Ben-To

The supermarket is an important building in any city, for they provide a convenient way to purchase a variety of food in a family-friendly, safe environment. However, these stores changes in the blink of an eye once the unsold bento boxes go on their nightly half-off sales! War breaks out and friends become foes as each person fights for honor, pride, and dinner. There are no longer any people in these supermarkets, only Wolves and Dogs⁠—winners and losers.

High schooler You Satou is painfully introduced to these battles after unknowingly stumbling into the war zone, but instead of choosing to avoid these nightly fights, he wants to in. After seeing Satou's lack of fighting skills, upperclassman and Wolf Sen Yarizui invites him and Hana Oshiroi, a girl who enjoys spectating the brawls, to her Half-Priced Food Lovers Club to show them the distinction between the Dogs and the Wolves. Together, they learn what it truly means to fight for your food.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Yarizui, Sen Main

Ise, Mariya Japanese

Shaga, Ayame Main

Katou, Emiri Japanese

Satou, You Main

Shimono, Hiro Japanese

Oshiroi, Hana Main

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Inoue, Asebi ing

Taketatsu, Ayana Japanese

Shiraume, Ume ing

Kayano, Ai Japanese

Kaneshiro, Yuu ing

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Sawagi, Kyou ing

Tamura, Yukari Japanese

Chapatsu ing

Nakamura, Eriko Japanese

Sawagi, Kyou ing

Horie, Yui Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Ishiguro, Tatsuya Producer

Kajita, Kouji Producer

Kasama, Nobutaka Producer

Reviews

Feb 28, 2025

YannaeLou

Recommended

Have you ever seen videos of Black Friday shoppers going crazy to get their desired goodies, battling it out to get their hands on the product they want to buy cheap? This is basically an anime about it!

Food on sale! And people going at it to get their hands on it! It's like a daily battle royale! A ridiculous one but very entertaining!

If you're a fan of just hand to hand combat + some crazy typical fighting game music, this is a must watch :)

If you like plot, I wouldn't go for this one. If you like anime fights, hand to hand, definitely give this ... one a shot!

I would put it 7/10, but this is one of those that I'd rewatch so 8/10 it is!

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Mar 2, 2025

JamieNormand

Mixed Feelings

Now, Ben-To is a great example of how dragging on a good idea can guide you to make a below average show. So, the premise of the series is that young people, and middle schoolers and early high schoolers at that, who are otherwise unable to afford bento boxes from supermarkets fight to the last person so they can get half-priced bento f at the discount hour. There are groups competing for the insufficient amount of bento, so we have competing groups of Bento hunters. Our main character Sato becomes one of these bento hunters via his student club and meets lots of girls ... and some menacing lads during the bento hunts. They develop strategies and end up working together or against each other.
This is a very nice setup for a 50 minutes long film. However, when you stretch the time to over five times that lenght, inevitably you end up with an overstretched story that becomes sillier as the episodes go on and on and on. Add to that how you don't understand the motives of many of the characters, even you cannot keep up with who was who among the myriad young lasses in the series, things get confusing, over the top, and at the end, boring. Sisters that were curious about the MC become supervillainesses, the one supermarket becomes a long list of supermarkets, the competing groups become seriously crowded.
Don't get me wrong, there is a couple of good characters in this anime. However, as I said before, as the story didn't develop into a harem anime, or a different kind of competition, or, as the bento-box-hunting didn't turn into a more symbolic, more philosophical issue, and as most characters cannot go beyond being 2D background characters, my liking level went down and down. Beginning writing this review, I was thinking "Mixed Feelings," and just for the sake of a few good scenes and the crazy writer lassie, I will keep it "Mixed Feelings" and not go for "Not Recommended." I wish it could have become better because dialogue, animation, and a copule of characters were really great.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Aug 8, 2023

ThatAnimeSnobRE

Not Recommended

Just like there is junk food, there is also junk anime, and Ben Tou is a fine example. Anime regarding food usually have to do with cooking contests. How to gather the proper ingredients, how to cook them properly, and how to amaze the judges. On a basic level these shows are motivational, as they tell you about the beauty of gastronomy and how cool it is to be a chef. Ben Tou though has nothing to do with cooking, although it is about food. Instead of trying to show or say something, it is just about fighting for whom gets to buy canned food ... and prepared meals from the grocery in half price. So basically, you have a bunch of guys and gals kicking the crap out of each other on a daily basis, just so they pay half as much for their dinner.

So you will now be probably wondering if this is a fighting tournament show, with food discounts being the prize. Again, you are wrong because the fighting in the show is comical and definitely not exciting. They are kicking and punching simplistically without any choreography, and with violence always being bloodless and wounds magically healing in a few minutes. Which is a good thing, because if they weren’t the money they would need to pay for bandages and doctors would cost a thousand times more than a half-priced prepared lunch.

The most interesting thing about the battles is the way the girls fight, as they do all sorts of motions than make their boobs bounce and their legs spreading and revealing stuff. So you will now imagine this is some sort of heavy on fan service anime with fighting chicks, in the likes of Ikki Tousen or Queen’s Blade. And again you are wrong, because there isn’t much fighting or nude. Most of the fan service revolves around zooming on dressed boobs and legs but you hardly ever see an actually naked girl. Most of the duration is about the protagonist trying to get his hands on the discount obentos and having his ass kicked repeatedly by chicks. In fact, he is the only one getting striped all the time for pitiful reasons. Yes, he is another one of those wimp worthless protagonists who want to come off as normal. He is constantly beaten and yet he is surrounded by pretty chicks. So this is a harem, right? You’d now think there are a dozen chicks who love him and constantly try to get in his pants. NO! They just kick the crap out of him and strip him while looking for food. That is not sexy at all and it is definitely not a show aimed at girls.

So… is this a show about, I don’t know, the economic crisis? The fact that they go through all this trouble just to get a discount can only mean that they are in a very bad financial state and the whole thing could be a metaphor for the extremes poverty forces you to head for. And again NO IT ISN’T; none of the characters seems to show the least concern for money. They even appear to have a fine time spending most of their money on videogames, clothes, and just hanging out in fancy places. They don’t even MENTION they have financial problems. They are typical anime teenagers with endless magical money.

Maybe it is about the beauty of struggling for your food. It tastes better when you need to fight for it than just buy it. SERIOUSLY? How about growing it? It will be even tastier this way AND motivate the viewer to be a farmer or a gardener. At best, this show is telling you it is all about the money. YOU FIGHT FOR DISCOUNTS WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE FINANCIAL PROBLEMS! I guess it’s aiming at Twitter socialists.

Aha, I got it, it is a fighting shounen parody. It makes fun of fighting by making everybody going crazy about something as pitiful as a discount. At which case IT IS NOT FUNNY! I grew bored of the idea in just 10 minutes. You can’t stretch a single joke to last for more than a couple of episodes; you need to flavor it with more jokes. Yet this whole anime is based solely on making fun of a SINGLE THING!

So after all this deduction process you realize that this show is about NOTHING! It is a retarded screwball school comedy with a concept you get bored of in a few episodes. The production values are also nothing amazing, soundtrack and voice acting are able, character figures are generic, and character personalities are stereotypes. I find no value in this show, and very little enjoyment if you are a seasoned viewer.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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