The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

My Girlfriend's Friend

High school boy Takeru has a girlfriend named Kaori. Kaori confessed her feelings to him and became his first-ever girlfriend. However, Kaori's friend Tomoko begins to seduce him and tempt him with her voluptuous figure.

My Girlfriend's Friend is based on the manga series by Jura. The anime series is streaming on OceanVeil on Sundays.

Hentai tropes and their popularity are what they are. So while I feel kind of surprised that the market hasn't prompted much backward NTR—with a blissfully unaware girlfriend having her man's loins purloined by some saucier sexpot—I guess that's just the direction the market swings. Still, for anyone into that specific scenario, here's My Girlfriend's Friend, an entry with the most cromulent treatment of this material that only Studio Quad's quality control can muster!

On the one hand, I could criticize how cheating facilitator Yoshioka is drawn with completely conflicting proportions to everybody else, inserted among these regular rom-com characters like some sort of sexy cryptid invading their boring world. But that's sort of the point, isn't it? Viewers are supposed to insert themselves into the ramped-up raunchiness Yoshioka is foisting on Takeru (of course he's named Takeru). There's not even any indication of what either of these women see in this guy, apart from his direct stand-in nature for the audience. Yoshioka alludes to something desirable about him, but for her the act mostly seems to be about the thrill of cheating itself. I'd honestly be interested in learning how she even became friends with Kaori in the first place, and how much of the psychology behind it was pursuing this sort of eventual taboo, but I don't expect this series to have it in it. This is hardly something like Scum's Wish.

For the minimal focus on the actual character—which, you know, should be a component of a psycho-sexual thrill-seeking porno like this—it's not like the treatment of the action is worth anything either. Yoshioka shoves herself into the unfitting borders of this cramped, barely animated show. Everyone ducks just out of frame as sound effects play while they're offscreen to promote the concept of sex. The show has the temerity to deploy some actual fuckin' bow-chicka-bow-wow-ass porn music while the cheaters are shuffling around in a bathroom stall. All this might be sexy enough if you want to imprint on the idea of being a stupid little guy who has the half-assed heaving bosoms of this woman foisted upon him, but really barely anything actually happens, and one's own imagination might genuinely be better than this sloppy slideshow.

And then speaking of slideshows, evidently the artisans behind My Girlfriend's Friend weren't comfortable churning out a half-hearted half-length episode. And so the second half is taken up by the sort of chibi bonus bits that would normally fill out the few seconds of episode preview time in a more complete show. I simply don't know that anybody knows or cares about these characters enough after 12 minutes to enjoy seeing them transplanted into out-of-context "comedy" scenes like a zombie apocalypse. Especially puppeteered as single chibi models wiggling around on popsicle sticks like this. Amazingly, the sole laugh this got out of me came in the second (!) bit, where Takeru and Kaori are revealed to be attempting sexy office roleplay, except he got way too into just trying to do a good job as a new hire. Other than that, this was largely me learning that a porno could, in fact, evolve into a complete time-suck.

When it comes to kinks, I've never been one for NTR, or stories about broken hearts and cheating lovers. I understand the appeal of exploring the taboo emotions that come from sneaking around and giving in to lusts that defy the social contract, but it's never done anything for me. Obviously, this is not a fault to be laid upon smut like My Girlfriend's Friend, which doesn't even make it to the three-minute mark before a girl is straddling our hapless protagonist and literally asking him if he wants to cheat on her friend. Still, since 90% of the porn experience involves whether or not it presses the viewer's specific buttons, it feels worth getting this disclaimer out of the way up front.

As for the craft, I can tell you My Girlfriend's Friend probably isn't a five-star experience, even for the folks who do get hot and heavy at the thought of dallying around with a heartless seductress (or being the one getting dallied upon). The show does fine with its heightened premise: Takeru loves his girlfriend Kaori, but her busty friend Tomoko is absolutely desperate to jump his bones in the bathroom stall of the karaoke joint, specifically because she can apparently only get her rocks off if she's screwing a taken man. So far, so good. The problem, as is often the case when smut cheaps out on the production values, is in the execution.

For one, the artwork really struggles with the proportions of the titular girlfriend's friend, to the point where I was scrubbing back and forth across scenes like a CSI investigator because I couldn't figure out how big Tomoko is supposed to be. Obviously, her boobs are meant to be on the somewhat preposterous side of extra-large, but there are certain shots where the ratio of boob to shoulder to head just looks wrong, especially in the cramped corners of the bathroom stalls. In one shot, Tomoko looks like she's built like a linebacker with a full head of height above Takeru, and in others Takeru has at least four inches (of vertical height) on either of the girls he is with. This might sound like pointless nitpicking, but I'm the kind of guy who actually relies on the spatial proportions and physical intimacy of the involved canoodlers to get into any onscreen sexytimes. I think lesser pornography handwaves the finer details of exactly how cramped a single toilet stall is going to be for an impromptu tryst, or how much weight someone might be pressing onto another by virtue of their body shapes and sizes.

Also, let's be honest, the more straightforwardly lewd material isn't all that great either. The one shot of bare breasts that we get is about as sophisticated as My Girlfriend's Friend can manage to be, but it completely falls apart whenever it zooms in on any downstairs bits. One crotch shot in particular somehow makes Tomoko's nethers look even more two-dimensional than they already must be by virtue of the medium of animation. That is an impressive feat. The second half of the episode dispenses with the sexy stuff entirely to deliver a mercilessly long and very cheap-looking skit, and I cannot imagine who this is for. I am very sorry to all the horndogs and horncats out there, because I don't think My Girlfriend's Friend will leave anyone satisfied this season.

My Girlfriend's Friend is such a weird exercise in narrative and sexual edging. A rare full length hentai releases (okay, technically the back half of this episode are a couple of gag animations in a simplified style, but still), I thought this anime might be a cut above the animation and writing caliber we're used to seeing from these kinds of releases. This is not the case and My Girlfriend's Friend feels super half baked in desperate need of a punched up script.

The basic premise is that same-face MC Takeru is dating the innocent coded Kaori, however Kaori's shaped-like-a-hentai-character best friend Tomoko has a cuckolding/cheating fetish and is down bad to jump Takeru's bones. She attempts to do so while crashing the couple's karaoke date and, despite her best efforts, she cannot convince Takeru to commit infidelity.

Even within the porno-world logic of this show, it's pretty grating to watch Tomoko sexually entice, harass, and assault a dude who just is not into her. This show also needs to introduce a new wrinkle in this set up in episode two, like Kaori secretly being into the idea or her being a little freak in her own right, because there's no way these failed attempts at cuckholding can carry this show through its entire season. The only entertainment I got out of My Girlfriend's Friend was, I think, unintentional to the creators; that being how I laughed when some misogynistic dude bros who were loudly commenting on Tomoko's body left the bathroom they were in without washing their hands.

Honestly, I think I enjoyed the tangent, chibi animations at the end of this episode more than the show proper. Putting these characters into situations like a zombie apocalypse and an office setting actually gave me a sense of what their dynamic is like as a group, and how they would individually respond to specific problems and situations. My only hope for this show going forward is that, in the office ending sketch, Kaori reveals that she finds the idea of an office roleplay romantic encounter to be arousing.

If this anime can give Kaori something to do besides NOT getting cheated on, there's a chance this show could have legs as a pervy romantic comedy where a vanilla dude is out of his depth with two kink positive women. As it stands now, though, My Girlfriend's Friend is kind of a nothing burger and it was a struggle for me to even have enough of an opinion about it to finish this review.