Reviews

(This review contains mild spoilers.) I went into this series having little in the way of expectations. The MAL rating at the time of writing is 7.75, which is kinda mid, so I had my doubts about the quality of the show. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the first 2-3 episodes, which were really charming, and hinted at an unusual love story between the protagonists, Haruo and Akira. I was very much looking forward to the next episode, thinking that I had found a severely underrated series. Sadly, the love story eventually turned into a love triangle, which is one of the most annoying tropes in anime (at least, if you've gone through several of them in your anime journey). As the story develops, Akira loses her charm and becomes cold, distant, and a Mary Sue: she's great at everything, although we do not see how she got those skills. She's also a violent tsundere, punching the wimpy Haruo to the point of making him bleed... and he just takes it. And yet we are supposed to believe that these two are destined to form a deep, mature relationship. Frustratingly, the other girl in the love triangle, despite being sweeter, prettier (imo), and putting more effort into her friendship with Haruo, gets left out, and we the viewers are left scratching our heads as to why. She appears in the opening credits briefly, which indicates that it's not her who' going to win out in the end. So why introduce her at all? The story also relies on the tired cliche where people don't express their true feelings (one is literally a mute), giving rise to misunderstandings and complications, in order to prolong the storyline. I have the impression that the main focus of this anime was to nostalgia bait people into re-living the old arcade games from the 90s, while the love story was just tacked on, choosing old tropes to fill in the gaps. Since I was never a very avid gamer, the depictions of 90s-era games never really grabbed my attention, and the love story falls flat mid-way through, so it failed to hook me on that end as well. Overall rating, 6/10. It had a lot of promise.