The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 2

With seven girlfriends assembled and a year after airing the first season, Rentarou's harem has concerns that ennui might be setting in. So why not spice things up with a body-swap episode? They're all mixed up and don't know what to do, but these girlfriends still really, really, really, really, really love you. Rentarou will need all that love to go around, too, since a chance encounter in the cafeteria uncovers his latest soulmate: the prickly, food-focused Kurumi!

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 2 is based on a manga series by Rikito Nakamura and Yukiko Nozawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

It's astonishing to think that it's been a whole year since The 100 Girlfriends fired its first shotgun blast of soulmates into our lives. The show leaves such a powerful impression as the most refreshed take on the harem genre in ages that coming back to it feels like hardly any time has passed. The artistry is as energetic as ever, and the performance of each character delivering their specific Girlfriend Gimmick™ keeps the riotous romcom ramp-ups rolling.

Returning after all this time with an understood need for escalation drives the first half of this second-season premiere. Rentarou's rooftop polycule has built up enough members to mine good material from a body-swap situation, so some meta-acknowledgment and a new drug by Kusuri kick off that contrivance, and the characters have at it. This is a great way to refresh viewers on all the characters and their bits while doing something new, not to mention reminding Rentarou himself why he loves all these girls so much. He can steel himself as much as he wants, but like the rest of us, there's only so much he can do against the power of, say, a tsundere mommy. Plus, this lets the animators play around with depicting the girls' distinctive mannerisms in changed-around character models. It's a good time and lets the show hit the ground running.

Whatever the opposite of easing the audience back in is, that's important for energy's sake, as 100 Girlfriends does slow down a bit in this episode's back half and central feature of this premiere: the debut of Rentarou's newest soulmate. Several of the next set of gal-pals are previewed in the season's new opening, and while I'm naturally most excited for the upcoming Sports Girlfriend, the cool style of Kurumi here also caught my eye. She's not exactly what one might expect to fill the "foodie girlfriend" niche, but nothing about this show has ever been exactly what's expected.

The trick with Kurumi will probably be a necessary maneuver for this series as it continues: meaningfully differentiating the compounding girlfriend personalities. Kurumi's issues with hangriness and how Rentarou gets through to her while still respecting her space are charming to watch. Still, there is the sense that Kurumi's more standoffish moments aren't too far off from Karane's defining tsundere tendencies (something that Karane herself seems to obliquely, momentarily take notice of at the end of the episode). The thing is, this is 100 Girlfriendsc, so rather than being super-concerned about that redundancy, I trust the show to really do stuff with it, and it all just makes me more excited to see Kurumi socialize with the others in this octuple in the upcoming episode.

That's where I'm at with this second season of 100 Girlfriends: the show hasn't missed a beat as Rentarou's heart skips one, and I'm just thrilled to have it back. The courtship of Kurumi works just as well as a reminder of the caring core of the story as the body-swap shenanigans do for its manifold madcap elements. With this many girlfriends already assembled, there's a lot to love going into this season.

You can assess deranged anime romcom 100 Girlfriends in a couple of ways. First, take the premise at existentially horrifying face value. Generic anime protagonist Rentarou stalks the corridors of his high school, hunting for fresh meat – unsuspecting females of seemingly any age – to add to his rapidly expanding harem. After his prey's and Rentarou's eyes meet for the first time, and the inevitable magical sparks fly, then it's all over for the poor girl, as she becomes one of his “hundred soulmates,” her fate inextricably bound to his limitless libido. She's doomed by God's edict to either join Rentarou's doomsday sex cult, or die.

Alternatively, you could throw all good taste and critical thinking out the window, and let 100 Girlfriends' fulminating torrent of steaming insanity cleanse you of cynicism. I chose the second option because it's a lot more fun than staring into the abyss. The second season wastes no time diving right back into 100 Girlfriends's moist, sticky morass of horny comedy, kicking off with some fourth-wall-breaking gags leaving us with no illusions that it's to be taken seriously at all.

The first, deliriously bonkers, skit sees Rentarou's first six girlfriends swap bodies, a risky move for a show returning after a lengthy hiatus, when viewers might struggle to remember characters. Thankfully each of the girls' strong personality quirks quickly asserts themselves despite their disembodiment– there's a tsundere, a horny girl, an efficiency nerd, a bookworm, a mother (!), and a definitely-not-FDA-approved drug producer. Of course, the resolution to the body-swap problem is hilariously horny, as is some of the surprisingly explicit dialogue I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to repeat here. Watching this in the same room as my eldest (adult) son has since caused his opinion of his father to plummet to new depths. My plaintive excuse, “But I need to review it for the preview guide,” wasn't sufficient, it seems.

The second half of the episode introduces a new girl, a middle-school student (uh-oh), who gets super grumpy when she's hungry. And she's hungry all the time. Weirdly, she seems more or less ok with becoming the next body in Rentarou's growing collection. Although she doesn't seem too interested in joining the other girls' seemingly sapphic love-in, I'm sure she'll find her place eventually. I'd normally despise this kind of contrived comedy setup, but this episode of 100 Girlfriends had me cackling with disturbed laughter, at least throughout its first half. It's mostly good-natured, horny fun. I'm not too sure about the new girl yet, though.

You could never get me to hate this show. I respect shows that try to unapologetically do what I want without holding back, and 100 Girlfriends absolutely fits into the criteria. The pacing is breakneck, the comedy is self-aware, and it saddens me that this is probably one of the best poly representations I've seen in an animated show. Almost every character is a very specific cliché. Still, it's cranking those personalities up to eleven and keeps coming up with fun situations where everyone gets to bounce off of each other in surprisingly organic ways. Trying to aim for a hundred heroines in a romantic comedy is ambitious, but it's clear that this show will do its best to hit that quota.

In the first season, it had six girlfriends. It looks like season two will have us interact with four more. I'm a little surprised at how low the number is, especially considering that we secured our seventh girlfriend by the end of this episode.

I appreciate that the show can be divided into two parts. The first part is Rentarou having his one-on-one experience with a new girl, and Takashi Aoshima writes those stories well enough that they could almost be romantic comedy one-shots on their own. The new inclusion, Kurumi, is just a glutton, but I appreciate the extra detail that goes into her gimmick, her personality, and even her design. A level of thought goes into the situation, and even though I could very quickly tell what Rentarou would do to win her over, I like that the rest of the cast just accepts this as the norm.

The first half of the episode was also entertaining, but it was for different reasons. The other half of this show is just the harem itself interacting with itself or getting into wacky situations as a group. Again, it says a lot that all the girls bounce off each other well. They might not be interested in each other the same way that they are in Rentarou, but there is a strong sense of camaraderie and passion for each other. This episode also opens up with some of the most blatant and hard-hitting fourth wall jokes I've seen in a while, to the point where they even call out the fact that it's been about a year since the last season…which implies that the show is weirdly in real-time with the real world. Plus, the your name. parody nearly had me on the floor. This will be my junk food show of the season, and I will enjoy every single bite of it.