English Dub Review: Conception “Please Be My Chikuwa!”

All these bread puns are going to give me a yeast infection.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

It’s the time of the school festival, and Mana thinks this is the perfect opportunity to get on making those last few Star Children, but Itsuki’s off to help Collette make her grandfather’s secret bread recipe. Though as they’re putting it together, she starts getting a little…forward, rolling up and licking dick-and-balls shaped batter and asking him to bite her ear. Also dishing out random shellfish gendering trivia. I’d be worried if I weren’t so confused, but it seems the true goal here is to recreate Collette’s grandfather’s “Happy Bread” that requires “a perfect pairing like when you make a child”. I wish I was kidding.

Eventually, the morning comes and they’ve decided on their creation: Chikuwa Sausage Bread. They sell it at the festival, facing stiff competition from rival bread companies and a…pantie grabbing competition…? But Itsuki stays strong in the face of this, which helps Collette to decide to do the love ritual with him. In bread and sausage costumes, no less!

But because we have about half of the episode left, we also have to get another maiden out of the way. Next up is Tarua, the maiden of Taurus, who runs all around town delivering letters but doesn’t know how to stop, so she crashes a lot. Mana has Itsuki help her deliver letters, and because they’ve spent maybe a few hours together, she’s D to LR too, but only after getting express permission from her boss because that’s how that works! Ah well, another one in the books. Also, Collette has a bunch of new panties. Yaaaaaaay?

OUR TAKE
What can I say that hasn’t been said? Well, it seems we’re continuing to vigorously scrape through the bottom of the barrel with a double loli episode. Couldn’t just spare us and take care of Collette last week so we just had to drag it out for the majority of this one. If I were being generous (and very drunk) I would say she went through some sort of character arc-like substitution where she went from being innocent to flirtatious, but I’m not going to dignify the sight of a girl who looks easily in elementary school at most licking dick shaped bread as an attempt at character development. This stuff was painfully uncomfortable to sit through on its own, let alone this complete farce of a relationship Itsuki has with her or any of the other girls.

Tarua is basically an afterthought, showing up just to have the most paper thin of dating scenarios with him before heading straight to bed. Or at least it WOULD be the most paper thin if there weren’t others before this that came about due to ONE BRIEF CONVERSATION. Compared to that, Tarua got a whole novel’s worth of bonding time and Collette got an entire YA book series for hers. Heck, going back to the two episodes I remotely enjoyed parts of, Episode 5 actually split things down the middle so the two parts felt like self-contained stories. I’ve watched plenty of harem anime before this, and they tend to keep their main female cast down to five or six to give everyone proper time to be fleshed out. Conception is just plowing through (pun intended) its cast of twelve and looks to be done by its eighth episode.

The backbone of a story like this is being able to develop your characters and this show doesn’t seem to care about that. And if they don’t, I can’t either. As much as I’ve felt the urge to destroy my computer just for getting this far, I genuinely think this series could have benefitted from doubling the episode length. At the very least, it would have given each of the girls time to feel like parts of the world and real people (or at least as close as possible) instead of just goals to check off. Speaking of which, next week is when we finally check off the last two maidens, and one of them looks like legal age this time! Oh, happy day.

Score
0.1/10