This is popular enough to have received a manga, anime, and video game spun off from its light novel origins, so there must be something to it, right? Yes, but with a definite side of ‘-ish’ with it.
On the plus side, great art helps things along. If you’re going to be doing a manga where the source material is dedicated to worshipping its female lead, you want it to actually look good. And it does - Alya’s design is dang cute and the art plays it up with aplomb.
The flip side of that is that this is a thirsty as heck story and it is hitting all the possible beats when it reaches any of its breaking points. They managed to combine the classic ‘change my socks’ with ‘oh no, we are crammed together in a tight space and much contact is occurring’, which is peak trope economy.
Alya’s whole conceit besides being amazing at everything is that she speaks Russian and drops it into her conversations, especially when she’s lambasting somebody. And she thinks nobody understands her.
Enter our hero, Kuze, whose big character trait is being a lazy ass who, paradoxically, works hard when he wants. Also, he speaks Russian for very silly reasons. So he knows that Alya’s jabs at his sloth are actually hiding her infatuation with him.
Kuze, however, thinks that this isn’t possibly true and here is where the driving action keeping them apart comes from. He’s mostly potato, but there’s at least a little to him, with his secretly competent nature.
This feels like one of those un-harem stories, where the guy is surrounded by girls who mostly exist to provide more eye candy while the lead girl quietly waits for the end to win the day and heart of the self-insert.
And, hey, if that’s what you want, you could do a lot worse. They milk that socks scene for all it’s worth, so the story knows what side of the bread the butter is on. Some of the background characters get a couple decent lines as well.
It is decidedly exactly what it wants to be and you can decide whether that works for you or not. So far, it’s a genre piece that I found kind of enjoyable for how nakedly (or half-nakedly as will undoubtedly prove the case) it goes for it.
3 stars - not being the target audience, I won’t be giving this too much praise, but it does the job well enough. Rank higher if you like the genre, there’s nothing you won’t enjoy in this one.