The best thing about anime is the huge variety of stories on offer to fans every season. If you ever feel tired of a certain genre, you can always find something fresh and new by trying out some other shows. This season I’m enjoying Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle, a school drama and romance (?) that will transport you back to your high school days. Keep reading to see if this anime is for you!
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What’s Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle About?
Saku Chitose has just started his second year of high school, and once again, he gets elected class president. Because he’s popular with the girls in his class, he’s got a bit of a reputation for being a “womanizing scumbag” by the jealous boys around him. But he’s really an okay guy. He’s always working to carefully balance his position in his group of friends — who are collectively known as Team Chitose — while managing his haters.
Everything changes when his teacher asks him to visit the home of Kenta Yamazaki, a student who dropped out of school last year. Chitose is tasked with trying to get the boy to return to school, asking his cute classmates to come along to help. The problem is that Kenta stopped going to school specifically because he felt socially isolated after watching popular students in class, like Chitose himself. Can our hero find a way to break through the glass separating Kenta from the rest of his classmates?
The show is scheduled to be a “split cour” of 24 episodes. The first half is currently airing, and we’ll get the final 12 episodes at some point in 2026. This sounds excellent to me. It means the animators will have the time to tell a proper story, with a break in the middle for the buzz to build a bit more, before we get the finale of the story. It’s a lot better than the usual situation. Nobody loves watching a single batch of episodes without knowing if we’ll get a continuation.
Based on a Light Novel Series
I sometimes throw shade on anime based on light novels because the quality of the writing can be hit-and-miss. For every truly amazing anime series based on light novels (Mushoku Tensei, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Re:Zero), there seem to be a dozen disappointing offerings. Some of these include Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest, In Another World With My Smartphone, or Reborn as the Background Character Who Dies in Episode 3, I Swore to Make It to the Beach Episode. (That last one is fake, but you believed it for a second, didn’t you?)
So far, I’m liking the story and the characters a lot. The writing is good and has a lot of potential to draw fans in and hold their attention. A standard harem anime would feature girls who were shallow and two-dimensional, but this is clearly not the case with this show. The novels are available in English from Yen Press, if you want to read them.
The animation is positively gorgeous, and the staff working on the show are clearly passionate about the original work. Studio Feel, who brought us such popular works as Oregairu, Bokutachi no Remake, and PapaKiki, produces the anime.
An Anime About High School Nostalgia
Anime often serves as a vehicle to transport us back in time to a simpler period in our lives. A time when we had nothing to worry about besides how popular we were in class or what we’d do for the upcoming school festival. Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle is exactly that kind of story, letting us live vicariously through these characters. The show specifically wants to tell us the story of a seishun no ichi-peeji, “a page out of the book of the springtime of our youth.”
Who Should Watch Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle?
The anime that are most similar to this series are:
- Definitely, the show has a “self-aware” feel to it, like Oregairu: My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU. After the situation with the shut-in Kenta is resolved, I assume there will be arcs as Chitose-kun solves problems with the other characters in his class, Bunny Girl-senpai style.
- Another way to view this anime might be as a “reverse Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki.” The main character is the class president, so instead of being unpopular, his class loves him.
- I like the story of the lonely otaku being coaxed into a better place socially. It reminded me of the arc of Yuu Ishigami from Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Yuu thought he was a pariah in class but gradually came to realize this wasn’t the case at all.
So if you liked any of these shows, by all means, give this anime a try!
Thanks for reading this blog post about the Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle anime. What other series are you watching this season? Tell us in the comments below!
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