The story focuses around a young high school student who became a professional shogi player. He lives alone in his apartment and has, at the start a very mysterious backstory, which is presented to be very tragic and we should feel sorry for him. The story starts of very one sided, with everything happening out of the perspective of the protagonist and many other character come around as rather one-dimensional because we know too little about them. This was fixed later on by adding backstories to side character as well to make them more interesting. There is also a clear distinction between characters, that are always in comedy scenes and character who mostly are involved in the drama part of the show. This approach is better than to just simply include every character in silly comedy to a point where you can’t take anything they do serious anymore (like in FMA brotherhood), but it still raises the question… why include both?
I don’t really think that drama and comedy work well together. One of the 2 has to suffer in order for the other one to succeed. This could really be seen in this anime.
The drama aspect of the show seemed to be just there to make the protagonist interesting, for me however it didn’t work and I found him rather bland with a backstory similar to so many other. That’s the main reason I really welcomed the later included focus on side character and their relationship to the protagonist.
The shogi aspect is merely a tool and not too deeply focused. It took them 8 episodes to introduce the basic rules of the game to the audience, but then again, if the show thinks you just learned about the game it is understandable that it doesn’t go into any deeper analysis into professional shogi games. That’s probably why it was missing completely in this anime. For me this was a bit disappointing to see. The anime also didnt really manage to build up much of a tension with their shogi games (espeically at the start), but it gets better the more episodes you watch.
The slice of life aspect seemed to be the most focused one, at least at the start. What they basically wanted to achieve was to take this introverted main character who only focuses on shogi and has a sad past and put him in a goofy environment with 3 sister who mainly function as comedic relieve. The reason for all of this is also very random, which sets it very much apart from everything else that happens in the show. I found none of these comedic relieve characters to be in any way relatable or interesting and the comedy felt very typical and unfunny (with a weird fetish around cats, which also didn’t do it for me). It tries to be self aware with characters constantly referencing how this and that looks like an anime or a manga, but this was just used to create cheap laughs and nothing more.
However the whole start is very light hearted and because you still have quite a bit of shogi story aspects is wasn’t too much of a chore to go through to reach the more interesting part of the story.
The sound design wasn’t really well done. The voice acting was ordinary, but the soundtrack was really not existent beyond forgettable background songs. There was one fine piano track at some point but it was very quickly forgotten.
The art style is very weird. The characters have huge mouths and often large eyes to make them look cute (a bit different from typical anime character eyes) , but they sometimes look like cgi characters. You will get used to the art style and not notice it too much but at first it kinda annoyed me. Backgrounds were nicely drawn and I found it nice that they depicted the real design of the shogi hall building in Tokyo.
For all the bad things I had to say about this anime I still have to add that I enjoyed watching it. Its story is engaging and grips you into it. It’s somewhat relatable and in many ways down to earth (at least compared to other anime). It could have been a lot better but for what it is worth it can introduce a lot of people in the fascinating world of shogi.
