Gamers is a bit of a misleading anime. The synopsis primarily gives off the vibe of being a slice of life club anime where the club in question would be focused on gaming. But that is not really what Gamers is about. Yes, there technically is such a club in this anime but it's a very minor part of it, and in reality Gamers is more of a stereotypical love polygon romcom. However, although it is certainly somewhat generic, the show has some decent merit to it all things considered, but ultimately ends up biting off more than it could chew.
Above all, Gamers is an anime about romance-related misunderstandings. Multi-layered misunderstandings. You may think that this does not sound like anything out of the ordinary for a romcom at all, and for first couple episodes of the anime you'd be right, and they are quite average at best. However, past a certain point the anime starts going to such an extreme extent in order to complicate matters as much as possible that it starts bordering on sheer absurdity. It makes the types of misunderstandings you'd normally see in romcoms looks like peanuts in comparison, and it almost starts to feel more like a parody of the genre. Once this happens (around episode 6), the enjoyment value of the show suddenly climbs rapidly. Every character is quite clearly described and their somewhat naïve personalities are easy to understand, so their respective misconceptions are quite logical from their own perspectives. Truthfully they are all pretty stupid in their own way, but as a whole it all makes sense and it is quite funny to watch. It becomes a sort of Fawlty Towers plot, where an initial misunderstanding is first conceived and then additional misunderstandings are added on top in order to sustain the logic of the previous one, setting off a chain reaction of exponentially increasing levels of ridiculousness until eventually everything comes crashing down in the most spectacular and hilarious way possible.
The problem with Gamers though is that ultimately it turns out to be somewhat of a one-trick pony. The peak which the show reaches around the halfway mark is quite good, but after that it starts to deteriorate again. Because once pretty much all the misunderstandings have finally been resolved and the plot looks like it's about to take a new, quite interesting direction... it's like the story suddenly has a relapse where it decides that instead of trying something new, let's just bring all the misunderstandings back and do the whole thing all over again. The difference is that the second time around it's just not as funny anymore. The joke has already been demonstrated; you don't need to do the exact same thing again. Not only that, but I also felt that some of the plot developments which led to this relapse were rather unnatural to say the least; Chiaki in particular suddenly started doing some inexplicably stupid things that barely even made sense from her own perspective. It started giving me the feeling that the author was running out of ideas, but unfortunately this kind of plot doesn't have the sustainability to warrant going in circles like this.
Gamers does have some pretty amusing characters (albeit pretty dumb ones) and momentarily has some moments of brilliance. However, despite only being 12 episodes, this anime is honestly still too long. If Gamers had ended after episode 6 or 7 it would actually have been a lot better, because everything beyond that just feels like padding. It's an inconsistent show, but on average still a decent one I think. It has almost nothing to do with games though.
