12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 8Nostalgia is one hell of a drug, and Kowloon Generic Romance runs with this idea on the visual, thematic, and literal level. Its shining thing is the Kowloon Walled City, a single city block in Hong Kong built up to impossibly dense levels during the second half of the twentieth century. You only get these unzoned skyscraper settlements where a) the political status of the area is contested, b) there are borders or physical barriers preventing sprawl, and c) the space is undesirable enough to escape redevelopment or bombs. From the back-to-back colonial occupations to the Chinese Civil War, the geopolitical conditions that led to the creation and eventual destruction of the Kowloon Walled City are one of a kind. There will never be another.…okay but what if there was??? Kowloon Generic Romance knows exactly what it wants: hot muggy summers, grimy streets, alleyways that never see the sun, densely packed interiors, hawkers with every counterfeit product under the sun, and a gruff, tight-knit atmosphere. But this idealized Kowloon is getting chipped away at from the outside: residents now have phones, trendy instagrammable restaurants are constantly popping up, and long-time residents seem to keep disappearing. Not to mention the giant sci-fi device quietly floating above the town. There is mystery afoot in this small yet towering world. And in the same way an empty field makes the Miyazaweans dream of yuri, doesn’t the thought of an anarchic urban enclave where every building is over ten stories tall inevitably have you imagining a beautiful woman with short black hair and glasses smoking on her balcony in there?It certainly does for the author of this manga. Kowloon Generic Romance slots firmly into the “cozy hell” aesthetic milieu present in VA-11 Hall-A and really any sufficiently slice-of-life dystopian work. Slow pacing is important for these kinds of stories - it gives the reader time to bask in the vibes, let beauty emerge out of the grit, and get a feel for how normal people go about their lives in an objectively rough but aesthetically pleasing setting. In fact, it takes a whole volume before the central mystery of the story is even hinted at – that protagonist Reiko is a clone of a deceased woman, Kuji-B and she’s been swapped into her former life with no explanation or long-held memories.It turns out that most of the cast is haunted by matters of identity, and that that’s one of the prerequisites for even being able to interface with this version of Kowloon. Most of it is pretty gendery, too. Reiko’s past life had a femme fatale air about her that she finds herself unable to replicate, and her mans Kudo, the former lover of Kuji-B, is distraught when she tries to replicate it. Her best friend, Yaomay, is a former child actor whose mother was grooming her into her own mini-me. She cut all ties, ran away to Kowloon, and got so enough cosmetic surgery that nobody would be able to recognize her from her past. Techno-pharma CEO Miyuki has that classic Mysterious Anime Intersex thing going on, which adds an extra layer of familial resentment to his schemes on top of further queering his yaoi moments. And then Xiaohei actively has a gender nightmare going on. He’s so tortured about growing up and no longer being able to convincingly crossdress that he literally manifests as a cis woman in Kowloon out of a mixture of desire and nostalgia-turned-regret. It’s like that sometimes.You could probably hazard a guess as to what’s going here on if you were reading between the lines, so to spoil it all outright, this version of Kowloon is a simulation that aims to replicate how city was before it was demolished three years prior. It’s populated entirely by clones and people with strong enough wants and connections to the original city that they can actually partake in the simulation, which ends up eating away at their memories of the outside world. The tech powering it was developed by Miyuki after he inherited his abusive adoptive father’s company. He aimed to use it to torture his old man with endless bad memories, but the project took so long that said old man developed dementia, rendering it all useless. The actual emotional core of the simulation ended up being Kudo, wracked with grief over his fiancé Kuji-B killing herself, wishing he could turn back time and share an endless summer in Kowloon with her. It’s a messy but fun mix of sci-fi and romance, built around the literal and metaphorical weaponization of nostalgia. While it still could whiff the landing, I had a good time with this manga, even if it’s not the easiest recommendation.But the anime…. the struggle of getting this stuff onto the screen! Kowloon Generic Romance received a thirteen-episode adaptation earlier this year, animated by no-name studio Arvo Animation clearly biting off more than they could chew. Not only was the project daunting from a plotting and aesthetic standpoint, but with Bandai Namco on the production committee, they were almost certainly dealing with heavy-handed oversight and brutal deadlines.As both a cost-saving method and a necessary wellspring of nostalgia, Arvo frequently tries to invoke old-school anime aesthetics, and it only works sporadically. The character art is pretty good, but there’s a consistent struggle to move these characters that frequently kills the vibe. The backgrounds on the other hand, are fucking amazing! They were done by renowned art studio Aoshashin, who are frequent contributors to Studio Orange productions and more recently worked on Look Back. They contributed all their art in advance, avoiding the production crunch entirely. So it’s jarring to see the animators struggle to properly light their characters against their surroundings, with animation way too choppy for the disparate elements to mesh. The production lurches from episode to episode, where some pretty much have it together and achieve the artfulness I’d want out of this adaptation, and some absolutely do not. In one episode, the character art falls back on 2000s-level line thickness and detail. This whole thing smacks of some truly nasty crunch, and even if the studio had been given the proper amount of time and resources, there still would have been the hard problem of the episode count.Remember how I said earlier how vibes-based works live or die on their pacing? The anime version of Kowloon Generic Romance adapts eleven manga volumes into a single cour. The normal conversion rate for anime is three or four episodes per tankobon, so needless to say this is absolutely breakneck. Not only that, but they had to come up with an anime-exclusive ending, since the manga is nearing its conclusion but isn’t quite there yet.Given those parameters, the only way to achieve a complete adaptation is to cut out the slice of life aspects and turn the story into more of a thriller. It works… sometimes. The biggest problem is that the central romance is much harder to care about when we hardly ever get to see the characters interact organically. It also means that the story’s jargon and plot bullshit both accumulate at a much faster pace, making it a more confusing watch than it needs to be. In some ways it’s a respectable move to try and get to the perceived “meat” of the work and tell a story with a start and a finish rather than leave on a cliffhanger if you know you’re not likely to get a second season. It’s just that a shame it came at the cost of what I liked out of the original. As most are, the anime-exclusive ending is half-baked. Reiko finds a way to become a Real Girl, and her and Kudo get together for good instead of moving on with their lives. It clashes with the rest of the show’s themes around desire and letting go and living your absolute self, and makes the whole thing suddenly smack of Final Fantasy X ( / X-2 HD Remaster) at the last minute.I actually got to attend a Bandai Namco industry panel focused on Kowloon Generic Romance earlier this year at an anime convention – it was very enlightening in ways that were surely unintentional. While much of it was just PR for an anime that had already ended and was clearly not the breakout hit that they wanted it to be, they had producer Ryouya Arisawa headlining the event, and I was surprised by just how young he looked. When asked about his experience working on the show, he responded that he was stressed about getting the episodes done on time, and was relieved that it was over now. In studio speak, I’m pretty sure that means that many long nights were had on an absolutely grueling production. He then made a remark about how after wrapping up work on the anime, he immediately had to pivot to producing the movie!That’s right, Kowloon Generic Romance also received a film adaptation earlier this year, and they apparently press-ganged this poor man into working on them back-to-back. I can only hope he got some rest on the international flight to the con. As far as I can tell, the KGR movie never got a release outside of Japan, and that it was pretty terrible. The anime already had to rush to try and hit all of the major plot beats, so I can only imagine how impossible of a task it was to get everything across in under two hours, all while being hampered by the usual challenges of translating manga aesthetics into live-action. ??????????So that leaves us with one “okay but failed to live up to its potential” and one “why would you even try this” between these dual adaptations. In conclusion, it’s kind of awesome to have an endless stream of opportunities to write about some new way that Bandai dropped the ball. See you all next year for Hathaway 2!
Dec 21, 2025 • Subscribe
KOWLOON GENERIC ROMANCE, LOOK BACK, Real Girl, Legend of the Crystals: Final Fantasy
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