Yamada-kun to Lv999 no Koi wo Suru

For an anime with a video-game themed title, very little of the show has anything to do with video-games. You won't be getting a fun exploration of how a relationship can blossom through an online game, you'll be getting all the tropes of the Shojo genre with little in the way of character depth or interesting twists, where the game occasionally serves as an excuse for our protagonists to interact.

After getting dumped, 20 year old college girl Akane meets 17 year old handsome, academically elite, pro-gamer, handsome, tall, aloof, handsome high school student, Yamada, who's very handsome. Much like that sentence, the show isn't shy ... about beating you over the head with Yamada's handsomeness; when he's in public everyone swoons over him, girls confess to him, guys high-five him, dogs do tricks for him, incase you ever forget how handsome he is, don't worry, the show will remind you.

But despite all this positive feedback, we're expected to believe he has no clue about his own attractiveness and even considers Akane out of his league?! Sure, buddy... It's almost as hard to buy as him maintaining what amounts to 3 full-time jobs (school, pro-gamer, MMORPG elite) while having enough time to tutor, hang out with his guild-members IRL and casually hang with a girl he barely knows. Even for a wish-fulfilment fantasy about the mysterious high-status man who can have anyone but chooses us, the self-insert protagonist, that's a stretch...

Akane is your typical Shojo girl: kind, earnest, understanding, tries hard, smiles in the face of hardship and is cute but not so cute that the average viewer can't project herself onto her. She's an active protagonist, yet much of the story relies on convenient coincidences, like the way they meet, or the frequency with which they happen to bump into each other in public.

Their chemistry is somewhat non-existent, owing in part to Yamada's lack of- and Akane's overabundance of personality. Most situations are just excuses for Yamada to witness Akane's, at times unnaturally forced, good-heartedness and they both spend way too much time in the "oh I don't know how I feel about them, or how they feel about me" phase, despite passing the line of mere friendship many times throughout the season.

If you're new to Shojo and don't mind suspending your disbelief for implausible premises, this show might be worth a watch; it's decent at some things, the animation is nice, the character design is kinda cute and the overall vibe is cozy. But if you've seen even a couple Shojo, you're not easily flattered by shallow pandering, or you have no patience for poorly written contrivances, skip it.

You want the secret to love, ladies? Well this show right here has all the answers!

Step 1: Find a guy who has zero discernable personality traits, except for his insistent disinterest in you. (But it's ok cos he's hot.)

Step 2: Pester him over and over and over again.

Done! That's love! You're a couple that was clearly meant to be together all along!

This is like every bad YA romance out there. The guy is hot so everything else about him is irrelevant. The girl is the main character, so despite the fact that her only defining features are being annoyingly persistent and constantly whining about a ... guy who broke up with her before the show started, the hot guy is just irresistably drawn to her (yknow, after the 6 or 7 times he told her blatantly that he's not interested.)

At first I just relaxed watching this anime because it's still quite fun to watch, For Minase Inori's voice actor, good job, he uses the adult version of the voice in my opinion for this anime so even though he has filled many characters, in this anime I feel there is another voice here.

For episodes 1 to 4 I can still accept it, but in episode 5 I don't like it, because it's made tense even though this is a relaxed anime with normal romance too, but strangely you make the audience gets tense in episode 5, and this shouldn't exist in a casually paced ... romantic story.

Not only that, after a while I also started to get disgusted with the male MC, he is handsome but slow, him already know the female MC is in danger but the response from him is very slow like a signal with a weak Ping.

I'm sorry but this anime went off track from a relaxed anime with moderate romance, to a disgusting anime with handsome but stupid male characters, The proper title for this anime is Yamada with Ping -99999999

Everytime it seems like it's about to get good and they're FINALLY gonna have some chemistry, nothing happens and instead we get a close-up of Yamada with sparkly eyes. I get being unaware of how you're feeling but for more than half the story it's so one-sided it's just sad. Also, he's a high school student, I really hope this is her first year of uni because that's just... weird.

Every single girl is a Yamada fan because he looks good? Pretty vapid, he has absolutely no personality. Yamada is uninterested in life and doens't even seem hyped about games either, if he were a spice ... he'd be flour. On the other hand, Akane needs to eat-pray-love her way into being a full character or at least more than an accesory, what does she even study? I see no goals or motivations here, this is some pride and prejudice "must find a man" 18th century mentality that can't even write down "Bechdel test", which I don't hate in a different setting or genre, but this is supposed to be current-time Shōjo?

It had a good premise and rating so I was expecting something livelier, but here we are. I finished and it might've gotten worse? Sadly it wasn't worth finishing. Not a single aww was awed. The OP is cute tho.

This was just waaay too slow paced. I like slow pace anime too. But there is still something fun or relaxing happening in them. Here there was barely anything happening. It was mostly inner monologue of female lead. Also is the shoujo tag not there anymore on mal? This is a shoujo anime. If I knew it from before i probably would not have watched it.

More words so that mal let's me publish -
It wasn't unique. It was boring.
Art style was good but the animation felt too much like a manga with pages moving rather than an anime with people moving.
The characters ... weren't well rounded. In fact they were quite cliche. Which was another thing I didn't like. Things were also mostly exaggerated or played down sometimes. It wasn't realistic or likable unrealistic either.

I personally don't like romantic genre that much. But if the story of romantic anime is beautiful and unique, then I'd like it. I've seen many romantic anime. Some of them are love stories which I enjoyed so much. Some of the love stories are boring and I don't like them and (My love story with Yamada-kun at Lv999) is one of them.
The reason I didn't like it, story wise I didn't find anything to draw me into it. The two main characters gradually get to know each other through the game and from there their relationship blossoms into love. A very simple love story. ... Where there was no love triangle, no plot and no extra story. Especially in a rom-com anime, I hope to see a new and unique story. But here I got none of that. Too much simple
But I don't know why many people liked this anime. Those who are normally romantic genre lovers might like any simple love story anime like this. But in my opinion it's not such a likable anime.
Talking about the characters, I found the female character a bit annoying. And the animation quality is average for me