Gloomy robot enthusiast Akutsu Eita has a massive crush on his school's idol, Agatsuma Makina, convinced that someone as cute and popular as she would ever notice him. But when Makina unexpectedly shows up at his door, things take an even stranger turn! It turns out, Makina is not just a popular girl—she's a robot designed for pleasure, and she needs Eita's help.

Thrilled at the chance to get a closer look at Makina's "parts," Eita braces himself for her to reveal it all, including her robotic interior. However, his lack of experience quickly overwhelms him. Is this a dream come true for a mecha-nerd like Eita, or will the pressure of keeping Makina's secret be too much for him to handle?

Makina-san’s a Love Bot?! has art and story by Yoshimi Sato. English translation is done by Ben Trethewey with an adaptation by The Smut Whisperer and lettering by Kaitlyn Wiley. Published by Seven Seas (September 30, 2025). Rated M.

Lauren Orsini
Rating:

In Makina-san’s a Love Bot?!, the titular heroine bares her breasts on nearly every page. It's a porn comic of the likes of which are sealed in plastic wrap before they're sold. In other words, the last thing I was expecting was its important political commentary on the state of modern Internet laws. Don't get me wrong: this is an erotic comic designed to titillate and turn on the reader. But it also has some surprisingly clever critiques of parental controls and AI, which make for an added bonus and unexpectedly laugh-out-loud funny humor.

This full-color comic features Makina, usually nude and dressed provocatively the whole time. To her robotics-otaku classmate Eita, she's the unapproachable class idol. But after Makina is injured and her mechanical innards exposed, she has no choice but to entrust Eita with her secret so he can fix her up. Back to normal, Makina spills her metaphorical guts. She's an android with a specific mission—to lure men with honeypot tactics as a super spy. (Spy for whom? When Eita asks, Makina's exact reply is “It's fine. Don't worry.”) To buy Eita's silence, she decides to ravage him sexually. There's just one problem…

You see, the manga's most frequently recurring—and most effective—joke is this: since Makina is a high schooler, her internet controls are restricted from allowing her to research anything of a sexual nature. The comedic irony of Makina's role as a sex droid and her lack of any sexual knowledge whatsoever is funny specifically because it is the quandary that more and more high schoolers will find themselves in: their hormones are raging, they're interested in sex, and they are forbidden from arming themselves with knowledge about how to do it safely. Unable to bypass her controls, Makina must rely on her AI model to guide her along. But afternoons listening to her female classmate chatter about boys' love have trained the AI incorrectly. Imagine a minor asking ChatGPT how to have sex, and they'd get similar results. In Makina's case, she asks Eita to “take out [his] prostate” so she can stimulate it. Between this manga's double entendres and “lucky pervert” situations lies this surprisingly pointed barb about our current world, where the laws of who governs the internet mean billionaires are allowed to use their chatbots to send us deepfake nudes of celebrities, but high school girls can't use search engines to learn about birth control.

Though Eita is a high school student purportedly Makina's age, he has a slight, Shota-adjacent appearance, and the manga introduces a growing female cast that sexually overpowers and torments him. I expect that Makina-san’s a Love Bot?! didn't intentionally set out to be so upsettingly current, and as the cast expands beyond Makina to a feisty co-ed with a taser on Eita's balls and a panty-peeing Loli droid who attempts to lure Eita with her apparent innocence, I'm not sure it will continue to be. Still, the dystopic comedy element was a welcome surprise.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

Intriguingly categorized in the genre of “robot smut”, Makina-san’s a Love Bot?! wouldn't normally be on my radar, but the “benefit” of reviewing for ANN's manga guide means I'm exposed to all manner of comics I would otherwise have avoided. And in this case, “exposed” is certainly the operative word.

Unusually, Makina-san is presented in full color, though I can't say the addition of webtoon-style digital color enhances the linework particularly. This isn't the prettiest manga, and that's an issue when the entire appeal hinges on the reader's attraction to female sex bot Makina, who spends much of the first half of the volume in a state of undress.

Plot-wise, it's like a slightly raunchier version of Chobits, crossed with heavily toned-down elements from Does It Count If You Lose Your Virginity to an Android? The problem is, with it occupying a strange middle ground between innocence and full-on raunch, I can't see this manga really pleasing anyone.

Male protagonist Eita spends most of the volume panicking and stressing about Makina's physical closeness and exhibitionism. His character isn't interesting, and doesn't develop. Makina herself is a bit more fun – especially when it becomes clear she doesn't know anything about sex at all, because her “adult filters” are enabled, which means she can't even look up sex manuals on the internet. This leads to some admittedly hilarious misconceptions, including a running joke about Eita's “prostate”. It turns out that Makina learning about sex from a BL-obsessed schoolmate probably wasn't the right educational choice.

For a story that sells itself on the promise of robot sex, well, there isn't any. There's plenty of boobs, and a weird scene where Eita examines the insides of Makina's pelvis when her leg falls out of its socket, and he accidentally stimulates her internal genital area. There are lots of double entendres about him, “Jamming it in as fast as I can” (reattaching limbs) that are fairly amusing the first couple of times, but get tiresome.

A late addition of another android character who looks like a child threatens to greatly increase the squick value for later volumes, and that only helps cement my decision never to read any more of this. As a raunchy comedy, it just about succeeds in raising a few chuckles. From an erotic point of view, it's weirdly sterile and uninteresting. It's definitely not for me, but I'm also unsure who it's actually for, either.

Bolts
Rating:

OK guys, what if we had a story about a sex robot that didn't know what it was like to have sex? Isn't that funny? I mean, it has the potential to be funny. As a fan of Yamada's First Time, I was actually really excited after reading the first chapter of this book. However, this excitement was quickly snuffed out as I failed to realize that this setup also has the potential to run the same tired jokes into the ground to the point where things just feel exhausting at the end. I really wanted to like this story because there are so many interesting things you can do with an adolescent sex robot story. Unfortunately, outside of the initial set up, the story just doesn't really go anywhere outside of the realm of the predictable.

We have one of the most popular girls in school suddenly reveal to the nerdy robot obsessed kid that she is, in fact, an undercover sex robot. However, not only does she not know why she was made, but she doesn't even know anything about sex at all. There are so many questions with this set up right from jump, and you would think that this is being done for the sake of creating some kind of slow burn mystery but it's really not. Most of this just acts as an excuse to tell really crude sex jokes that don't even make a lot of sense. It's not the fact that there are crude jokes that makes me disappointed, it's how boring and overused they are. It's implied that this girl doesn't even know that men and women have different genitalia and because of a misunderstanding with a friend, thinks that she needs to penetrate her new mechanic's prostate. Take a shot every time one of those jokes are used in this one volume, I dare you.

The design and aesthetic of the book is pretty solid. I especially like the way that the robotic nature of our lead is presented. She is damaged in a way that makes her limbs very susceptible to popping off, but it's represented as a sort of digital force field that covers her joints. It's a good way of creating that uncanny valley between the anime aesthetic and rather detailed mechanical parts. I like it and I can almost see this aesthetic working in more plot driven sci-fi series. But for right now it's just a shiny trinket on an otherwise relatively boring and unfunny story.