going through some introspection. I don't want the tragedy of season three to come off as an excuse for her to finally let her guard down and let somebody in because it implies that, without a tragedy, she wouldn't have even opened up to the possibility of going out with Kazuya.

And then there's Mami. Of all the characters in the show, she is the one who frustrates me the most, but probably not for the same reason that many fans. I don't know why she's here, and it's so rare that we have a romantic comedy series where a person's ex is actively involved in the story. Mami sometimes feels like a force of nature, stirring up drama for no apparent reason, and we don't know why she's doing all of this. I hope season four makes her a more defined character, especially when it seems like she is so proactive about something shady, and the show is going out of its way to paint her in this villainess light. I don't want her to be a lump of wasted potential like a lot of other rare things I find in this show.

I'm so glad that we're done with arguably one of the strongest emotional cores of this entire franchise, so we can get back to the real issue, like Kazuya losing his mind about what Chizuru might want to talk to him about for the millionth time. Season three was my favorite season of the show because there was actual emotional weight, from the production of the film to the impending passing of Chizuru's grandmother. Now that that's all settled, it's time for Kazuya to catch up with friends and who knows, maybe go on a nice date with his actual girlfriend. Remember her?

I swear to God, Ruka must have the patience of a saint because I don't think I have the emotional fortitude that this woman does. Not only does she give Kazuya plenty of space to help out someone he knows he has feelings for, but she also has to regularly walk him through what being a good boyfriend looks like, and she isn't even demanding a lot either. I know that part of the joke of the show is that Kazuya isn't a great person when you break down his actions. He's not a bad guy and will do the bare minimum of common decency, but he hardly goes out of his way for others, aside from Chizuru.

We are four seasons in, and yet it feels like he still lacks a significant amount of emotional maturity. I wonder if the show is setting up this as the season where these two will finally break up, so he can pursue the obvious girl he's been paired with since the beginning. Still, it's just frustrating because, like many other romantic comedies or harem anime, the show does such a good job of establishing why somebody else would be a better match for our main lead than the expected final girl.

This show has a lot of balls to have the first seven minutes be all about how everybody is changing and moving on when we know it's going to continue to drag its feet. While Kazuya was working with Chizuru, people were going about their lives and enjoying the summer. Some even manage to hook up and find relationships. The status quo has to change eventually, and maybe that'll happen here in season four. Either that opening monologue was foreshadowing, or it's a massive troll. The fact that I can't tell which route this show is going to take is a testament to how much it continues to do everything wrong in terms of creating an engaging romance story.