The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

I'm Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!?

Tsukasa is an ordinary salaryman who is attacked by demons one night and saved by a genius kunoichi named Shizuri. In her off time, though, Shizuri is a lazy otaku NEET. Tsukasa and Shizuri end up living together, and Tsukasa uses his homemaking skills to pamper Shizuri as she continues to serve as his bodyguard.

I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? is based on the NEET Kunoichi to Nazeka Dōsei Hajimemashita manga by Kotatsu. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Saturdays.

I experienced an interesting phenomenon as I was watching this episode, which is actually two shorts stapled together: even though I kept turning the volume down, Shizuri just kept getting louder. I'm not sure how it happened, but she is easily the loudest ninja I have ever encountered in fiction, to the point where, halfway through watching, my sister called from the other room, “Is someone squawking in there?” I will grant you that I'm sound-sensitive, but my sister is not, so I think that says something about the volume and tone of this show.

It also would have undoubtedly worked better had it been left as a short, something I dearly hope happens in future episodes. It's very obvious that it was intended as one: we get the opening theme twice, as well as the ending at the tail end of the runtime, and each half-length segment features its own distinct plot. The first is how hapless everyman Tsukasa ends up saddled with a perky pink kunoichi in his home, while the second introduces Ayame, a blue ninja who has a very sexual interest in Shizuri, something oh-so-subtly shown when Shizuri being angry with her leads to Ayame lying on the floor having a private moment in public, complete with ahegao. The theme songs hint at three other color-coded kunoichi to join later, which frankly has me very concerned.

To be clear, that's not because of the sexual component brought by Ayame. It's because all of the characters introduced so far have the collective appeal of wet garbage. Tsukasa has exactly zero personality (or affect) and the two women are each a stereotype rather than a person to the point where the show doesn't even seem aware of the inherent contradiction in Shizuri: she can't be a NEET and a ninja at the same time, because the latter clearly negates the former, given that she's working for Tsukasa to keep him safe from supernatural creatures. Otaku I will absolutely grant her, if only because the show lacks any and all subtlety when it comes to that – spending food money on a rare figure and staying up all night for multiple nights gaming drive the point into the ground.

I will say that if you're looking for fanservice, you'll find it here, and unlike Beheneko, it comes without kitten testicles, although it's also much tamer. The ladies' fighting outfits may not show much skin, but they also don't leave much to the imagination, and Shizuri attempting to cover it with a tracksuit jacket is the one thing that gave me a chuckle. The camera also adores Shizuri's backside and thighs, so there's that. But there really isn't much else here if this isn't your sense of humor or flavor of fanservice, so these are ninjas in bright colors you may want to let keep hiding in plain sight.

There's a particular kind of pacing that is a dead giveaway for a web manga. They jump right into their premise rather than spending any significant time building up to things in a way that makes it feel like you missed some really important things happening. They're gag-based, with neither the attention span to create sitcom-style plots that fill out an episode nor the clean setup to punchline snap of a four-panel. While some good anime based on web manga exist, I tend to view these features as shortcomings rather than strengths or neutral. So when I say that I clocked I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? as being based on a webcomic within five minutes, I am insulting the series.

Tsukasa is the biggest box of unseasoned mashed potato flakes I've ever encountered. He is nothing. He looks like Hideki from Chobits if he'd had a lobotomy instead of meeting a sexy baby robot. He's good at cooking and video games and occasionally makes the surprised Pikachu face when Shizuri says or does something. He doesn't even deserve the dignity of being called a potato. I can't even really get up the energy to hate him, other than vaguely resenting him for having the bad luck to be present in this show.

And Shizuri? Shizuri isn't much more. She's a cardboard cutout, the imaginary fantasy of boring guys who think it would be so cool to have a hot girl who likes the same things they like (like video games and moe anime!) living with them, which would be so much easier than having to actually go out and talk to women. That's scary! The girl being a disaster makes her more approachable, and she gets all blushy and bothered when you say anything to her. At one point, Shizuri has to hide her blushing face because he buys her a figure as a thank you for protecting him, a message he delivers with a completely blank expression. Oh, and of course, she has to have a rocking body, the importance of which is emphasized by the careful attention to shading around her pubic mound.

No, I don't hate the characters. I don't even hate the original creators, Yakitomato and Kotatsu, for creating such a blatantly self-indulgent manga. I kind of hate Hisashi Saito and the producers at Quad, though. Saito is an experienced director with plenty of ecchi comedies under his belt; he should be able to put out something that at least has a sense of comic timing or an understanding of how to set up a joke. Instead, I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? is limp, where jokes just kind of whiff by without any snap. And that is a crime that won't be forgiven.

Few things in this world are more unpleasant to endure than bad comedy. This is a well-known fact amongst anyone who has ever had fun knocking back a few cold ones with their friends and laughing over a screening of The Room, The Book of Henry, or anything Niel Breen has ever made. Terrible dramas and incompetent action movies are fun to watch and make fun of because of the contrast between their earnest goals and the failure of their execution. Bad comedy, though, is torturous to sit through because, by its very nature, it extracts and obliterates the joy from your heart instead of adding to it. I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? is a very bad comedy, indeed.

You are never in for a good time when every joke in an anime is telegraphed by all the nouns and verbs in its title. Yes, Shizuri is, in fact, a ninja who lives like a shut-in and doesn't have a real job, and yes, Tsukasa is living with her. There. You've just been given an exhaustingly thorough breakdown of every single attempt at a joke in this cartoon. What's that? You need more elaboration? Well, okay, I guess, if you insist…

Sometimes, you see, Shizuri has to do ninja things like fight evil yoma monsters, but what she really wants to do is stay inside all day. You know? Like a shut-in NEET! Then, there are times when she has responsible adult things to do, like manage her food allowance, but instead, uh-oh! She bought an anime figurine instead! Like, uh, what an otaku would do! Then there's Tsukasa. He used to live by himself as a boring, everyday guy with no discernable personality traits of any kind. Now, though? He's a boring, everyday guy with no discernable personality traits of any kind…who lives with an Otaku NEET Ninja. That's, like…not how things typically go for people! Oh, and you know what? There is one element that the title of the anime doesn't exhaustively telegraph, and that is the presence of the “Crazy Psycho Lesbian” ninja who is stalking Shizuri. The joke, you see, is that she's a girl who wants to have sex with other females, but she's totally craaaaaaazy about it. (In the grand anime tradition of buffoonish homophobia, “totally crazy” in this context just means that she is horny enough to soak through her ninja bodysuit at the mere thought of being glared at by the object of her affection).

Now, the only way that one paragraph alone is going to have anyone doubled over with laughter and rolling in the aisles is if their standards for what constitutes a functional joke are so low that they don't even need their entertainment to understand comic timing or the general concept of a punchline. In that one case alone, I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!? might end up being watchable instead of functioning as the audio-visual equivalent of being stuck on the last empty seat of a crowded public bus with the most annoying cosplay contest reject who ever walked the face of this Earth. For everyone else, though, I encourage you to say far, far away from I’m Living with an Otaku NEET Kunoichi!?.

Alright, I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain here. Most of the time, when writing these reviews, I simply watch the show and then start typing things up. But occasionally, I jot down a few notes while watching—sorting out my ideas even while the episode is still going. This might be the first time I've ever had to basically throw all my notes out due to the closing scene of an episode.

I was planning to write about how, while I didn't like the show, I didn't hate it either—that the whole episode was predictable fluff. The jokes never made me laugh, but I didn't cringe, either. And sure, the animation can be wonky occasionally, but most of the time, it looks perfectly fine.

As for the characters, Tsukasa is a guy who, while quiet and more than a bit of a pushover, is actually quite thoughtful. Shizuru, likewise, may be obsessed with her NEET existence but she never fails when it comes to her job of protecting him—and even feels like she should be doing more for him. They even share a few, dare I say, cute moments between them.

…and then the show just has to bring in a, and I quote, “Crazy Psycho Lesbian” who is not only obsessed with Shizuru but is also a masochist who begins playing with her breasts in ecstasy in the middle of Tsukasa's living room.

While I'm not going to pretend there was no fanservice in the episode before this point, it wasn't in the softcore porn territory. This sudden escalation just felt so out of place in the cute story we had seen so far that it kind of ruined it for me—like the anime was saying, “Here's what the show is really about.” And frankly, if I was barely interested in the story before this twist, I was completely uninterested after.