Alternative title(s): Anime x Mistake, Time x Wasted, End x Me
Manga Adaptation by Hoods Entertainment
Streaming on HIDIVE

Premise

A bland dude winds up living with nine girls of varying ages and helps them to fight demons by groping their breasts and making them fall in love with him.

Euri’s verdict: Trash x Garbage

Val x Love feels like a bad hentai visual novel from the 90s, and that’s probably the kindest thing I have to say about it.

We launch straight into a classroom scene where some girls are talking about boyfriends and winning beauty pageants, while a couple of boys oggle them, picking their favourites and dreaming of scenarios in which they’d be stepped on by the girl. The girls are creeped out by this, one of which responds by talking more about the beauty pageant and groping one of the other girl’s breasts.

Pictured: six of the nine girls that protag will make fall in love with him

Our protag is a loner – he has a scary face and people misunderstand him, believing he’s some kind of demon. After some time spent establishing he’s a loner, he heads home to find nine girls have moved in. Some of these were in the scene earlier, some not, and ages seem to range from 10ish to mid-twenties. This is important, because they’ve moved in specifically to enter a relationship with protag, which will enable them to become valkyries. Or to become more powerful valkyries, it’s not exactly clear.

Protag doesn’t yet know this, and only finds out when he and one of the girls are confronted by a demon while on their way to the shops. In order to battle the demon, the girls strips down to only her panties, has protag fondle one of her breasts, and kisses him. This then brings up some nonsense about her ‘level’, what ‘quest’ she was on (in this case, walking to the shops), and has her transform into a valkyrie.

This didn’t come as much of a surprise, unfortunately – the opening animation is pretty explicit about what kind of a show this is. There’s no importance to the girls actually defeating demons, even though it pretends that it’s a big deal; it’s all an excuse to get the girls to strip down in a show that’s already not afraid to show them undressed in the first place. Heck, the very first scene when protag goes home to find the girls in his house results in the classic ‘bump into girl in the bath’ scene, except there are three of them in varying states of undress. We also see the girl who undresses to become a valkyrie ask protag to be gentle, because it’s her first time.

Skeevyness aside, there’s just nothing here in terms of the plot; sympathetic protag with no friends suddenly having to share his home with nine girls/women is hardly an inspired premise to begin with. Besides that it’s a load of vaguely Norse-inspired nonsense of no consequence, so even if you’re fully on board with the many ecchi scenes, there’s literally nothing else to see here. There are better shows out there if you want story and ecchi content, so if that’s what you’re after perhaps consider picking one that isn’t eventually going to have a young child falling in love with the protag and getting undressed, possibly groped, to fight demons.