Omamori Himari

Title: Omamori Himari Genre: Action, Supernatural, Romance, Comedy Rating: 6.5/10

Summary: Seven years ago, Yuto Amakawa's parents died in a car accident, leaving him alone without a single relative. Ever since then, his childhood friend, Rinko Kuzaki, has woken him up, cooked for him, and generally takes care of him. The only thing he has from any relative is a mysterious charm given to him by his grandparents as a good luck charm. From the day of his 16th birthday, his charm is said to not be able to protect him from evil spirits anymore, and Himari—a cat spirit samurai girl and demon huntress who, aside from wanting to copulate with him madly—was sworn in as his bodyguard. There is only one small problem: Yuto has a severe allergic reaction to cats!

Review: Omamori Himari was one of those animes that had quite a bit of potential, but ended up being a flop for anyone looking for a strong story. The main reason I didn’t like it was the random ecchi moments. Girls ripping off shirts for the sake of being naked got really repetitive. It literally came down to one losing her shirt, the other one would take off hers because girl B was jealous the guy saw girl A naked.  Despite the ecchi I found the story rather well done. It was pretty cool watching samurai style sword play, berserk cat girls, and supernatural magic. The story even had character development (whoa what?!). All the girls that happened to be thrown into the harem had a legitimate reason to like the protagonist (or at least a reason to stick around him). As I said before the story was rather well done. It was pretty interesting to learn about the different demon fighters and the demons themselves. In fact, I could have seen the creators making a much longer season. They had a lot of room to work with, it was unfortunate that they only used a small corner. Even though the girls were looser than the guy, they were at least interesting. The comedy wasn’t half bad either. Although admittedly most it was just random nudity, there were moments that used it in a ‘classy’ way.  The art style wasn’t that great. The fight scenes were good, but I could have seen them done better if they made a little better looking fire blast or water tornado.

Final statements: For a guy who is completely against ecchi anime, I kind of enjoyed this one (that’s saying something). They could have easily extended the series, but they didn’t cut it too short. With small problems here and there, I still consider it a decent anime. If you like ecchi I would consider this a preferred watch. For everyone else like me, it is a low priority watch.