The story follows main character Hotaru Tachibana, a reverse trap with a strong sense of justice. Hotaru is put under the impression that her friend Kanae was treated badly at this host club she visited. She goes to investigate and gets into a survival game (airsoft gun fight) with the place's owner, Masamune Matsuoka. The place gets damaged in the process, and Hotaru is forced to join his survival games team, Toy Gun Gun (a really dumb name that they even point out as being dumb), in order to pay off the damages. This ends up just being an excuse to bring Hotaru into survival games as the paying off the damages part is hand waved pretty shortly afterward. Hotaru soon meets Toy Gun Gun's other member Tooru Yukimura. He initially hates her for no reason other than the fact that she's getting between him and "Mattsun" (his nickname for Matsuoka). However, he gets over it really quickly, within the course of one episode. After the team is together, they make it their goal to be the best in Japan. At this point, everything is relatively inoffensive, but the one-dimensional cast of characters and relatively unintersting story aren't earning it any points.
The anime goes downhill very quickly. There are two main conflicts in the show, one of them is incredibly pointless, and the other doesn't really go anywhere. First is the issue of Hotaru's gender. Her teammates (and pretty much everyone who doesn't know her) are under the impression that she's a guy. Not too much of an issue at first glance, but it turns out the Matsuoka doesn't allow girls on his team for reasons that you eventually find out, but it ends up not being something you can more or less figure out way before they actually tell it to you near the end of the series. Ultimately, this does nothing but stir up pointless drama. My issue with this is that they could have easily made Hotaru a boy, and the series would have been exactly the same. The issue of her gender is rarely addressed in a meaningful way. They almost came close in one particularly annoying episode somewhat centered around Kanae in which Hotaru is urged to be more feminine and avoid survival games, but what could have been something to address gender stereotypes in a thought provoking way ends up being nothing more than an episode where Hotaru strengthens her resolve through her friend. It's annoying enough that the point of the episode could have gotten across in a much better way if this was done through Hotaru interacting with her teammates, but it's even more infuriating that Kanae's character was clearly written just so this episode could happen. Her only character trait is that she's a girl with pink hair, and she acts as somewhat of a foil to Hotaru's masculine side. But a foils aren't nearly as effective if you almost never have the two of them interact. Without spoiling anything, the issue of Hotaru's gender never goes anywhere. She says she's going to tell her teammates, then you never see her tell them, so it feels like an annoying tease. To make things more insulting, there's even a scene near the end where Hotaru is grabbing Matsuoka's hand and he starts blushing (after doing no such thing the entire series). The groan I let out at the moment was beyond comprehension. It's almost like they're insulting you. Feels like somekind of really lame yaoi fanfiction.
The other conflict in the story revolves around Matsuoka and another survival game player named Midori. There's apparently some sort of history between the two of them. But ultimately it boils down to Matsuoka really wants to beat his team in a survival game. Outside of the games, when Midori interacts with Hotaru, he's almost creepily friendly. But during the games he's a terrifying sadist, or at least that's what they make him out to be. There's pretty much nothing interesting about Midori's character other than the fact that the story needed some sort of antagonist, so it's really hard to care about him. He's extremely one dimensional. There's not much else to say about this part of the story without spoiling it, but it ends up involving Matsuoka being tormented by his inferiority to Midori and the results of every big tournament his team lost. This doesn't go anywhere particularly interesting, but it ends up making for some really lame drama.
So, the story's pretty bad. The characters are pretty awful as well. On top of being a reverse trap for no reason other than to create some really stupid drama, Hotaru is an extremely frustrating character to have as the main character. She's one of the most annoying leads I've seen in a long time. She has that aforementioned sense of justice, but it's only brought up every once in a while when convenient. She grows to love survival games very quickly, and that almost becomes a point of contention and room for deeper characterization, but they do almost nothing with it. For whatever reason, she has some sort of intense bloodlust when she gets really into a game, but it ends up being nothing other than her eyes are drawn differently and she sort of moves faster. She's actually really bad with a gun, as you find out very quickly. Other than that, I want to slap her every time she opens her mouth. Just imagine an obnoxiously gung ho shounen protagonist with the emotional maturity of a 12 year old girl that gets really excited over everything.
Matsuoka is the closest thing to an intersting character as part of the story revolves around him getting over his issues, but it's extremely hard to care about him when he has so little screen time. It's almost like dedicating the plot to a side character.
Yukimura is extremely forgettable. He's a creepy shut-in, pervert that has no friends except Mattsun (and now Hotaru). He was bullied a lot back in the day, and Matsuoka was the one who stood up for him. So now he just has a creepy attachment to him. You could say he's the pervert who's incredibly clingly to Matsuoka and that'd be about the entirety of his character.
Every other character is garbage. I already talked about Midori, so I should mention the side characters... there's like three and I'd be lying if I said they were even fleshed out enough to be one-dimensional.
So, the two components that matter most, story and characters, are absolute garbage. There's nothing to be said about the music since I can't even recall a single track from the soundtrack, shows how memorable it is, and the art style is kinda bland. The animation is kind of acceptable, but nothing to write home about. So I can't even give it a point or two for that.
Finally, I need to talk about the action scenes. This could have been the anime's saving grace, but it was a total let down. All of the choreography of the surival games is out of whack. It's pretty clear that there was little to no spatial awareness in the planning of the action scenes. The best example I could cite: Hotaru is facing down an enemy. The shot implies that there's about 20-30 feet between them. Then when she runs at him, it looks like she's running the distance of a football field. Given that they were in a forest at the time, it's even worse since you could use trees as markers. There were only a few trees near them, yet Hotaru runs by a bunch of them. This sounds nitpicky, but it's really infuriating and totally immersion breaking when given that there's tons of room for realism in the game they're playing. Even stuff like that aside, none of these survival game scenes are particularly fancy. In fact, it often feels like they go out of their way not to show them to you. The first couple of episodes involved Hotaru getting totally hyped to get out and shoot people up, but instead of the viewer getting to see her try, it cuts to her instantly failing and leaving the battlefield. Even when we do see her in action, it's either totally lame or something stupid and immersion breaking like what I described earlier. And at this point I haven't even mentioned how everyone plays this game like they don't even want to win. They're not using real guns, it's not a life or death situation, yet everyone seems to rather talk menacingly to each other instead of just shooting each other. The number of times where someone totally would have gotten shot if the person holding the gun to them just shut up and pulled the trigger is way higher than it should be. How is anyone expected to feel any tension in this already incredibly low stakes (in the grandest scheme of things) game when people are practically refusing to do the only thing you do in it? It's like watching a really bad stereotypical shounen where a fight that could have taken ten minutes last three episodes because no one would shut up and do what they're supposed to be doing. So, the entire show falls apart even on a conceptual level. You're given a realistic game, why not let everyone play it realistically instead of like a really bad fighting shounen?
This anime is bottom of the barrel. It's certainly not the worst I've seen, but it's pretty close, and I wouldn't feel bad about lumping it together with the only other title I've given a 1 to. The characters are mindnumbingly bad, the story surrounding them gives you no real reason to care about it, and everything else is flat out unimpressive. Also, did I mention that it even manages to have an infuriating flashback filter? It even messes up in that department.
1/10 - I'd have more fun pounding my head against a wall
