New Game doesn’t really feature many of these notabilities mentioned prior, but such is often to be expected from a slice of life show; an episodic one at that (of course, there exist plenty of great examples of environmental storytelling that serve as counterexamples, but as it’s obvious that this was not the goal of the creators, I digress). Nonetheless, an unchanging character environment without major conflicts of note can work, but ONLY if the humour works. Imagine watching Seinfeld (or any other sitcom for that matter) without the incidental humour. Trying to watch any show centred around comedy that doesn’t “click” for you will feel like a slog; It just doesn’t work. Perhaps if you like underdelivered jokes that have the writing equivalent of a runny egg’s consistency, you’d find New Game a lot more amusing than I did.
To top it all off, New Game isn’t even particularly educational in its subject matter, preferring to dedicate most of its runtime to idealistic scenes that are slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry. It’s very well animated paint, for sure, but underneath the colourful, vibrant visuals, the enthusiastic voice acting, the fun soundtrack, and the fluid animation, there’s... nothing really of note? The characters show features an all-female cast for no other reason other than to provide the viewer with eye candy, with some of the fanservice shots, while much less common than certain other offenders, being as obnoxious as ever.
I can’t say I hated New Game, but between every fun interaction that could even be humorous on occasion, there existed a plethora of moe fluff scenes I couldn’t get behind personally. While far from the worst offender, I cannot be Stockholm Syndrome’d by the art direction into saying I very much enjoyed the overall experience. Whilst this review may seem harsh, understand that it’s an okay show if you need something cute and thoughtless at the end of a day.
