FUNimation | Through the Shattered Lens

What really nudges Interspecies Reviewers into “guilty pleasure” territory is the production’s split personality. On one hand, it’s shamelessly explicit for a late‑night TV anime; on the other, it’s structurally tight and surprisingly imaginative with its worldbuilding. The fantasy ecosystem is treated almost like a handbook of interspecies compatibility: differences in mana, lifespan, physiology, and even perception of age all factor into how each reviewer scores their night out. You’ll get a gag about the dragon girl’s overwhelming presence right next to a mini‑lecture on why fairies have extremely strict size limitations for their patrons. That blend of horny premise and nerdy specificity makes it feel like your group chat’s “what if” jokes got adapted into a full production.

There’s also the whole meta layer: Interspecies Reviewers was so out there that major distributors and broadcasters backed away from it, dropping or canceling its run because of how far it pushed explicit content for television. For a modern TV anime to get pulled partway through its broadcast is rare, and that notoriety quickly became part of the show’s identity. Just knowing that multiple networks balked at it adds to the sense that you’re watching something you’re not “supposed” to be watching—always a potent ingredient in guilty pleasure status.

The humor, crucially, is broader than just “look, boobs.” A lot of the jokes revolve around how absurdly bureaucratic and normalized sex work is in this world, from porter guilds hauling review sheets across the land to rival reviewers trying to torpedo or inflate ratings. There’s even an incubus critic who takes offense at the main crew’s negative scores and starts leaving his own glowing reviews, only for his swagger to be cut short by a vengeful lover. Moments like that reframe the series as a raunchy workplace comedy disguised as fantasy porn: everyone has opinions, everyone’s hustling, and nobody’s as objective as they pretend.

None of this magically elevates Interspecies Reviewers into high art, but it does make the show a lot more watchable than its reputation suggests. The episodic structure gives it a breezy, “one more episode” pacing; you always want to see what weird race or gimmick they’ll tackle next. The scoring boards at the end of each brothel visit become their own running joke, with wildly varying ratings, petty commentary, and the occasional self‑own when a character realizes their kink is not shared by anyone else in the party. It’s almost like a fantasy version of Anthony Bourdain crossed with late‑night cable: travel to a new spot, experience the local flavor, then sit around and compare notes over drinks.

All that said, this is exactly the sort of series most people will feel weird admitting they enjoyed. The explicit content isn’t a light garnish; it’s the central axis of every single episode. There’s no serious emotional through‑line to hide behind, no grand plot twist, no lofty theme you can trot out to justify the time investment. It’s just well‑executed trash: unapologetically focused on sex, gleefully juvenile in its punchlines, and willing to go places that many “edgy” shows only flirt with. Even fans who praise it often do so with qualifiers, acknowledging that it’s “kind of weird” while admitting it’s hot, funny, or unexpectedly creative.

That tension—between embarrassment and enjoyment—is the core of why Interspecies Reviewers works as a guilty pleasure. One side of you rolls your eyes at how lowbrow the premise is, yet the other side recognizes that the show is actually doing some clever things with subjectivity, fantasy biology, and the review culture we live in. You can’t really defend it in polite company, and you probably won’t see it on anyone’s “Top 10 Must‑Watch Anime for Beginners” list, but you also might find yourself remembering specific gags, species breakdowns, or character reactions long after you’ve finished it.

So, is Interspecies Reviewers good? In a conventional sense, maybe not. In the “I had more fun with this than with half the safe, respectable shows in its season” sense, absolutely. It’s crude, controversial, and brazenly fixated on its own niche, but it’s also surprisingly consistent, inventive with its setups, and genuinely funny if you’re on its wavelength. That combination of shame and amusement, of “I really shouldn’t be enjoying this” tangled up with “but I kind of am,” is exactly what makes Interspecies Reviewers one of anime’s purest modern guilty pleasures.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

As anyone that knows me knows, I have a massive backlog of videos that I bought but have yet to watch. Hence the incredibly uncreative name for this column! Seriously, I sat and thought on it, and that was the best I could do. Deal with it. So anyways, as I have about 850 discs that I have purchased but never watched, I thought it would be best if I sat down and watched them and gave my thoughts on them here. They’ll all be anime, but this is different from the Anime You Should Be Watching column I infrequently wrote before. With that column, I was cherry picking the titles that were the best of their particular genre. Here, there’s going to be a lot of average shows, because there are a lot of average shows produced in Japan. In fact, just because I bought it doesn’t mean it’s any good. It’s entirely possible that I bought a steaming pile of shit. If that’s the case, well, if I sat through it and watched it, then you’ll have to suffer through my review of it. Lucky you! Thankfully, I like to think that for the most part, I have pretty decent taste, so the worst that you’ll have to put up with is a resounding MEH from me.

So, without further ado, let’s start this new column!

I really wish that I had started out with an instant classic, but that’s just not the case. As I said before, they can’t all be winners kid, and this one is certainly not what I’d put in my stable of timeless classics. When Sgt. Frog first was announced for license here in the US, there was a huge swelling of support. The way people were acting, you’d have thought that the second coming of Cowboy Bebop was upon us. Then the company that originally licensed it, ADV Films, went bankrupt, and that was that. Until FUNimation swooped in and picked this up. I hadn’t watched any of the fansubs of this, and I was strictly going off of word of mouth when I bought it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. In this case it doesn’t. The sad thing is that I bought every release that FUNi made before I ever watched the first one. That’s the drawback to having the backlog that I do. I’m only now watching stuff I bought 3 years ago. C’est la vie.

This particular release follows pretty much all the others. A lot of Gundam humor and veiled references to other similar shows. That’s great if you’re a fan of Gundam. I’m not. Hence my mileage on this particular show is highly limited. I do love the yandere type of girl, so Nishizawa, while not a strict yandere, does amuse me with her going from all dere dere to conniving psychopath. But that’s largely negated because Fuyuki is a clueless idiot. So here we’re mainly going through the winter months. This means the typical things like Christmas parties and New Year celebrations. I really wish I could say that this brought something new to the genre, but it really doesn’t. Everything we see here we’ve seen many a time before, and more importantly, we’ve seen it done better. I don’t care about things being repeated. When you’ve seen as much anime as I have, you’re not going to see a ton of genuinely new content. But a lot of anime can take these well worn tropes and still make them interesting. This one doesn’t. Frankly, I have no idea how this managed to go for 358 episodes. I’ve watched through 51 and frankly that’s enough for me. Unfortunately I still have another collection of this to get through, although I should be happy that FUNimation didn’t pick up any more than that, and since it’s been over a year since they licensed any of it, I think it’s safe to assume that no more will find its way over here.

For something that had so much buzz going in to it, I must say that this has been a massive disappointment. I don’t often let public opinion influence what I buy, and this gives a good reason why I shouldn’t. The public at large doesn’t know good anime, and they certainly don’t know what I’d like. I may not always pick out a winner, but I certainly can do a lot better than Sgt. Frog.