This Week in Anime

Why Hi Score Girl II is a Perfect Gamer Romance

Steve
Nick, we're about to talk about a series that takes place way back in the mid-'90s, but it's also one that's managed to capture how I've been surviving for the past two weeks.

Season 2 is also more broadly about the way teen boys have always sucked, but admittedly there's a lot of overlap in that particular Venn diagram.

Meanwhile I ended up mainlining both seasons in a row, and wow! At the beginning I was literally just anticipating a show about "haha bideo james funny," but by the end of the first half I was ready to lay my life on the line for these precious bobble-head morons.

Yeah, I was born in the late '80s, so I kinda missed out on the height of the arcade craze pictured here, but I absolutely remember going to them and playing some of these machines. It also helped that I've watched a pretty unconscionable amount of GameCenter CX, so my knowledge of Japan's arcade scene is decent enough. But basically as long as you know that Guile's theme goes with everything, you're pretty good.

A literal match made in street fighting heaven.

Never fear though, dear readers, because under no circumstances will he ever have the brain bandwidth to do so.

Seriously, watching this dumbass 16-year-old boy try to figure out what Feelings are gave me so much firsthand embarrassment about my OWN 16-year-old dumbassery that I had to pause the video on multiple occasions. Hi Score Girl gets arcade games right, but it really gets adolescent idiocy spot-on.

Oh no, honey. Please reconsider. It's only 1996. You have so much time to turn this around.

He's a likable little brat for sure tho. And another thing that also helps mitigate his thicker romcom protagonist tendencies is that literally every woman in his life is out to make his existence a living hell. As it should be.

The addition of a dirtbag oneesan to the cast is such a power move—a hadouken, if you will—by season 2.

Makoto's presence is a consistently welcome one, and she also provides a reasonable lore explanation for why Akira never talks: Makoto does so enough for the both of them. Perhaps, arguably, too much at times.

Oh my god yes. They're basically just regular episodes that bridge the two seasons in addition to featuring the aforementioned most romantic gesture ever to grace a gamer's greasy thumbs.

Everyone needs an outlet to vent their frustrations through, and sometimes you're the child of overbearing aristocrats and the only outlet that's wide enough to handle your frustrations is a burly man named Zangief who loves piledriving.

The best set of wingmen a gamer couple could ask for. And in general you can tell there's a lot of love poured into how the meditations on arcade gaming weave their way into the show's central relationships. It's one big hotpot of nostalgia, but the way it highlights arcades in particular as social spaces is really insightful.
Even if you've never slapped a single joystick, Hi Score Girl should make you understand why this was a unique and magical time for kids like these.

Of course. Sometimes it's not ALL about gaming. As much as Haruo might want it to be.

Hidaka is such a great character and my biggest legitimate frustration with the show is that it doesn't do more with her. That's the big downside of Hi Score Girl structuring itself around a love triangle that she ultimately loses, which means she disappears for a good while until popping up again in the last episode. It's a shame too because her surprise ascension as a fighting game wunderkind is a perfectly interesting story in its own right!

It's a great scene for sure! I just think we could've gotten even more out her in the end than "gets a Character Development Haircut in the finale." But I totally agree she's better off not dating Haruo, especially when Nikotama is right here putting the moves on like this.

Look I can't help it if Hidaka's most compatible matchup is voiced by This Week In Anime's favorite esteemed Heybot alumnus Shiori Izawa.

I did not dare hope that this was real, but it is and it's spectacular:

When video games are good, they're good.

I could watch an entire series that's just Spirit Guile providing sage guidance on the regular. And to be fair, I guess that's pretty much what Hi Score Girl already is.

And while Haruo might not have gotten laid at this particular juncture, he got the next best thing I'd say.

If there's one thing Hi Score Girl understands, it's Gamers.

I'll never get sick of it's two emotionally stunted dorks sublimating their feelings into a form of communication that only they can understand—an act which, by its nature, confirms the validity of their connection.

This is so sappy and I'm HOLLERING all the same. This doesn't even approach the surreal brilliance of the big emotional climax of the entire show, which is so good I kinda don't even want to risk spoiling it.

That's all wonderful and true, but I think an equally powerful message to take away from the show is that getting beaten by a girl in a video game was the best thing to ever happen to Haruo. We can all learn from that.

I also think it's VERY important to share this: there's a sequel spin-off manga called Hi Score Girl Dash that is apparently about a 30-year-old Hidaka who's still a gamer. So we BETTER get a adaptation of that, is all I'm saying.