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Feb 14, 2024
Nominally a love letter to bishoujo games, 16bit Sensation is actually about the importance of having passionate interests and using them to indulge your imagination.
With her singleminded focus on creating a great bishoujo game, Konoha, the heroine, annoying voice aside, is one the most relatable otaku ever to grace an anime. Her foil and co-conspirator, Mamoru, who initially dislikes Konoha, slowly comes around over the course of the series because of his own passion for the long-since-discontinued PC-98.
With colorful and frankly beautiful character animation (Konoha’s faces alone are worth the price of admission) the story leans into what anime does best: be crazy and over-the-top.
As
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the series proceeds, interspersed with interesting lessons in how games were made a quarter century ago, there’s time travel, aliens, and corporate conspiracies.
Does it all work? Absolutely not!
But that’s a big part of its great charm! The people behind 16bit Sensation seem to really love the whole idea of creativity, in particular as it relates to games, but more than that, as the off-the-wall alien episode illustrates.
Konoha and Mamoru bond over the course of the series less out of any romantic feelings (though I can’t rule out that’s implied, too) than over the fact that both feel so ardent about their respective interests - and the fact that they share the desire that others learn to love the things they feel passionate about, as well.
While the show’s reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, I personally feel it’s just a pure joy when anime cranks out a show like this. One that may be a bit short on commercial appeal, but is just filled to the brim with the kind of over-the-top nuttiness and enthusiasm that makes wading through a thousand isekais worth it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jun 24, 2021
Regrettably, the Orthogonal Diagonalizer arrived too late to stop this anime from being made, ushering in a true Catastrophe.
Superficially, this is a pretty well-made show. It looks good and was clearly directed with a relatively strong sense of how to visually present a story with some verve.
But, oh Lord is the writing horrifically bad, and in the end, no director can cover for dialogue this dreadful.
Godzilla S.P. is plagued by too many characters, too much pointless talking, and far too little Godzilla and friends.
I’m not sure the endless rambling of virtually every character who receives any significant screen time is best described as pretentious, or
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merely inane, but whether spouting literary or philosophical references or just a word salad of incomprehensible technobabble, the criminally bad dialogue in this show proves that the only monster really needing to be stopped is the guy who wrote this garbage.
The writer clearly believed that taking the subtext of the traditional Godzilla story and trying to explain it in great detail using pseudoscience stuffed into the mouths of the characters would be a good addition to the canon. Truly, a Godzilla-sized mistake.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Oct 11, 2018
Deeply nostalgic, unabashedly sentimental, and filled with melancholy longing, High Score Girl is a romantic comedy wrapped in a geeky love letter to 1990s arcade gaming. It’s a coming-of-age story about searching for, discovering, and embracing your passions; and the realization that you can’t always get what you want.
Haruo Yaguchi is a boy who loves arcade gaming more than anything. The author takes great care in portraying him as a decent, generous and caring person who has a one-track mind that can seemingly only handle three things: breathing and gaming and talking about gaming. Indeed, Haruo just can’t shut up about games.
Akira Oono is in
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many ways your standard-issue “poor little rich girl.” From an extremely wealthy family, she gets driven around by a chauffeur who is also charged with keeping close tabs on her doings. Good at everything, pretty, and popular, she’s actually enormously unhappy, with no real friends, and feeling absolutely crushed under the pressure her parents have put on her to be flawless at everything. While she doesn’t live and breathe gaming like Haruo, she clearly loves it, and uses it as an outlet and escape from the huge coercions she feels filling up her everyday life.
Of course, as with everything else, she’s also pretty much the best at every game she plays, as well.
Oh, and one other thing: Akira never speaks. At least not in the presence of the audience. Her thoughts and feelings are portrayed solely through her actions, her facial expressions, and ultimately, through Haruo, who seemingly understands her like no one else. I’ve seen people complain that they don’t like our male protagonist because he annoyingly talks too much. Personally, I think that misses the point, because by the halfway mark of the very first episode, he’s already talking for both himself AND Akira, able to explain to the audience most everything that’s on her mind.
I guess I can understand why someone might find such chattering off-putting, but I think it’s charming, and more importantly, it deftly shows what an ineffable bond the two share.
Finally, there’s Koharu Hidaka, a reserved girl who, in Haruo, sees someone unafraid to pretty much always do whatever he wants – a boy who never sweats the repercussions. It is his willingness to follow his passions that makes her quickly fall for him. Although it turns out she’s a natural at gaming, it’s never quite clear that she shares the love for it that Haruo and Akira have. Rather, Koharu’s passion seems solely focused on Haruo, someone who represents the freedom and exuberance she’s been missing from her life.
High Score Girl follows the relationship between these three characters over the course of several years, from elementary to middle to high school, efficiently developing them through dialogue that at one and the same time is both ridiculous and heartrendingly real. It is not an easy trick to make a line like, “Did you know SNK is releasing a fighting game called Fatal Fury soon?” feel both profoundly emotional and intensely romantic, but High Score Girl does it repeatedly over the course of the series.
With shows like Just Because and Takagi-san, in recent seasons, anime has had a pretty good run of heartfelt adolescent romances. Yet even though this series doesn’t have a definitive ending (hopefully, they can pull that off with the upcoming three extra episodes), High Score Girl stands above them all as one of the most genuine, keenly observed, and yes, passionate portrayals of growing up and falling in love you will ever see.
You can watch High Score Girl purely for the gaming nostalgia and be perfectly satisfied. But the wistful, yearning love story at its heart is what makes it truly unforgettable.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 3, 2017
I guess the most succinct and germane review I can provide for Di Gi Charat is that it very much comes across, to me at least, as sort of a Japanese "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." I doubt the creators of either series were aware of the other (though they were begun within a year or so of one another), but they absolutely possess a similar spirit and sensibility.
The two shows share the same sort of dada, nonsensical storytelling, and a comparable comic use of the non sequitur. Aqua Teen's weirdo style certainly isn't for everyone, and neither is Di Gi Charat's. But if, like me,
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you really enjoy Meatwad and company, I think this show is definitely worth a try.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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