Tune in to the Midnight Heart – Episode 1

What’s it about? Since middle school, Arisu Yamabuki has been searching for a girl known only as Apollo, a radio broadcaster whose face and true identity remains a mystery. Now a second year in high school, Arisu’s dedication to finding out who Apollo is complicated when he meets four girls who could be the voice from his past

Bust out the fork and knife because finally, I’ve got some yuri to snack on…at least it looked like it from the posters until I saw A MAN (okay, a teenage boy) was involved in the plot. This is the gamble of picking a show based on promo images, I guess. It decidedly is not the yuri my heart had hoped for, but hey…you can’t blame a guy for hoping, right? So here we have Tune in to the Midnight Heart, a show about a radio program and the teenage boy collecting a gaggle of girls which like…

…Can we be real for a moment? No high school boy, at least in my distant memories of school in the oughts, had enough rizz to really maintain any kind of romantic relationship. As a former high school educator, I maintain that from the perspective of a safe adult: high school boys are little delightful goblin kids learning how to be themselves, and while I want them to date safe…. do cis girls find them so intriguing on a romantic level as to posit a situation like Midnight Heart? I don’t know: you’d think after almost six years of doing this professionally, I’d have some sort of answer.

Alas and alack, I don’t have any answers to why things look the way they do only to vaguely disappoint. But I do have a review for you. Let’s dive in.

The icon of mysterious radio broadcaster Apollo.

Episode 1 introduces Arisu Yamabuki, a young man in search of a girl he only knows by the shape of her voice from a radio program he used to tun into late at night. But his quest at Furin Academy isn’t going to be so easy, even when Furin Girls’ and Furin Boys’ combine into one school. Thankfully, Arisu is so full of “sheer aura and gravitas 99% of the time” (this is taken from directly from his introduction speech) that it leaves only a one percent gap where…he’s an ABSOLUTE WEIRDO. Arisu believes that adversity builds confidence and strength, so he steams ahead with his plan of getting each student to say “I love you” as a way find the voice he only knows through the connection of his phone.

Thus begins one rich boy’s quest to find that final one percent of his missing personality and heart—and hopefully the girl whose voice inspired him along the way.

Arisu finds himself surrounded by four coeds who each aspire to use their voice in their future work.

What I will say about Midnight Heart is that I was kind of surprised that it wasn’t just a straight rom-com but a 100% unambiguous harem show. It’s actually low-key kind of a compelling premiere, even if the paper-thin excuse for Arisu to collect girls comes down to him wanting a voice that comforted him when he was in middle school and has become, to some degree, his reason for existing. The actual “why” is interesting enough, given how most of these anime tend toward a more leering motivation. Here, Midnight Heart really presents its male protagonist as being something of a normal, misguided boy who fumbles his way through life based on his personality quirks.

It helps that the girls aren’t immediately enamored of him: in fact, they’re quite irritated and kind of bothered by him crashing their lunchtime broadcast. They pretty much kick him out immediately until he proves to be skilled enough to help with their aspirations of working in the voiceover industry. And speaking of the girls, each actually has a defined personality: Shinobu aspires to be an announcer; hoodie-wearing Iko is a Vtuber, Nene wants to be a seiyuu, and Rikka wants to be a singer. Each girl has a defined friend group, defined behavior, and interacts with Arisu in shockingly grounded ways. It adds flavor to a show that actually could have flopped, resulting in a solid premiere, even if it’s not necessarily my thing.

Arisu lays in bed listening to Apollo's broadcast.

I came for yuri, found out this was a het rom-com in the making, and ultimately…I’m kind of okay with Tune in to the Midnight Heart as it is. It’s not deep, but it is at least a little fascinating, and I think that’s all that can be asked of anime in a time where seasons easily exceed thirty episodes. I’m not necessarily sold on tuning in on a weekly basis though: this feels like the kind of show I’d binge all at once, which being honest, that’s probably how I’ll engage with Midnight Heart unless episodes two and three reaaaaaally pull me in.

For now, I’m content to let this be one of my more “perfectly okay” premiere reviews this season and will say that if you’re even slightly curious, maybe give this a watch over a meal when you’re feeling less focused on other things: it’s a pretty unoffensive way to kick back and spend half an hour.