This does contain spoilers for the anime “Conception” so if you for some reason do not want it spoiled, here is your warning.

Conception, where do you even begin with this show. This "review" or what not will contain spoilers. For starters, the myanimelist score quite accurately represents the quality of this show. Roughly 4,5/10 on myanimelist would suggest that it is very bad, when shows that are just bad end up around 6/10. If someone were to watch this, I would highly recommend them to only watch the highlights because overall, there is way to much stuff in it that just doesn't mean anything. It is not because it had a lack of interesting material to work with, no, it is just very weird what this anime decided to focus on. 

 So what is it? Conception is an anime based on the video game "Conception: Please Give Birth to My Child!" which got a remake slightly after the anime aired, with the title "Conception Plus: Maidens of the Twelve Stars". No matter what the title implies, it is not an 18+ rated game or show. The main character gets transport to another world with his cousin and childhood friend. In that world, he has to enact Love Rituals with these Maidens to make Star Children in order to seal various labyrinths. If the labyrinths are not sealed, the monsters in them will leak out and attack the world. The Love Rituals are not actual banging, they are "just" star banging and definitely not (read: they are very much) sexual in nature. The anime focuses mostly on the Maidens themselves, and give very little screen time to the labyrinths themselves which are mostly handled off-screen.

To start with, there are 12 Maidens and 12 episodes to this show. Even if each Maiden got one episode each, that would be nowhere near enough development for this to be good. And that is not even what happens. Some of the Maidens get one episode. Mahiru even gets more than one episode. Most of them however, gets half an episode or share an episode with another Maiden, which severely limits their development. In the end, all of the Maidens are done and romanced with after episode 8. That results in 1,5 Maidens per episode. The last 4 episodes revolve around romancing a secret 13th Maiden that was revealed, queerbaiting by suggesting that Itsuki bang a dude and then chickening out at the end, banging a racoon and then the finale happened and it wrapped things up real fast. 

 The pacing because of this was very odd. You'd think with this much to go through the pacing would be extremely fast, but instead there are a lot of scenes that don't add anything and are nonsensical. A lot of them include Mana, the perverted racoon who is helping Itsuki seduce the Maidens. Most of her dialogue is just being extremely horny, which works sometimes and other times is just annoying and drags scenes out.

The way the different Maidens are seduced is quite varied, and most of the methods used are questionable at best. The highlight here is probably the Maiden that they use Stockholm syndrome on. They straight up kidnap one of them, keep her in a cellar and then Itsuki takes care of her in order to make her fall for him, and in the end they perform the Love Ritual and get a new Star Child. 

 The Love Rituals themselves are varied and were actually quite entertaining for the most part. In the first episode we got a lot of shots featuring Itsuki's bulge, and he was straight up about to bang his cousin when they were interrupted and explained that the Love Ritual is not actually bonking, and then they just make a Star Child instead. This was just in the first episode by the way. There are at least two times that the Love Ritual is a threesome, one includes Itsuki getting pegged and finally we have Mana, the perverted racoon. That was not a love ritual, it was just Itsuki straight up banging a racoon.

With all this said about the show, there was one thing in particular I thought it did well. Episode 4 was an episode which focused on one of the Maidens and gave her some nice development, had some amusing gags and was overall a very enjoyable episode (Coffin-chan best girl don't @ me). Was this actually a good episode, or was it still a bad episode but just so much better than all the other episodes so it seemed good comparatively? That is impossible to tell. 

 The show also had some amusing highlights in it, a lot of them being very sexually out there scenes. They are mostly entertaining because of the shock value, not because of any actually good writing or anything.

The final epsiode contains a decent final boss fight, and wraps up things by having Itsuki and Mahiru go back to their world. The other Maidens also follow, somehow one of the Maidens who died got resurrected and all the Star Children also followed to the real world. And finally, Mana the perverted racoon, also followed them and turned into a girl. After everyone is transported to the real world we see Itsuki marrying all of the Maidens in the true harem end. Way to go Conception, an actual harem end! 

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