RPG Real Estate – Episode 1

Content Warning: Fanservice

What’s it about? 16-year-old Kazairo Kotone has moved to the capital city of Dali to start her new job at RPG Real Estate, a business dedicated to helping humans and monsters of all kinds find their perfect home.

It’s my own fault, really. Over the years I’ve gotten accustomed to the incorporation of very soft, cutesified character designs in shows that run the gamut from melancholy to goofy to spooky. I’ve been so spoiled as to enjoy a lot of them. So RPG Real Estate has come along to catapult me directly back to the 2007 as punishment for my hubris.

RPG Real Estate’s heroines aren’t just cute. They’re pwecious. And no offender is worse than Fa, a dragon who—actually, let me walk you through the experience as the show paints it.

After the designated shots of Kotone ooh-ing and aah-ing over the sights of the big city, she arrives at her new place of employment. She hears shouting through the door. Alarmed, she nonetheless perseveres. At which point she is greeted by a blonde girl attempting to wrestle an underwear-clad dragon girl with the body of a tall seven-year-old into a shirt. Later on into the scene, the dragon-girl gets back at the blonde by pantsing her in front of our heroine, with the camera set at a level that ensures we’ll see through blondie’s thigh gap.

The fanservice isn’t as in-your-face as some shows, but it’s almost creepier for it. These characters are in a job you’d expect to be filled by adult professionals, but they all look twelve. From the exaggeratedly breathy and high-pitched vocal direction to the costumes that look like a combination of kids playing dress-up and bargain-basement RPG party members to behavior that is only passingly familiar with human behavior, it all carries an unpleasantly infantilized undercurrent. There’s a warrior character who’s embarrassed by her revealing armor, because we have to check the box of humiliation-based fanservice.

And it displays the uniquely brazen form of audacity to pretend it’s showcasing friendly bonding with a bathing scene where the characters show off their shiny, shiny knees and shoulders and the camera makes sure we get a face full of tits in the process. And in case you were wondering—yes, that does include Fa’s extremely prepubescent-looking torso, because this is my personal Hell. Even the yuribait that I’m usually a sucker for even when it’s transparently extraneous felt especially cynical. Ah yes, of course the blonde girl and the twintailed warrior have a somewhat tsundere back-and-forth, only for blondie to crawl into her colleague’s bed that night. Platonically, of course. Y’know, like girls do.

There are a few decent RPG-based jokes during an early scene where Kotone is apartment hunting, but you know what other show had literally this same genre of “House Hunters but make it fantasy?” The unremarkable but extremely enjoyable Dragon Goes House Hunting. I even managed to watch all twelve episodes of that show without once wanting to scrub my own flesh off. If you’d rather watch cute girls chilling in a fantasy setting, may I suggest BOFURI. Just so long as I can get back to punting RPG Real Estate off the nearest cliff.