Love Kome: We Love Rice

Do you love rice? Do you love boys? If yes, you'd better hand yourself in to the police. But before you do, you'd better watch Love Rice. It might make you reconsider your life choices. Hinohikari is a boy who knows what he wants & what he wants is to be the HarveStar of the Harvest Show. There's just one problem: nobody likes rice any more, which is unfortunate enough when you're a rice-boy (not the car kind) but doubly so when it means the Kokuritsu Inaho Academy he attends is in danger of shutting down. Undeterred, Hinohikari will achieve his dream & save his school the only way he knows how; by joining a cross-dressing idol unit? Okay. Rice Boys sets out to answer the ultimate question – which is better: bread or rice? After quickly ditching the women's clothes, the newly christened Love Rice (because they love rice) prepare to do musical battle against their wheaty rivals the Yeast Kings; using as many bad puns, bland songs & homoerotic moments as it takes. In case you weren't able to tell, Love Rice is out to promote Japanese rice (white, sticky, short grains only. None of that exotic Indian stuff here) to women. Each character is named after a specific strain & some effort is made to tie their personalities with their namesake, though it's hard to tell with rice - since it's rice. Their musical performances take place in golden paddy fields & dammit if they aren't trying their hardest to be the best rice-boys they can be so the Gourmet Girls will vote for them. It's a concept silly enough that it could have been a lot of cheesey fun. But for a concept as silly as pretty rice-boys, Love Rice for the most part plays itself frustratingly straight. Part of this is down to the utterly uninspired production, which makes almost no effort to visually accentuate the humour & often leaves the characters looking like rough drafts rather than finished articles. But even beyond that there isn't much to it. The story is for the most part bog standard, with the bland songs doing little to improve things. It take a turn for the suitably stupid when Love Rice & the Yeast Kings set aside their differences – because at the end of the day rice & wheat are both grains - to thwart a kidnapping, but it's so rushed & disjointed that the humour is lost. When compared to other male idol or anthropomorphic pretty boy series, Love Rice hardly measures. Unlike Sekko Boys, It doesn't do nearly enough with the ridiculousness of its core concept, relying instead of repetitive agriculture puns & Sasanishiki coughing up more white fluids than Paris Hilton. It barely manages to fill its four minute episodes, even with songs & cooking tutorials padding out the runtime, whereas Miracle Train managed to build an entire regular length series out of sexy male train stations. Or they could have gone in a completely different direction & made Love Rice about actual rice. Worked for The Nameko Families. Instead, whatever the intentions behind its creation, Love Rice just feels like a half-arsed attempt to ride the male idol & fujoshi waves by combining “attractive” male character designs with a silly gimmick that's supposed to make you think it's just a bit of fun, so who cares? It's certainly no Pillow Boys, but there are plenty of better examples of what Love Rice is trying to do, though you might get some new meal ideas from it. Unless you really love boys...I mean rice, it can be safely ignored.

I don't know why people disliked this show so much. I genuinely had a good time watching and I don't think you could ask for much more in a show that has 12 episodes with 4 minutes each (with +- 30 seconds in the end being a recipe + credits). Yeah, the story is really weird and doesn't make sense sometimes, but this show is obviously not supposed to be taken seriously, it's supposed to be funny and entertain you for 4 minutes. For me, it delivered that. Visually it's pretty and the characters are cute. It's also pretty funny and the puns are awesome.

So I found this show on a whim one night just scrolling through Crunchyroll.I didn't think much of it, but then I read the description and hurt myself laughing. That's the moment where I decided "Oh yeah I gotta watch this". I didn't get around to it till now because I knew, despite my excitement, that this show was going to be terrible. I was ready for this hot mess of a "animation" so to livin things up a little bit I decided to roll the dice and show it to my friends, and the experience was euphoric. It was an hour of absolutely bliss purely due to the confusion and absolute chaos that was occurring. We gave character nicknames because god forbid you try to remember the actual names, we spent like the entire first season wondering why the hell it got a second season, and overall the show made no sense what so ever. All in all the show itself was terrible, but I will never forget the experience it gave me. I feel closer to these friends I watched it with, I felt like the relationship of these bland as bread characters brought the own relationship of me and my friends closer together and I will forever thank love rice for giving me a bonding moment that I will never forget. All in all 10 out of 10 P.S. Yeast king is objectively the better group in the entire show.

Minor Spoilers. Yes, I know. I get it. It's a gimmick: a bunch of anthropomorphic (read: basically human) strains of rice set out to become the HarveStars in this food-based idol anime, glorifying white rice in what is essentially a propaganda piece/P.S.A. attempting to encourage more sales and growth of white rice. With that bizarre scenario in mind, if you ride the irony, this show is absolutely hilarious. So much effort went into telling the facts of the grains industry and real world problems facing it, inserted clumsily into the actual character dialogue; you can almost imagine the meeting that was had in order to promote white rice effectively in the show. If you take into context the absolute corporate cynicism at display here, it becomes very humorous to think about, at least, for me. It follows stereotypical rice boys, a complete set of oft-used anime personalities. They gotta train to be HarveStars, you see. When they do a special dance, it is a Harvest Show, and rice begins to grow. The main protagonist gets a crew together and the group is called Love Rice. There's also the bread boys, their rivals, whose group is called Yeast King. Even if it is enjoyed ironically there's some dumb but funny humor at play, with a lot of rice puns. Lots of rice puns. Each episode is short and you could blaze through the series in a day. The first season episodes all end in a special rice-related recipe (done in live action footage, something akin to what you might find on your facebook feed), whereas the second season episodes end in rice trivia. So the question being, is it fun to watch alone? Probably not. But if you get a good buddy and you both go into this anime, it's a fun watch for how dumb it is alone. Immensely enjoyable.

Last night, my husband and I saw the name and read the synopsis; we decided we were in. I don't know why so many reviews are negative. The humor is 99% puns and simply outlandish situations taken straight. We both enjoyed it and started the second season as of writing this. The characters are the usual archetypes but not done obnoxiously or too on-the-nose. The situations made us actually laugh out loud a few times throughout. On the negative side, the ending felt sudden and a bit rushed. Not that it's out-of-the-blue or anything it just seemed to be doing one thing and suddenly changed instead of a bit more gradual.

Actual rating 5.5/10 This show was an interesting experince, in many ways upon the surface it would appear similar to a great cooking manga/anime like Tonkatsu DJ Agetarou, Shinya Shokudo or Shokugeki no souma, and in terms of actual product it was similar to all three but in the worst way, the linking of the shorter charachter studies in this show were enough to retain one's attention but not enough to be engaging so it is almost an inverse of Shinya Shokudou, it lacks the requisite goofiness and identity through visual presentation to be as funny as Tonkatsu Dj Agetarou and it lacks the amazing presentation of cooking that is present in Shokugeki no souma. BUT The series as a whole had one other thing in common with these other series, Passion, there was a clear effort put into making this show charming above all else, it has real heart and I think that is worth as much as I have given the show

I came across this anime on my quest to watch the lowest rated slice of life anime here, and I don't know why it's rated so low. I had a really great time watching it and I would recommend it to anyone. Plus, the episode run time is so short you really have nothing to lose. The show falls on a LOT of cliches, but given the absolutely absurd premise, this is actually a strength. Like, what if generic idol academy competition plot, but RICE??? I mean, canonically within the universe of this show, rice people have rice water for blood. This comes up more than once, this is consistent world building we're talking about. They just triple down on the rice thing and don't look back, and it had me screaming-laughing and crying-laughing more than once. A lot of the rice puns get lost in translation, but the translators really did their best. You can kind of get the idea that it would be funnier if you spoke Japanese. Most of the humor is more visual and premise-based, though, so the pun thing isn't too bad. Given the minimal plot, the ending (of season 1) is still genuinely sweet and ties things up nicely. Plus, the ending scene features the main characters floating in space naked with glowing sparkles to censor their private parts, which is something this anime has in common with Puella Magi Madoka Magica, one of the greatest anime of all time. Need I say more?