Haganai: I don't have many friends NEXT

僕は友達が少ないNEXT (Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Next)

7.3(337,155)

MAL Score

Ranked #3433

Popularity #457

Comedy
Ecchi
Romance
Harem
School

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jan 11, 2013 to Mar 29, 2013
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

The Neighbor’s Club was created for one simple reason: to help a group of socially unlucky students learn how to make friends. Even after an incident involving Yozora Mikazuki at the end of summer, club life continues much as it always has—awkward, noisy, and full of small attempts at “normal” school experiences.

As new faces enter the picture, including a peculiar nun and members of the student council, Kodaka Hasegawa finds his already hectic days getting even more complicated. Between trips to the amusement park, game sessions, birthday celebrations, and taking on the school festival, the club keeps chasing the kind of everyday youth they feel they’ve missed—while the bonds between them begin to subtly shift.

Otaku Consensus

Haganai NEXT is the season where the franchise’s noisy club-room comedy starts paying interest on its character friction, with Tooru Kitahata’s pacing giving Sena’s romantic progression, the game gags, and the school festival material more forward motion than the first season’s looser sketch structure. Its best asset is the way Yomi Hirasaka’s light-novel voice survives in the adaptation through sharp teasing, meta otaku bits, and harem expectations that get deliberately shaken up. The recurring complaint is just as consistent: the supporting cast can feel shrill or gimmick-driven, and AIC Build’s serviceable art rarely elevates scenes beyond competent TV comedy.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Haganai NEXT if you want a harem rom-com that is less about wish-fulfillment polish and more about socially maladjusted people making every normal teen ritual catastrophically awkward. It scratches some of the same itch as Oregairu’s club-room cynicism, but with more ecchi, louder otaku parody, and a messier love-triangle engine. The second season is the better test of whether Haganai works for you: Sena’s role stops feeling like a simple rich-girl punchline, Rika’s meta humor leans into video-game and anime logic, and the school festival stretch gives the cast a goal big enough to expose their insecurities. If you want romantic escalation without abandoning dirty jokes, handheld-game gags, nun chaos, and harem sniping, NEXT is the franchise’s sharpest twelve-episode run.

Key Characters

K
Kodaka Hasegawa
Kodaka is a deliberately restrained harem lead whose delinquent image and caretaker habits make him both the group’s stabilizer and, for many critics, the least sharply defined member of the ensemble.
Y
Yozora Mikazuki(VA: Marina Inoue)
Yozora’s appeal comes from her weaponized sarcasm and competitive control of the club’s atmosphere, making her more abrasive than the typical romantic-comedy heroine.
S
Sena Kashiwazaki(VA: Kanae Itou)
Sena is the character most often singled out as NEXT’s payoff, with reviewers noting that her first-season development turns into genuine romantic momentum here.
R
Rika
Rika functions as the show’s otaku pressure valve, pushing the comedy toward meta jokes, game references, and deliberately uncomfortable fetish humor.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
AIC Build keeps the production in clean TV-comedy territory rather than spectacle, which matches the review consensus that the animation is competent but not visually groundbreaking.
2
NEXT is structurally more consequential than the first season: fan discussion and reviews repeatedly point to Sena’s progression and the later school festival material as the season’s main escalation points.
3
The series composition is credited to both veteran screenwriter Tatsuhiko Urahata and original author Yomi Hirasaka, an unusual production detail that helps explain why the anime preserves the light novel’s teasing-heavy dialogue style.
4
Buriki’s original character designs are adapted for animation by Yoshihiro Watanabe, keeping the cast’s recognizable light-novel look while simplifying it for a 12-episode TV run.
5
The AniList tag spread captures the show’s hybrid identity unusually well: School Club and Female Harem dominate, but Video Games, Meta, Crossdressing, Chuunibyou, Nun, and Nudity all register as recurring ingredients rather than one-off jokes.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Haganai NEXT aired as a 12-episode winter 2013 TV season from January 11 to March 29, 2013, with AIC Build handling animation production.
Fun fact 2: The anime adapts Yomi Hirasaka’s light novels, illustrated by Buriki and published by Media Factory; the property also produced multiple manga adaptations before and around the anime boom.
Fun fact 3: Original author Yomi Hirasaka is credited not only for the source story but also for series composition, placing the novelist directly in the anime’s writing pipeline.
Fun fact 4: Marina Inoue and Kanae Itou performed both the opening and ending themes, tying the season’s music branding closely to two of its central female cast members.
Fun fact 5: Its database footprint is unusually lopsided: a MAL score of 7.25 places it around rank #3386, while its popularity rank of #450 and more than 336,000 votes show a much larger audience than its critical standing alone suggests.