Kanojo x Kanojo x Kanojo

Series Overview

Kanojo x Kanojo x Kanojo: Exciting Life With Three Sisters (Kanojo x Kanojo x Kanojo: Sanshimai to no DokiDoki Kyoudou Seikatsu / 彼女×彼女×彼女～三姉妹とのドキドキ共同生活～) is a slice of life romance series of the harem variety. It’s an OVA series consisting of three episodes.

The series follows Haruomi Shiki, a high school student who’s forced to evacuate from his hometown due to a volcanic eruption. As a result, he ends up living with his childhood friends, the Orifushi sisters, who have a spare room due to the death of their father some time prior.

Upon his passing, Mr. Orifushi left his business, MinMin Ice Cream, to his children. MinMin is a small shop, more of a stand really, that has been on the decline ever since Natsumi, the eldest Orifushi daughter, took over the day-to-day operations.

Now that Haruomi is in the picture, he’s determined to help the Orifushi sisters revitalize their father’s ice cream shop. But the arrival of a much larger competitor, 101 Ice Cream, just across the street from MinMin isn’t going to make things easy.

Ultimately, it’s going to take the combined effort of the Orifushi sisters, Haruomi, and a few of Haruomi’s classmates if MinMin is going to stand a chance of survival. And, that’s one of my favorite things about this series.

Kanojo x Kanojo x Kanojo isn’t simply a harem series in which various girls fall for our hero. Nearly every character has a role to play in restoring MinMin to its former glory. I won’t say they’re all relevant to the story, but even the one who isn’t is still a unique enough character for her inclusion in the anime to be worthwhile.

Main and Supporting Cast

From the overview section, you know basically all there is to know about Haruomi. The only extra piece of trivia I have for you regarding him here is that the “Haru” in his name means spring. Why is this important? Because the Orifushi sisters are named after the other three seasons.

Natsumi is the eldest of the Orifushi sisters. We don’t have an actual age for her — or any of the characters for that matter. But I’m going to assume she’s in her early 20s. She’s out of high school and works at MinMin full time, where she apparently drinks Bacardi Black rum while on the job.

Akina is the middle Orifushi sister and is in the same high school class as Haruomi. Honestly, I think Akina is the least interesting of all the girls. She’s basically just the vanilla option. And while vanilla is nice sometimes, it’s never been my first choice when it comes to ice cream.

Mafuyu is the youngest Orifushi sister as well as the best character in the entire series. Not only is she simply the cutest, but she’s the most complex. She’s a quiet middle schooler who enjoys reading. And while it may not seem like she’s that interested in helping out with MinMin, she often indirectly leads Haruomi to solutions.

Midori Byakudan might be my second favorite girl after Mafuyu. She’s the class president and one of Akina’s friends. She ends up helping out Haruomi by translating recipe notes that Mr. Orifushi had written in English before his passing.

Suzuran “Suzu” Himenohara is the wildcard of the series. I can’t actually think of any way she helped with the whole MinMin situation. But, since you never know what kind of antics Suzu is going to be up to, she’s one of the more interesting characters in the series.

Does Hard Work Pay Off?

Now, I’ve included a few spoilers for the series already in this review. But this is where I’m going to get into endgame spoiler content. Does the hard work that Haruomi and the girls (except Suzu) put into MinMin pay off?

Normally, you’d expect the answer to be yes — unless this was the first season of a Love Live! series. However, rather surprisingly, all of this hard work actually doesn’t pay off. Well, at least not in the way you would expect it to.

You see, there’s an ice cream competition that both MinMin and 101 enter. And throughout the course of the series, everyone is doing their share to come up with the perfect flavor for MinMin, which turns out to be a lavender flavor. But in the end, MinMin actually loses the competition despite everyone’s best efforts.

So, does this mean that MinMin failed as a business and had to shut down? Well, no. And this is the part of the anime I don’t like all that much. 101 actually closes its doors — at least of that location, it’s a chain — before it even officially opens them.

You see, it turns out that one of the board members of 101 actually used to work at MinMin under Mr. Orifushi. And after tasting MinMin’s lavender flavor, he realizes that he made a mistake when he left to work at 101.

I know that having MinMin win the competition in the end thanks to all their hard work would have been as generic of an ending as it gets. But at the same time, the actual ending is extremely unsatisfying. It’s almost like nothing that was accomplished throughout the series mattered.

At least it was thanks to the lavender ice cream that 101 closed and MinMin survived. But winning because the competition forfeits isn’t how anyone wants to win.

Conclusion

I’m actually very conflicted about my rating of this series. On one hand, I love it. It’s probably the anime I’ve rewatched the most amount of times. But on the other, it’s very generic. So, with that said, I guess I have to give it a 7/10. I might come back and bump it up to an 8 later. We’ll see.

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