Akiba Maid Wars – A Retrospective

Akiba Maid Wars is what I tend to put into the pretty but nothing special category. It looks like an anime. The colours and character designs are everything you would expect out of a modern anime and for a lot of people, that’s going to be enough. More than enough really. It’s a show entirely populated by cute girls and the designs are diverse and fun.

The animation is decent and does what it needs to. Sound design similarly is perfectly fine and voice acting has moments of greatness, but I wouldn’t single anyone out as giving a particularly striking performance one way or another.

It’s a good production. Nothing more and nothing less.

Where Akiba Maid Wars shines though, and what’s likely to be the main appeal (or turn off) for viewers, if the plot. Or even the premise.

I might have sounded a little dismissive when I said it was yet another take on the dark magical girl genre but in my defense, I once went on an absolute binge of these types of shows and have really seen a whole lot. I also stand by that description. But as far as they go, it’s one of the most original takes of the genre. And technically there aren’t even any magical girls so it’s arguable.

The basic idea behind Akiba Maid Wars is this: What if we did an anime about the various maid cafés throughout Akiba and their staff but treated it like it was a gritty coming-of-age organized crime drama. And that is exactly what they did.

I can’t blame people for going nuts over this premise. I’ve described it to a few friends now and universally, the reaction has been intrigued amusement and an immediate desire to know more. It’s a good premise. And for what it’s worth, the show handles it well. Mixing the serious dramatic tone with the absurdity of the setting perfectly.

But….at this point I would like to reiterate that I went in with pretty high expectations. I realize myself that the issues I have with Akiba Maid Wars were really exacerbated by the fact that people had been telling me for weeks that this was the best show ever.

There are definitely weak points in the series. It relies quite heavily on that great premise and other storytelling elements are left underrealized. For instance, I found the characters a little shallow. Admittedly it’s a large cast and a lot of them get dispatched rather expediently so we don’t get a chance to know them but even the main characters are a bit underdeveloped. They are cute girls with individual personalities. If you have a soft spot for anime girls, you could find a favourite. But they aren’t deep complex characters that would make for a fascinating character story. And the show is definitely plot-driven. Personally, I would have liked a bit more nuance in that area.

Moreover, when stretched out over 12 episodes, that plot does wear a bit thin at times. This is made much worse if you binge the series. When watching one episode after the other, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that you see the exact same stories come up repeatedly with only a bit of window dressing to differentiate them. Plot points get reused and since the characters are fairly straightforward, they start to become predictable in their reactions. It’s not overwhelming like in some other anime, but watching the entire series in about three sittings, it was definitely something I noticed. Even the escalations were bigger versions of previous stakes.

On the other hand the ending subverted a lot of expectations for me. I also ended up describing the last episode to some of those eager friends of mine and it got a huge positive reaction. I’m not going to describe it here because I’m not a jerk. Let me say this though, I was a bit disappointed in Akiba Maid Wars as a whole going into the last episode. I know it wasn’t a bad show but I felt like it wasn’t for me and I was just expecting a nebulous more. I was about to call it a kinda boring run of the mill put cute girls in violent and gruesome situations type of show. But that last episode… I really liked it. It made me smile. It made me care about characters I hadn’t cared about at all for 11 episodes. It sort of brought the entire series together in the perfect way.

I recently watched a YouTube essay on modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism in film. It was interesting. Against all of my initial expectations, Akiba Maid Wars turned out to be a rather endearing example of metamodernism and for that, I can’t help but have a soft spot for it.

At the end of the day, it’s a show that turned out to be more than the sum of its parts. I don’t know if I can recommend you sit through an entire series just for the last episode, heck I don’t even know if you’ll like it, but I don’t regret doing so!

Here’s a twist, I had every intention of writing a much more negative review when I started this post but as I was writing, I started to remember more and more little moments I enjoyed and ended up realizing I liked the show more than I thought I did. Take that for what it’s worth!

You enjoy cute girls in ridiculously violent settings

Yume Hiiragi – what can I say, I’m a sucker for a cute girl