Instead of me explaining what Keitai Shoujo is about, you might just as well watch episode one somebody has helpfully put on Youtube instead:
From 2007, from before the iPhone, when flip phones ruled Japan, comes Keitai Shoujo, literally “mobile phone girls”, a five episode six minute OVA series that’s basically a series of harem romance vignettes, but with texting. Strip the full sized opening and ending from each episode and you’re left with 31/2 minutes of ‘plot’, each of which revolves around our protagonist duo witnessing a scene involving yet another girl each episode. Some of those work, like the first episode in which the girl in question is already friends with the both of them and the plot revolves around the romantic tensions between the three of them. Some don’t, as in the very next episode in which the more desparate of the two friends saves a gloomy girl from falling down the stairs, then hits on her and gets shot down. Some episodes don’t even involve them at all, other than as witnesses to whatever the girl is doing this time.
Of the five featured girls I liked this one the best. I just like that archetype of the perfectionist, overly serious senpai; the yamato nadeshiko type. Nothing much is done with any of the characters though so all you’re getting out of any of them is their stereotype and associations from other anime. The individual stories are all decent enough and it could’ve been a decent sort of harem romcom had this been a proper series, rather than a series of shorts obsessed with text messaging. There’s also an epilogue, which repeats episode two for some reason and then contrives an ending for the series as a whole involving the mascot character only seen in the opening and ending. All in all this is interesting rather than good.
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