Rifle Is Beautiful

Rifle-shooting sports are competitive activities testing accuracy and precision using a rifle. In Japan, carrying firearms is prohibited, so most of the participants are members of the defense force. When the use of rifles using a light beam instead of real bullets as ammunition became common, rifle-shooting competitions became accessible to the younger population, giving way to school contests.

First-year high school student and marksmanship enthusiast Hikari Kokura has just transferred to Chidori High School. She tries to join the club of her choice, but finds out that the club no longer exists due to the low popularity of the sport. Distraught, she tries to restore the club and somehow manages to recruit three other members: her childhood friend Izumi Shibusawa, the half-Russian Erika Meinohama, and the stoic Yukio Igarashi.

This marks the beginning of the Chidori Rifle-Shooting Club, who have only one goal—to compete on the national stage!

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Igarashi, Yukio Main

Yamaki, Anna Japanese

Kokura, Hikari Main

Machico Japanese

Meinohama, Erika Main

Minami, Saki Japanese

Shibusawa, Izumi Main

Kumada, Akane Japanese

Kaijima, Sayu Supporting

Suzumoto, Akiho Japanese

Nitta, Serena Supporting

Suzushiro, Sayumi Japanese

Kogomori, Maho Supporting

Watanabe, Keiko Japanese

Nakagawa, Tae Supporting

Isobe, Karin Japanese

Touma, Ako Supporting

Kouno, Hiyori Japanese

Tsuji, Marina Supporting

Tadokoro, Azusa Japanese

Yukawa, Jun Producer

Murata, Hideyuki Producer

Ogisu, Hirotsugu Producer

Nishikawa, Kazuyoshi Producer

Reviews

Jan 18, 2020

ExemplarCayman

Recommended

Girl 1: I'm not going to pretend to be friends with someone who has no ambition to improve! If we're doing this, we're going to try to be the best in Japan! Are you ready for that?!
Girl 2 (tearing up): I just wanna have fun competing in the Olympics with everyone…

Have you ever seen an anime that is so generic and by-the-numbers, it loops backs to being a unique experience, because nothing else is so close to the platonic ideal of genericness? Rifle Is Beautiful starts as that show. The “sad puppy with a bunny-ears ribbon” face of the MC that permanently looks off-model even ... when it isn’t ends up being distinct and memorable. The running gag of her being completely flat in clothes and suddenly having massive honkers when stripping is such an awkward and half-assed attempt at sexual pandering, you want to fake being enticed out of pity. Two out of four main girls being literally Rei and Asuka effectively lets this show be an impromptu comedic spin-off of Eva a la Carnival Phantasm - taking the established characters from a drama story and letting them interact in a light-hearted setting. Originality plays a major role in me enjoying a show, and, well, this one is unique one way or another.

Also, there is a reason I used the words “starts as that show.” It’s because this is one of the astronomically rare cases where a series actually gets better later. In the end, Rifle Is Beautiful succeeds in being a show about competitive rifle shooting, which apparently is a sport that exists. I should emphasise it for clarity: this is A SPORTS SERIES ABOUT COMPETITIVE RIFLE SHOOTING, as opposed to a show about girls drinking tea or some other literal nothing. There is this common dimwitted sentiment that being generic automatically makes a show bad. No, it doesn’t. Actual flaws make a show bad. A lack of distinct identity, or, speaking marketing, of any distinct selling point is probably the worst flaw a CGDCT series can have - and is not the case here.
It has almost no flaws in general. Characters (simple as they are) behave in sensible ways. Dialogues sound like they were written by someone who goes outside and talks to people. The writing doesn’t insult human logic and intelligence. The jokes (like the one used as the epigraph) are funny. Art, animation and music don’t make my earballs bleed. The reason I was inspired to review a “generic” series like this in the first place is that it makes for a good case study of how to do a low bar show right.
I knew literally nothing about competitive shooting before watching this, and, although I don’t find the sport itself interesting (no one does, as the show acknowledges), I’ve been presented with a compelling depiction of why certain people would commit themselves to this and what kind of fulfillment they’d be getting out of it.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why this particular generic sports club CGDCT is rated much lower than all the other similar shows - surprisingly many people were angry and disappointed about the fact that they’re using “fake” rifles, instead of …idk, shooting live ammo in a school gym? Shooting their classmates with the customized AR-15s? Yeah, sorry folks, if you were expecting this kind of school shooting anime then the show isn’t the one with problems.

9/10 for “Huh, competitive shooting is a thing. Cool."

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jan 18, 2020

ACasualViewer

Mixed Feelings

Anime is known for turning the mundane into the spectacular, using concepts and topics one could not imagine to be entertaining in a media setting to craft wonderfully amusing stories. Anime has brought us shows about rakugo, farming, shogi, after school tea time, Karuta and other topics one couldn’t possibly imagine would be a hit. When I first heard that there would be an anime about shooting rifles, I was a bit apprehensive, but hopeful given the past history anime has had with bringing out the best of the mundane and given the general high production quality of studio 3hz. Sadly, these hopes were dashed ... fairly quickly as Rifle is Beautiful is not a sleeper hit, its just boring, and it has lower production quality than the average JC Staff series which is a new low for studio 3hz.

Let’s talk a bit about the characters, the main cast consists of possibly the dumbest girl in anime with a goofy smile and possibly the most oversized head ribbon in existence, another basic redhead tsundere, another blue haired quiet girl, and the brown hair straightman normal girl. As you can tell the character designs and how the characters were written, and their roles executed throughout the story was quite uninspired. Hibike might be the single most annoying and comically stupid protagonist I have had the displeasure of coming across in anime, normally I find stupid girls with big ribbons to be incredibly moe, but typecasting has gone way to far this time. Everything Hibike does screams that this girl is a three year old in the body of a 15-year-old who happens to some how be able to speak yet at the same time say nothing meaningful. All she wants to do is shoot rifles, eat snacks, and be totally oblivious to literally anything going on around her, her character singlehandedly ruins the show, although the rest of the cast do nothing to redeem the show either. The tsundere is rip off from other popular anime tsunderes and this specific character archetype is considerably less amusing outside of a romcom or action setting, the quiet girl is not deep, she’s just boring and the brown hair girl is so irrelevant that I can’t name a single quality about her that separates her from a background character.

Now the story itself is practically a parody of more popular underdog sports stories, they happen to be part of a club full of first years and they are trying to win nationals, sounds familiar? There is no tension when a person can reasonably guess everything that is going to happen in the story, and rifle shooting really is a boring sport which the show constantly reminds us with little textboxes mentioning how boring it is, probably the least effective way to deflect the tediousness of watching this already incredibly boring show. Maybe this story could have been written in a way that could have made beam rifle competitions interesting, anything is possible, but rifle shooting is definitely not a sport that translates well to the anime medium given that accurately depicting it involves a bunch of girls firing invisible projectiles getting scores that we are aren’t sure are hit or miss until the sensor picks it up.

As for production values, as written earlier the production values are an incredibly low showing for a studio that put out series like Princess Principal and Flip Flappers, this show could have been redeemed if it was at least as flashy or as wild as those series or if there were a lot of effective beam effects such as in Gun Gale Online. However, instead of the usual flashy animation seen by studio 3hz we got animation that made middle school power points look dynamic in comparison, the character designs were all uninspired garbage as well, and the scenery was probably some of the most cookie cutter stuff I have seen in any anime.

Given this that this show was already a borderline parody in comparison to good sports anime, on top of being poorly written, lacking meaningful characters, and having low quality production values one may wonder why I even bothered watching this. Well it comes down to 2 things, there wasn’t really all that many shows airing on the day this show airs, and because I have a thing for ribbon haired loli characters. That is essentially it, if you don’t have a thing for ribbon hair loli characters and you are not watching this a seasonal show on a day with almost no other anime airing, then please spare yourself from watching this atrocity that is the second worst show I seen this season besides assassins pride, which is the only reason I gave this show a 5 instead of a 4, because a show worse than it exists this season.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Jan 18, 2020

slavemaster_1991

Not Recommended

When it comes to a slice of life show with cute girls doing cute things you can't really mess up. Or so I thought up to this point. This anime though managed to shatter this illusion. First let's hit the obvious stuff:
1. Story - in slice of life with a club there are not really many options to pick as a plot. Shooting is a sport, so competition it is. Pretty generic, pretty dull, being a slice of life you can't really expect much drama or sudden turns of events as in sports anime, so nothing more to say about it.
2. "Cute girls doing cute ... things" should have cute girls and things they do. And here is the first major problem - shooting is not really the most spectacular sport. Well, at least range shooting with laser rifles, watching competition shooting with people moving between targets and real guns is fun, but it is understandable that a school club will never have those (giving minors actual guns is not the best idea), so all we have here are girls standing still and shooting at a static target. While it is not the easiest thing to participate in, it is still pretty dull to watch.
3. And the second big problem - the actual girls. A bunch of stock generic presets, with no original quirks, with nothing actually standing off - those characters don't really pull their weight in the task of entertaining the viewer. Add to the boot a very "special" artstyle, that makes the whole anime look like they had no budget for graphics, so not only they do dull things, but they also look very basic, with no detail or beauty. And maybe it was just me, but those rifles looked like they were done in CGI with half the framerate of the actual anime, so they looked out of place in every single scene they were present.

And cause of the stuff I said above you can't really enjoy this anime: there is simply no plot to be worried about and interested in, characters are so basic that you will not even remember them in a week, and everything looks so dull and basic that it doesn't even catch your eye, neither it does hold your attention. The only reason I finished this anime is the fact that I don't like dropping things I have started watching or reading. I don't recommend this anime if you are not a huge fan of shooting.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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Dec 30, 2019 2:52 PM by Snow | Discuss (13 comments)

	Poll: Rifle Is Beautiful Episode 12 Discussion KANLen09 - Jan 18, 2020	45 replies	by Muow »» Sep 29, 4:40 AM
	Poll: Rifle Is Beautiful Episode 9 Discussion Stark700 - Dec 15, 2019	22 replies	by Dekom »» Sep 10, 3:59 PM
	Poll: Rifle Is Beautiful Episode 7 Discussion Stark700 - Nov 24, 2019	33 replies	by Dekom »» Sep 8, 3:44 PM
	Poll: Rifle Is Beautiful Episode 6 Discussion Stark700 - Nov 17, 2019	24 replies	by Dekom »» Sep 7, 11:57 AM
	Poll: Rifle Is Beautiful Episode 5 Discussion Stark700 - Nov 10, 2019	22 replies	by Dekom »» Sep 6, 3:52 PM

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