I really wanted to like this anime. I truly did. Awkward nerd romance involving video games and such, it sounds right up my alley. I had fun watching Wotakoi just last week, so I thought this would be more of the same. I couldn't have been more wrong...
First of all, the anime has basically nothing to do with video games. Referenced in the title and the main selling point of the story, video games serve as mere background props. Akane, the main protagonist, is not even a nerd, just a generic college student who gets roped into playing some generic MMO. Aside from a handful of scenes where they talk on the in-game chat, we learn nothing about the game, or really any game or anything connected. I mean, that's fair to a point, not everyone is a huge gamer or necessarily interested in the culture at all, but the anime makes it feel like games and nerdy stuff (again, the main selling point of the story) is nothing but unremarkable plot devices, relegated to just a trendy gimmick to exploit, which - being a nerd - feels pretty damn offensive.
I could forgive an anime being tonedeaf like that if the story was actually great. But it's not. First of all, the main love interests, Akane and Yamada, have exactly ZERO chemistry. They have absolutely nothing in common, save for a single video game, and they would've never even met if not for her ex-boyfriend roping her into playing right before dumping her. Akane is a wordly college student who...well...has a friend(?) who she talks to sometimes, I guess? Being the most characterized character in the whole show, we don't really learn much about her at all, since 90% of the runtime is about her hopelessly fawning over the titular Yamada-kun.
Speaking of whom, Yamada is a hardcore gamer who...uh...plays video games a lot. Yep, that's basically the only thing we learn about him in the whole show. Oh, and that he is incredibly, insanely, unbelievably pretty! The anime continuously hammers home the point just how much of an amazingly cute boy Yamada is, with characters extolling his godly good looks left and right and scenes where squeeky fangirls line up to confess to him everywhere he goes. Too bad he has the personality of a medium-sized brick. I mean, hardcore gamers in general are not exactly known to be social butterflies, but Stoic Stickbug Yamada is just taking it a little too far. A bland, brash, absolutely asocial guy with the emotional intelligence of a doorstop, who's only remarkable trait is how much he DOESN'T wanna be involved with Akane, makes for a very unbelievable love interest. And it's not even the "oh, he doesn't know his own feelings" or "doesn't know how to express himself" kinda thing. No, he's obviously just plain not interested in dating, period. And it's not like he hides this fact either, what with turning down confessions left and right and even outright saying that he is completely disinterested in romance.
But that won't stop our obvious self-insert heroine, who is dead determined to get him in a "I have no filter, so I'm gonna bug you until you love me" kinda way. Discounting the absolute forest of red flags of a college student woman desperately trying to date a high-school boy, the whole thing comes off as disingenuous. It really feels like the author has never been in a relationship and just took two unlikely characters, put them in a trendy setting and went "Now kiss!". There are just too many wild coincidences, accidents and the meddling of side-characters that force the two into awkward situations where Yamada needs to play the reluctant hero, and at the end something just suddenly flips in his head "I love you now, I guess". The whole thing is just so artificial, factitious, like someone who only experienced romance on TV, or a 4-year-old playing with dolls. I don't use this word often but I think "cringe" is the adequate definition here.
The ONLY saving grace of this anime is Madhouse. The production quality is through the roof! The art style is beautiful, amazingly animated and directed, I would expect nothing less for one of best studios in anime. Too bad it's all wasted on this terribly artificial snoozefest of a story. I'd only recommend it if you are a fan of Madhouse or you have nothing better to watch.
Thanks for reading!
