Now, on the other side: the main character is your average twatless, low grade, video game enthusiast who cares about nothing but games and doesn't even seem to be competent socially. Really, he is barely shown having normal conversations with classmates or other people, everything is about videogames but the part that makes it dumb, is that is always about HIM playing videogames, just Haruo in his own world. Never plays with any of his friends, not hangs out, goes out for a coffee or anything, it’s a one dimensional gamer.
I can understand Ono having feelings towards this guy because they have known each other for years, experienced various things and played together for a long time, but it just does not make any sense for me that Hidaka falls in love with him. He clearly is a childish gamer that knows nothing but playing, does not care about girls, school or any other thing. Instead of her finding interesting how passionte he is about videogames, it would be more of a redflag on how neglected he is.
Ono never talks, and even tho she is sometimes called out with things like “oh you don’t talk a lot don’t you?”, how can it be that anybody is asking her why she does never say a word. You just can’t take that for granted, it’s dumb, she just never speaks. Being timid is one thing, but to caricaturize it to such an extent makes her void.
The progression of the show is quite predictable, where Haruo of course does not notice that Hidaka wants his D and is still obsessed about being better than Ono at videogames, but that obsession makes him start developing feelings for her, but they can’t see each other now and bla bla bla... Nothing interesting really happens, but this is something that Hi Score Girl Extra Stage kinda takes care of.
I could go on for a bit more about plot and characters but I think its enough, these are my main issues and most of them regard main character who is very dislikeable. The show brings nothing new to the table, if you like retro videogames (mainly fighting games) you will be entertained with all of the arcade references. Characters are nothing special and feel like exagerations of personality traits and story-wise, not a lot of things happen. This anime is just an average shojo that manages to play the nostalgia game with all those 90's arcades. I'm feeling a strong 3 to a light 4, on Hi Score Girl.
