Hand Maid May

Kazuya our male lead is a university student whose hobby is working on his squid-robot, developing its artificial intelligence and speech synthesizer. For some unknown reason one of his classmates Nanbara is secretly jealous of him and plans to give him a computer virus on a disk. When Kazuya runs the program somehow an order is placed to the Cyberdyne Corporation (from the Terminator movies) for a mini-robot. A delivery arrives at his door and inside the box is a doll-sized robot named May. May is a cheerful, enthusiastic girl and every episode she has to talk about trying to do her very best. Nobody ever wonders aloud about how today's technology can produce such a marvel but this issue is resolved in time. Eventually more cyberdolls wind up in Kazuya's apartment building. Even though you might see the various girls as stereotypes - brainy Kei, bubblehead Mami, little kid Rena - they all seemed interesting to me.

I mustn't forget Kasumi, whose mother owns the Kasumi Apartments. She is Kazuya's neighbour and good friend. She has a secret crush on him and drops hints but Kazuya doesn't notice. The ending song "Real Feelings" is a sweet one and from the lyrics it must be Kasumi's song. In it she wishes she was more girlish so he would pay attention but is hopeful that one day he will notice her.

Although it can be said that the setup has been used before (decent, likeable chap somehow winds up with many cute girls vying for his attention) what matters more is how you feel after watching the show. I first saw the fabsub edition at the Ryerson club and I've just seen the first two English-language volumes from Pioneer and I must say that I really enjoyed the series both times. By the way, Pioneer did an interesting thing by labelling the episodes 1/10 and so on to 10/10 to let you know there was a definite end to the series.