Writing comedy in hentai presents a unique challenge. The tropes of this medium are so laughable that any attempt to parody it risks feeling effortless. How can you satirize that which feels silly even when played completely straight? Mankitsu Happening attempts to overcome this hurdle—with mixed success.
The story centers around Keiichi; a boy with a most peculiar “curse”. No matter where he goes or how improbable the circumstances, he always gets laid with any woman he meets. Somehow he just attracts sexual encounters. He walks in on girls changing, stumbles into their toilets, or they simply begin lusting after him. While that may sound awesome to some, for Keiichi it has become quite a problem. He keeps having to quit jobs because he can’t avoid having sex on the clock.
After his most recent firing, a “friend” offers him a new job that should cater to his condition. Keiichi can start working at a manga café, where all the women are 2D and the clientele a bunch of sweaty otaku. However, I put “friend” between quotation marks for a good reason. Because not only is this café markedly popular among women, Keiichi will also be working exclusively with the voluptuous beauty Rei. Thanks buddy…
What follows is exactly what you’d expect. Everybody in the café becomes part of Keiichi’s incidental harem, leading to sexy altercations between bookshelves and orgies in the backroom.
For how much explaining the premise takes, the actual events of the story are incredibly straightforward. Each episode is usually cut up into two long sex scenes, with the briefest of storylines leading into them. There is something of an overarching plot about a rival shop trying to put the café out of business, but developments are kept so compact that it’s not really worth following. At best, not skipping through the plot might give you a slightly better idea of what the characters are like. Spoiler alert: they are goofy stereotypes.
Rei is an emotionless vixen who is hard to read, Kururu is the ditzy childhood friend, Otona is an undercover idol with a nerdy side, and Sayaka is the ojou-sama. The cast is nothing special, but their designs and voice-acting are competent enough. They are fun archetypes to watch sex scenes of, but that’s about it.
Fortunately, the sex scenes in Mankitsu Happening are impressive. Like with its plot, the anime embraces the ridiculousness of hentai. The sex is wild and indulgently animated, to the point of absurdity. I can legitimately not even tell how some of these scenes are physically possible. And you know what? I am gonna chalk that up as a positive.
You don’t watch Mankitsu Happening for a grounded, realistic sex scene. You watch it to see a maiden lactate like there’s no tomorrow. To watch a dude cum so hard that it’s spraying out of 4 different places spread across 2 girls at the same time. Shit’s absolutely preposterous and I appreciate it for that.
Even so, Mankitsu Happening came out a time where overindulgent hentai wasn’t strictly unique. Futabu, Dropout, and Rance were releasing around the same time, all of which I’d recommend over Mankitsu Happening. I also couldn’t help but feel that it peaks too early. Episode 1 does the introductions and episode 2 has the best scenes of the entire show. Episodes 3 & 4 ended up being forgettable in comparison and even boring at times.
If I were to put a number on it, I’d say that Mankitsu Happening is a 6/10 with occasional bursts of brilliance. Not interesting enough to watch in full, but you may find yourself revisiting some of its best scenes.
