A Sister’s All You Need: The Complete Series

The best parts of A Sister’s All You Need find light novelist Itsuki and his friends playing board games, drinking, bonding, and discussing the hardships of being a novelist. The drives, methodologies, and varying levels of success of the three main writer characters provide an interesting look into the field. Scattered among these good times is plenty of sex talk, dick jokes, and nudity, sometimes as successful humor and other times as pure fan service. The opening episode offers a window into the mind of Itsuki, whose fetishistic longing for a little sister appears in all of his novels, much to his editor’s frustration. It’s a fairly explicit and splashy entrance into the series that is nowhere matched in other episodes, but this titular fetish hangs over everything (and it feels like both a fake-out to draw in viewers and a true aspect of Itsuki’s life). The story does gradually gain some weight as an unusual slice of life dramedy, and the character design, animation, and other production values are solid. But the positives are undercut by fetishization bordering on incest, fan service nudity, and cheap sex jokes. Compiling all 12 episodes from 2017 in a dual-language Blu-ray edition, rated TV-MA, extras include a Twitter anime short. Optional. (L. Martincik)