(Average+) Romantic Killer

Series in one sentence:
Magic potato wants the declining Japanese population to fuck and tortures one single asexual redhead to get it done.

Series in more sentences:
Anzu is a high school girl with no interest in romance, but when she gets visited by a magical being who claims to have been hired to implement dating sim logic to a real person's life, she soon finds herself surrounded by boys one could call "handsome".

Oh no.. They messed up tremendously here, and I don't think the writer realizes it.
There's a story in this story, that of Kazuki, which was so damn good, it made me realize how pointless everything else was.

This should not have been a harem anime.
This should not have been about a girl getting tortured by a magic potato.
This could've been a real drama, about a young boy running from an adult stalker, struggling to live again. His scenes of panic were so intriguing and his backstory narratively the best in the anime, it made the rest feel like clutter.

The first episode was pretty boring. It's this repetitive conversation between the main character and the magic potato, going like "You're gonna meet boys now and I'm taking away everything you love!" and "No, I need those things, why're you doing this?" over and over again. I was eating breakfast when it started, finished my food, and that brainrot on a script was still going. I had to watch the entire anime in 1.5x speed in order not to abandon it on sight.

The idea that love will help a dying race repopulate is laughable. Nearly half of babies born in the world are unintended pregnancies. What the potato should've done is flush all forms of sex protection through the toilet, because the vast majority of humans are mere animals who'll never have the restraint not to get nasty, even in the face of risks like pregnancy and disease.
In fact, the modern world has access to so many helpful measures, and there are still people who don't make use of them.

I would've been a better potato.

Anyway, glad to have ruined this review of what's supposed to be a simple comedy, but here's the thing, this anime took its sweet time to become funny. And I still don't know if it actually was, or just the 1.5x speed that made the interactions seem more on point.

Anzu's struggle isn't one I fully understood. She clearly has a preference for men and responded pretty excited to hear she'd get to meet attractive boys, until her video games, chocolate, and cat were taken away, then her viewpoint suddenly shifted. Why? This is just a temporary rule that'll get lifted when she falls for someone, so why not play along with this game you showed initial excitement for, allow yourself to get enamoured by the men you very clearly find attractive, and get your stuff back? What's the problem here, why is she fighting it?
I must've missed something while I was listlessly stuffing my face.

When Kazuki got stuck at her house during a storm, I finally started having a decent time with this show, because it was my first glimpse of what the story could've been. Anzu offering him instant noodles for dinner, her lame pyjamas, her winning board games to an infuriating degree -these things would've been much more fun to witness if they weren't done on purpose. Anzu should've been an aromantic, clumsy geek.
It was a bit confusing to see how he contacted her when he needed a place to stay -surely this popular kid has actual friends to ask help from- but alright.

Later, another rival spawns into existence, claimed to be her childhood friend. It's eventually revealed the boy is a late-bloomer Anzu used to actually hang out with and not someone who got brainwashed with magic.
And so, I started wondering again: what is the point of this magic potato? Anzu is apparently already surrounded by boys who adore her. Potato argues she was too distracted by her hobbies to notice them, but who says she would've been distracted like this forever?
As the series progressed, I was mostly entertained, but this doesn't change that the motives of the potato and Anzu were truly bad. The general plot was bad.

For a harem anime, it did alright in the sense there were at least two "candidates" I felt made a good chance with Anzu. In most harem animes, there's really only one person the main character has obvious interest for, or none at all.
Nevertheless, when you have a story with such a large cast, characters are bound to get shoved aside or not be written that well. The rich kid was one of those, he added nothing. Nothing another character or plot convenience couldn't take care of.

In short, turn on 1.5x speed, ignore Anzu's weird self-boycot, have an extremely high tolerance for stupid cutesy potato comic relief, and you'll have a decent time with this otherwise average high school harem anime.