Convenience Store Boy Friends Is Charming but Confusing

Pierrot

One learns to appreciate the simpler, smaller things that can be found in a world where things are overly convoluted and overstimulating. Not every anime is as over-the-top as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Mr. Osomatsu, or Pop Team Epic, which may be the reason why many of us still watch anime at all. That being said, if you want to keep your audience’s interest piqued, the worst thing you can do is present your viewer with an art style that is simplistic, but make it less-than-easy for them to keep track of your plots, subplots, characters, and so forth.

Such is sadly the case with Pierrot’s 2017 romance anime Convenience Store Boy Friends. Now, if you know anything about me, you might know that convenience stores hold a special place in my heart because they’re the place where I often bought lunches during my summer workweeks. Needless to say, I became interested in this anime pretty quickly. A quick Google search of the anime yields the following synopsis: “Six high school boys hang out at a local convenience store where they talk about their daily lives.” While this premise might sound straightforward to the casual observer, it commits the cardinal sin of being confusing in practice.

The first couple of episodes are focused primarily on only four characters, two boys (Haruki Mishima and Towa Honda) and two girls (Miharu Mashiki and Mami Mihashi). Already, we are met with our first challenge, as the names of these main four characters sound very similar to each other, which makes it difficult to keep track of who is speaking to whom. Thankfully, the question of who likes whom is a lot easier to piece together: Haruki has been in love with Miharu ever since they were very young, and Towa likes Mami. Based on what we see from the first two episodes, it would seem as though the rest of the series is going to focus on these two specific couples as their relationships develop and more obstacles appear, right? Wrong.

From then on, we are slowly but surely introduced to not one, not two, but four more character romance subplots alongside the characters mentioned above. This means that the viewer has to keep track of eight more characters in addition to the core four. The worst part is that the romance plots outside of the main four characters’ seem to be little more than background plots with little dialogue spoken, which leads me to believe that these subplots are grossly superfluous in the grand scheme of things.

To give credit where it’s due, though, Convenience Store Boy Friends is very ambitious in what it’s trying to be—an anime soap opera filled with raw emotion and engaging story arcs. It’s also got plenty of interesting character dynamics between the designated pairings (Towa being a chatty playboy who likes the quiet and serious Mami, for instance).

Nonetheless, if you’re just dipping your toes into the romance genre of anime, I would strongly advise you to look elsewhere, because Convenience Store Boy Friends is nothing short of a pain to try and unravel.