This cumbersomely titled anime – called Noucome for short – has perhaps the largest gulf between potential and quality of anything I’ve seen. Its premise is absurd but laden with promise: the show’s protagonist, Kanade Amakusa, a high school boy, finds himself regularly faced with “Absolute Choice” – a set of options that he’s required to choose from. This could have been leveraged as an alternative depiction of mental illness or as a framework of challenging decisions up-ending the status quo … but instead Noucome wields at as an excuse for poor writing and extreme “wackiness.”

Part of the problem is that these decisions are generally uninteresting, and there are a whole lot of clauses to reduce their narrative impact – for example, “those affected by Absolute Choice lose their memories of what happened once they’re done.” But, really, the bigger problem is the egregious lack of imagination on display. Noucome operates as a brainless high school sex comedy for the most part, defined by transparent characterisation and mediocre animation. It’s entirely unexceptional; with its premise wasted, the only thing that sets it apart from similar shows is a persistent and virulent strain of homophobia. The only worthwhile element of Noucome is its premise.