Watching Heaven’s Lost Property reminded me of my time working through A-Channel. Though they occupy entirely different genres, both shows feel meticulously designed to be as unremarkable as possible. You can’t really get mad at them, simply because there’s not enough substance to really get into.
The difference is that A-Channel had the decency to end after 1 season, whereas Heaven’s Lost Property kept getting follow-ups and movies for years to come. I did not stick around for those!
So, plot. Heaven’s Lost Property is about perverted high school student Tomoki Sakurai. He is a hopeless idiot, already largely dependent on the support of his busty childhood friend Sohara Mitsuki. There’s some romantic tension between them, but nothing has ever come of it because Tomoki can’t go five seconds without trying to sexually harass someone. The duo is also joined by the unsettling student council president Mikako and the school’s resident weirdo Eishirou.
Haven’t nodded off yet? Good! So, Tomoki has recurring dreams of an angelic person beseeching him for help. One day the crew agrees to hang out together at night, but Tomoki is the only one to actually show up. Suddenly a light comes down from the sky, crashing right in front of him. In the crater, Tomoki finds a winged girl in strange clothes, who he reluctantly rescues.
This girl is Ikaros, who introduces herself as a pet slave to be used for Tomoki’s pleasure. She can grant wishes with few limitations and is a total babe to boot. Since Tomoki thinks with his penis first and foremost, he immediately begins abusing this power for all his naughty schemes. Ikaros herself doesn’t have emotions, so she is perfectly fine with all this happening.
Heaven’s Lost Property is mainly a comedy series, which I’d rank as “entertaining enough”. Much of its humor recycles familiar gags that are then complicated by Ikaros’ magic. For example, 1 episode is about Tomoki accidentally getting to see Sohara’s panties and not liking them. Her panties then become sentient and fly off, as will any other pair she puts on until they find one to Tomoki’s liking.
The anime shines when it gets delightfully weird like this. Some of my screenshots would take me half an hour to properly explain, just because so much setup went into these jokes. It’s profoundly stupid, in a way. However, HLP struggles to keep that energy going, forcing it to instead rely on story and its characters to bridge the gaps between its few punchy jokes. And none of those were engaging enough to keep me invested.
The characters don’t rise far beyond their basic stereotypes. Ikaros gets some development throughout season 1, most of which ties in with a mystical subplot about the angels. It’s fairly dry fantasy stuff spiced up slightly by scenes that try to be as edgy as possible. All this effort feels misplaced in a show about a little chibi dude whose love for pantsu and oppai causes all kinds of silly problems. When the last few episodes suddenly go all-in on this mythological plot, I gotta say that it lost me entirely.
Several episodes before that also ended up being uninteresting for other reasons. Some jokes just take a lot of setup, only to end up not being very funny at all. Some episodes try to have a more serious story, only to fall flat because the characters aren’t deep enough for that. There is this one episode where the cast ends up stranded on an island, which leans heavily on the relationship between Tomoki and Sohara. It was so boring that the only highlight ended up being the ED song.
Really, I am not sure what I could possibly recommend Heaven’s Lost Property for. Its comedic extremes are nice, but those alone are too sparse to carry the whole show. The characters and plot aren’t interesting, and even the fanservice is far too tame for an alleged-ecchi series. You don’t get any action scenes until the last few episodes and even then it’s nothing special to look at. It doesn’t do anything so poorly that I wanted to drop it, nor does it do anything well enough to feel at all significant. It’s elevator music in anime format.
