Kaguya-sama: Love is War -Ultra Romantic-

かぐや様は告らせたい-ウルトラロマンティック- (Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Ultra Romantic)

9.6(5)

OtakuDen

8.9(644,017)

MAL Score

Ranked #17

Popularity #163

Comedy
Romance
School

Episodes: 13
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Apr 9, 2022 to Jun 25, 2022
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

At Shuchiin Academy, the student council’s daily routine remains a battlefield of pride and romance. President Miyuki Shirogane and vice president Kaguya Shinomiya are equally determined to make the other confess first, turning every conversation into an elaborate contest of wits. Outside the council room, Kaguya also wrestles with the rigid expectations of her powerful family, gradually pushing back against the cold persona she’s been taught to maintain as she grows closer to Shirogane and her friends.

Elsewhere on the council, treasurer Yuu Ishigami tries to carry himself with new confidence while nursing an unrequited crush on the popular upperclassman Tsubame Koyasu. New member Miko Iino finds herself drawn toward Ishigami despite his rule-bending nature, all while attempting to reconcile her strict sense of morality with the messy realities of feelings. As relationships deepen across campus, the council’s schemes spill outward, pulling classmates into ever more comical standoffs.

Otaku Consensus

Ultra Romantic is where Kaguya-sama’s televised form fully cashes in: Shinichi Omata’s direction and A-1 Pictures’ hyperactive visual timing turn Aka Akasaka’s mind-game comedy into a 13-episode escalation with a widely praised cultural festival climax. Its reputation is not just fan inflation, with an 8.95 MAL score from over 643,000 votes, AniList’s 89/100 average, and 15,525 AniList favourites reflecting a rare rom-com season that satisfied both gag-comedy viewers and romance payoff seekers. The recurring criticism is that its rapid-fire meta/slapstick mode can be exhausting, and manga readers may notice that TV adaptation constraints soften some of the source’s more mature edges.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Ultra Romantic if you want a school rom-com that treats every emotional beat like a tactical operation, but without the dourness that often follows “smart” teen romance. It scratches the same verbal-sparring itch as Oregairu while staying closer to sketch comedy, parody, and surreal cutaway gags; the result is closer to a prestige sitcom than a slow-burn melodrama. The season is especially strong for viewers who like ensemble escalation: Ishigami and Miko are no longer side-console joke machines, while Kaguya and Shirogane’s material gets sharper because the comedy has accumulated two seasons of emotional context. If you bounce off romance anime that stall forever, this is the season where the stalling itself becomes the joke, the structure, and the payoff.

Key Characters

K
Kaguya Shinomiya(VA: Aoi Koga)
Kaguya remains compelling because her ojou-sama polish is constantly undercut by panic, pettiness, and a growing refusal to behave like the perfect Shinomiya heir.
M
Miyuki Shirogane(VA: Makoto Furukawa)
Miyuki’s appeal comes from how the series weaponizes his competence and insecurity at the same time, making him both the straight man and the punchline.
Y
Yuu Ishigami(VA: Ryota Suzuki)
Ishigami is the season’s clearest coming-of-age engine, shifting from deadpan observer to someone whose social risks give the comedy real stakes.
M
Miko Iino(VA: Miyu Tomita)
Miko works because her rigid moral language keeps colliding with feelings she cannot adjudicate like a student council rulebook.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
A-1 Pictures’ adaptation leans into the material’s AniList identity as surreal comedy, meta comedy, and parody, using abrupt stylistic shifts and exaggerated scene framing rather than treating the manga as a static dialogue script.
2
The season’s 13-episode length is a concrete advantage for its structure: it preserves the franchise’s episodic sketch rhythm while giving the final stretch more room than a standard 12-episode cour.
3
Yasuhiro Nakanishi’s series composition balances the show’s high gag density with a stronger coming-of-age emphasis, matching AniList’s unusually high tags for both Slapstick at 86% and Coming of Age at 83%.
4
Ultra Romantic broadens the council-room formula into a true ensemble season, reflected by AniList’s Ensemble Cast tag at 84% and School Club tag at 91%, rather than relying only on the central confession duel.
5
Its reception numbers are unusually high for a romantic comedy sequel: MAL lists it at 8.95 with a rank of #18, while AniList records an 89/100 score and more than 15,000 favourites.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The anime credits Aka Akasaka as original creator, while Yoshikazu Masuzawa and Hiroki Sakai are both listed for original work assistance, a production credit that points to close source-material coordination.
Fun fact 2: Three different staff members are credited specifically for the title logo design: Akira Saitou, Yayoi Kaneda, and Miyuki Yamaguchi.
Fun fact 3: The season aired from April 9, 2022 to June 25, 2022 and finished with 13 episodes, making it slightly longer than the common one-cour 12-episode TV anime format.
Fun fact 4: A recurring early fandom talking point was that the series was “only worth watching for Chika,” but Ultra Romantic’s strongest reception centers on broader character dynamics and dialogue rather than a single breakout gag character.
Fun fact 5: Online viewer summaries repeatedly stress that Kaguya-sama is primarily a comedy with serious moments, which helps explain why Ultra Romantic’s romance payoff lands through timing and escalation instead of abandoning its sketch-comedy engine.