Boku no Itoshii Youkai Girlfriend (2024)

I really need a Season 2 for this!!

Firstly, I'd totally recommend this show if people out there want a soft romance with Fantasy, Action and Comedy elements mixed into it.

The main reason I began the series was the description. As a person who always reads the description first, I have this tendency to drop japanese series without much thought to it, but this time I assure you this series was so much better than what I thought.

As the title of this review says, I think with the limited japanese series I've watched, this one had the best fight scenes. I got hooked up for them from the start.
Then came the comedy. Laughed throughout the show. And the Fantasy, with the whole Youkai, it was a new type of fantasy I'd watched.

Finally, the cute romance. It was so cute that I have a whole list of cute romance shows like this. I loved how Izzy kept protecting Hachi and how Hachi kept on going about how she shouldn't kill anyone anymore. It was cute.

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Be careful what you wish for!

What happens when a lonely nerd uses an ancient spell to summon love? He ends up with My Undead Yokai Girlfriend. A mix of comedy, romance, friendship, the supernatural, and mystery, Boku no Itoshii Youkai Girlfriend had a little bit of everything.

University student Hachi and his friends belong to an E-games team called the Underdogs. After a “romantic” betrayal, desperate Hachi and his friend Tanuki use a forbidden spell book to conjure him a girlfriend. The girlfriend ends up being a nine-tailed fox, Princess Izuna Imiki whom Hachi calls Izzy. Izzy’s first priority is getting laid so that she can stay in the human world. It will also bind her to Hachi and him to her. Izzy’s other goal is separating the heads of her enemies from their bodies so that she can release the other yokais from the place where humans trapped them---The World of Nothing and Timeless Darkness. Along the way evil humans conjure zombies and strive to stop Izzy from completing her goal. Hachi isn’t sure how to handle this new girlfriend who appears to be a serial killer.

I would have rated this cute drama higher if not for some of the acting. Sano Hayato’s Hachi drove me to distraction with his over-exaggerated acting and Hachi’s childish behavior. It was painful to watch. Some of that is on the writers to be sure. The female cop also behaved childishly and erratically while the other cops played their roles straight. On the other hand, I loved Yoshikawa Ai’s portrayal of Izzy. Izzy was strong and didn’t act like she’d eaten too much sugar. Not everyone can pull off a warrior princess role but she did a good job. The Underdog gang was a mixed bag of characters. I enjoyed Tanuki and Hikari’s budding romance. A word about best friend Tanuki played by Anthony. I’ve seen rather crass comments about his casting. Anthony is Japanese, born to a Japanese mother and American father. His father died when he was two and his mother married a Japanese man when he was five. As he said of growing up, “There were girls and boys and then there was me, this mysterious black being.” He grew up around Tokyo and doesn’t speak much English because he is Japanese and was raised Japanese. So bitch about the Amazon and Coke PPLs all you want but this man does not deserve the ire for not fitting some people’s narrow view for Jdrama casting. I’ll get off my soapbox now.

The production values were uneven but in a story like this it wasn’t terribly important. Some random thoughts…The producers must have spent most of their money on the special effects as the sets weren’t very memorable. A wealthy lawyer’s office looked more like a storage room. I thought it was interesting that several characters had blue streaks in their hair like you might see in comic books. Bonus points to the drama for working one of my favorite songs, Chicago's Hard to Say I'm Sorry, into the story. Demerits for a Coke float that had ice in it! Lastly, anyone who knows me knows I have kinemortophobia. Hate zombies and the zombies in this drama were creepy. But even I have to admit peering through my fingers that trying to figure out how many zombies you can fit in a VW van was funny.

My Undead Yokai Girlfriend was entertaining. The ending left room for a second season though that remains to be seen. Maybe enough time will pass so that Hachi can grow up and control his emotions better as he discovers how deeply entwined he is in the supernatural goings on. I would definitely be open to seeing more of Princess Izuna Imiki’s story.

10 October 2024

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it's good....but not excellent.

I was really curios about this show because honestly I really struggle in finding Interesting japanese dramas.
this has (or had) a lot of potential but somehow it manages to be .....meh.

the story: interesting. a young man manages to evoke a yokai and to bond with her experiencing love for the first time.
the yokai though is on her mission to find the five families that contributed to segregate her fellow yokai and therefore kill them.
hachi, the protagonist really cares for Izzy (the yokai) but doesn't agree with her "methods" of freeing her friends.
that's basically the plot in a nutshell.

the acting is really good. the music, the photography are also enjoyable but what is really lacking in the script.
the funny moments are not really funny, the tense moments are not really tense. I get that this is a short series and developing characters and plots takes time but everything is too much superficial.

don't get me wrong it is still enjoyable but it feels liked a missed opportunity.

the last episode gives away the fact that the story is far from over and that a second season should be on the horizon but as for now , June 2024, nothing seemes to be confirmed.

give it a watch if you want something light.

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Unfortunately lost potential. : (

Themes of love, camaraderie, partnership & family.

While initially starting out strong as a rom-com w/ some dark humor the show eventually drops the ball & just spirals into a redundant mess.

First of all the positives:
- Yoshikawa Ai heavily carried this drama & if it wasn’t for her character & the show being short I would’ve dropped it. And her character Izzy is such a fun fish out of water character.
- The main antagonist Tenkai was also a good nemesis for Izzy too. Which made for a fun dynamic.
- The action scenes were actually good & although you could tell when there was a stunt double Ai comes off believable as a fighter.
- The show is quite funny a lot of the times & the actors all have pretty good timing.
- Music is just okay as I mainly remembered the dub-step & nothing else.
- Camera work is also pretty good w/ some fun techniques every once in a while.

Now for the negatives:
- Sano does a pretty good job for the character, Hachi he’s given, but he was clearly directed to overreact & worst of all his character was heavily mis-written. The major problem w/ his character is he never truly understood Izzy & her situation, bcuz he was rarely in danger unlike her. The writers never challenge Hachi’s suggestion of pacifism before violence. Instead they just decided to keep him ignorant of the Antagonists & their evil nature. Resulting in him not allying w/Izzy for the last half of the show.
- The side characters are frankly boring & forgettable w/ a few exceptions. 1 of them being Sorimichi’s Detective Dad as he plays a father who isn’t close w/ his son well. But he’s wasted. Then there’s the friends & associates of Tadashi who were either annoying or contributed little this creating no real attachment between everyone. So when they started getting so much screen time it was just wasting this already short show.
- Speaking of which, the show is 8 ep & they utterly wasted their time w/ creating a fun & loving couple. Instead so much time is give to the supporting cast who also weren’t allies of Izzy.
- Which leads to the story & that is it’s confused as to what it should do. Instead of creating a story about 2 loners/losers who eventually find that they aren’t so alone, they completely ostracize the FL. The theme is love, camaraderie & partnership, but the only one who showed that was Izzy. So the writer’s intention, whatever it was, is completely lost as I didn’t feel any of that.

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Overall had a good time.
Hoping for season 2 🥺
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In the end, a disappointing show

This is one of those shows you watch and wonder, why did I watch this? I guess because the series and episodes are short.

Be warned that the ending of the show is very westernized. Meaning it's just a setup for a second season, which might or might not happen. I found this the most disappointing aspect of the drama. This is one of the reasons I stopped watching Western TV shows.

Acting was meh. The FL was cool, and that was about it. The friends were uninteresting and downright annoying, especially his best friend. I hated every minute he was on the screen.

Having read the other reviews, I agree that he spent most of the drama acting against his girlfriend instead. She tried to explain that she was a victim of a group of nefarious villains who exterminated and banished her people in order to steal their power. The descendants of those villains were still active, still benefiting from the actions of their ancestors. Yet the ML seemed unable to grasp that, with his obsession with pacifism.

The reason for this hatred was never explained, just that they couldn't exist in the same world. Says every oppressor ever. We are left thinking that they were simply out to steal their power.

All these questions were never resolved and were left for some future second season, which might or might not happen.

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I expected more

This had so much potential, especially being on Prime.

I like the FL, she was unique, with a history and plot as well as an uptight personality, but regardless still a good one.
ML on the other hand gave me multiple second hand embarrassment. Most of his actions were against her, rather than helping her, or trying to understand her. Didn't take responsibility for what he has done, and an overall idiot in serious situations. The zombie intern dude had more braincells that he had, especially in the last episode. That man i call a devoted one.
All he did was whine, complain and setting rules whithout explaining the reason those would apply in his world.

The last episode really made it seem badly scripted.

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Hopefully there will be a second season.

Really looking forward to the sequel, I hope there are no murders or people dying in vain, and more slice of life moments that are funny and entertaining.

I like Izzy's innocent and very cute appearance when facing contemporary Japanese life.

Who knows who the bad guy is actually doesn't really matter, because the attraction of this series is the romantic relationships. The many interests and points of view make it feel complicated and difficult to determine whose side the audience should side with.

Some unimportant characters somehow have to be sacrificed and die without making significant story developments. I'd rather have them stay alive and experience character development. For example, a character with the ability to change shape. It appeared very quickly, and then suddenly it had to end.

I'm really looking forward to the continuation of the story and hopefully Izzy and Tadashi can often have their happy moments.

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