Let’s start with the main characters, and just like a character select screen, I’ll let you pick who’s first… (Just kidding, I seriously wish that could actually work though.) Our main character is Haruo Yaguchi. This show follows his life through elementary school through high school so it’s hard to pin point his exact personality. As people grow so to does their personality and the way they react to different things. There are some constants though, he loves video games, he is good at them, and he likes a good challenge in video games. Normally I wouldn’t like a character like him much, but there is a very strange amount of charm that seems to come from him that I like. It’s his passion I think that draws me in. It’s the same for anyone really, the spark that shows up when someone has fallen in love with something else, I am always interested in that spark.
At the same time that I like Haruo, I kind of don’t fully like Akira Ono who is our second character. She is a very rich and popular girl who all the boys seem to fall for even when they were elementary school students when boys would normally be trying to space themselves from girls. She gets good grades, attends after school studies at home including flower arranging, piano, and all the other lessons a typical rich kid in Japan is supposed to learn, but her greatest passion seems to be sneaking away from all that just to play video games at an arcade. She feels a lot like a typical Tsundere character as she always seems to beat up on poor Haruo except for one thing, she is mute throughout the whole show. When I say I don’t fully like her, it’s the Tsundere part of her that I’m not to big on as I see that time and time again in anime, but what I find fascinating with this show is the fact they did leave her mute. You only know what she is thinking from her gestures and facial expressions (and sometimes her feelings show through her game play) so a lot of time your left guessing what she is thinking.
The next person I would like to talk about is Koharu Hidaka. She becomes a classmate of Haruo’s in his junior year… basically in the 4th episode so it’s not spoilers really. From the first moment that she came on screen, I knew she was going to become a ‘option 2’ for our main characters affections just from how she sort of starts to interact with him. She’s a lot like me in a way where I would call her a beginner or casual player. Someone who likes to watch others play instead of playing themselves for the most part. While she does get a small interest in games near the end of the 4th episode, she seems to only get into it because of Haruo. I like her but at the same time don’t like her which is a very odd thing to say. I think that because she feels so much like me in a way, I feel like she doesn’t really fit in with the story line that they were trying to get to. It’s like they put her in just to say ‘here is your love triangle everybody, will the new girl get the guy or will it be the childhood friend?’ If they had integrated her more into the story line somehow, I think there would be more of a reason to have her there but with the 12 episode limit, they didn’t have enough time to flesh her out or show how close she could get to Haruo to give her a fighting chance really.
I love the fact that they start the show with them in elementary school and work their way up. The different little breaks of years gone by is filled in with a very basic low down of the advancement of video games within Japan and just how advanced they got though the years that we are missing in the jumps. It also shows just how dedicated the characters are to their love of the games. What got me really excited was that Haruo’s first console he talked about was the Turbographic-16 which was part of some of my earliest gaming memories. My family and I would sit around and play Dungeon Explorer together when I was in elementary school so the show really brought back some fond memories. I think that was the biggest reason why I actually got interested in where this show was going.
The English voice acting is interesting, especially since Ono doesn’t actually talk. Christine Cabanos is the ‘sound’ actor for Ono and she does an ok job for her but sadly it doesn’t show her talent. Haruo’s voice actor kind of made me a bit annoyed at first but then started to grow on me a bit as he got older. I think it was because Johnny Yong Bosch was his voice actor and throughout the whole time I watched the show up until I looked it up on wiki, I had no clue it was him. There have been a couple new voice actors that sound similar to him that the familiarity of his voice had me racking my head trying to figure it out. Also, when Johnny plays a kid, his voice can get a bit annoying it seems… (Sorry Johnny, still love most of your voice acting.)
The animation is a little odd in my opinion, reminding me a little like the Korean style of art I have seen before. It’s not a style I’m normally drawn to but it does have its own charms. I do like some of the consistency’s they did with how children grow up as its sometimes hard to make a character look older without losing what they looked like when they were younger. They had to do that for at least three separate time frames and in all of them, the children do still have the same air about them as when they were younger in their design. The odd thing about the art style is that they do sometimes randomly have this strange shading on the characters that shows they were 3D models which sort of breaks the show for me. I’m detail oriented so if it first looks hand drawn and then that strange 3D thing, I end up losing my immersion.
Overall, I do love the nostalgia the show brought to me and the interesting story that came with it. It’s not high on my list but it is one I probably will end up watching again. Just one warning, I would watch the first 5 episodes before you say you don’t want to watch anymore. The show kind of changes around then which will make you know if you like this show or not.
