Hi Score Girl II Review

CG anime is terrible. The animation looks off. They never get it right. CG ruined Berserk.

You hear this all the time and then along comes a full CG anime that makes you forget that you’re watching CG. Sure, it’s in your face the entire time and, yet, you don’t even care because the characters, the story, the soundtrack, everything else is just that damn good.

Welcome to the second season of Hi Score Girl.

Let’s Jam!

The Story

Hi Score Girl II picks up where we left off. Hidaka and Oono are entangled in a battle over Haruo’s love and affection but that’s just the beginning. In the end, the story reverts back to its original plan… trying to get Oono and Haruo together and this is where the drama and the emotions get kicked up into high gear. Watching these two grow inside of both their character development and the overall story was something to marvel at.

Mixing comedy and drama together, Hi Score Girl’s story brings an amazing balance to the forefront. Even when the story takes little detours, such as when Haruo gets mixed up in video game gang warfare, it still adds to the overall development of the story and characters. It draws you in and makes you hang onto every scene, every word. Even when an episode is pure comedy, things can turn serious on a dime and while some shows make that feel artificial, Hi Score Girl is a true master at it because they make each one of those turns matter.

Of course, Capcom was in full force with all of their great 90’s games plastered all over the place. It brings with it a sense of nostalgia for older games like myself and just heavily embeds the anime in one of gaming’s golden ages. Even if the show felt just like one great big Capcom retro commercial, you couldn’t help but smile whenever you saw in-game footage of some of your favorites or the occasional name drop of one of your favorite series (I’m looking at you Mega Man!)

Still, despite all of this, the story was this show’s most powerful tools. It kept everything simple and didn’t do much to make things convoluted. You had two gamers who were rivals end up developing feelings for each other. Toss in a second girl to mix things up and you have yourself a classic love triangle story. We’ve seen it done time and time again and it either just feels generic or it hits it out of the park. There really never seems to be an in-between here and I can say that Hi Score Girl definitely knocked it out of the park in this aspect and breathed new life into a tried and true genre.

The Characters

Haruo Yaguchi

Our main protagonist here who is your typical, loud-mouthed, boastful gamer. He is absolutely in love with video games to the point where he makes them his entire life, even going as far as to neglect his studies for the sake of gaming. He’s the type of friend who never shuts up and goes a bit too far with his boasting about how good a game is or how good he’s at playing said game.

Despite those nuances, you don’t end up finding him annoying at all. His personality has a certain charm about him because Yaguchi reminds you of the kid inside of us that always got excited over a new video game or a kid who just found a bunch of quarters and realized that they can go to the arcade and waste the day away with them. There is a little bit of Yaguchi in all of us which is why he is so relatable. Despite his brashness, he does care about Oono and slowly begins to realize that his rivalry is becoming something deeper.

You get to see that transition where he goes from excited and obsessed with playing Oono in matches in order to solidify the fact that he’s the best to wanting to just spend time gaming with her. You see him develop his feelings slowly over time and the pacing at which he does is perfectly timed out… especially for a show that only got 12 episodes. While Yaguchi can be a little brain dead at times, it does add some comedy to the show and the fact that Oono is constantly beating the crap out of him, both in games and in real life, it makes it fun watching him be the punching bag of the show!

His development over the course of the series sees a change in his character but it’s not up until the final episodes of the series. While it does come late, I felt that the show strung the viewer along, teasing them at every turn to build up to this one defining turn when he FINALLY realizes his feelings for Oono. The payoff is worth it. Main characters like this are few and far between but I felt Haruo was executed to perfection.

Akira Oono

First and foremost…. My hat is off completely to this series for making a bold move. We have a main character who doesn’t utter a single, solitary word for the entire duration of the show! Oono speaks in mannerisms, low grunts, and facial expressions, yet, you can always tell exactly how she’s feeling and her actions speak louder than any word could have. The fact she doesn’t have a single voice line in this whole series sounds like it would be a recipe for disaster but I have never seen a character like this pulled off so well in all of my years watching anime.

The fact that they were able to convey Oono’s feelings PERFECTLY through mannerisms alone is a hard feat in an of itself… add in the fact that this was pulled off in a show that was in full CG and not traditional animation… and your head just explodes trying to understand how they were able to pull this off so flawlessly.

Needless to say, Oono made this show. Without her, this show would have been as generic as all hell. I wouldn’t be sitting here singing its praises if it weren’t for this one and only character. Sure, Hidaka had her own charms and was a very solid character, Yaguchi was fun as hell and if it were just the two of them, the show would still be enjoyable but it wouldn’t be as great as it was.

Oono made that much of a difference. The fact that the show FORCED you to pay attention to every little nuance about her character rather than glossing your attention down at the bottom to read subtitles while listening to tone and inflection, allowed you to have a much deeper connection with the character. It allowed to take in everything with Oono and it made you appreciate her all that much more. You got to see her natural reactions to every situation from getting annoyed by Yaguchi’s brashness to being emotionally stomped into the ground by her upbringing. Everything was there on display and this made her one of the most unique characters I’ve had the pleasure of watching.

Kouharu Hidaka

Hidaka is a classmate of Yaguchi’s during high school She lives upstairs from their family’s convenience store and when they install an arcade outside, who else but game-addicted Yaguchi shows up to spend a lot of his free time there! This causes a love/hate relationship between Hidaka as she wasn’t really all that interested in games at first but the more she got to know Yaguchi, the more she became converted to the religion known as gaming!

This new love for games ended up causing a different kind of love to brew inside of her. Despite the fact that Yaguchi was a bit insufferable at times, she begins to feel a connection to him and, eventually, falls in love. However, it’s not as simple as confessing your love because she discovers that Oono is in the picture and then there’s the whole “Does he love me or does he just love games to the point where I’m confusing his emotions?” aspect that was pulled off very well.

This conflict allowed you to connect with Hidaka and relate to her and is a prime example of how to feel a connection to a character using dialogue. It’s like Oono and Hidaka are on opposite ends of the spectrum yet they accomplished the same goals with the viewing audience. It’s almost as if the writers wanted the viewers to feel that the same connection could be made using traditional and non-traditional methods. If that was their modus operandi, I say that they were highly successful. The only thing that stops Hidaka being the best girl of the series is just how well they pulled off Oono as a character.

Oono just stands out way too much for Hidaka to even have a chance but it’s knowing that she has no chance of being best girl that makes you root for her even more! It’s like you, yourself, are involved in this rivalry as a spectator but it’s not just in a viewing role. It’s in a way where you feel helpless because you want to interject but you know that all you can do is watch!

Art, Animation, and Sound

I was highly skeptical when I heard that this show would be in full CG. There was a mixed bag of expectations going into this show. All I will say is that I wouldn’t have this show any other way. Besides, I’ll touch upon this in my Overall Thoughts, but it’s almost like this show could have been animated in any way it wanted it and it wouldn’t have mattered. The art took a backseat… a BIG backseat to story, soundtrack, and character development. When those three shined so bright that the art didn’t matter too much, you know you’re in for a great ride.

But all in all, the characters were designed uniquely and even though it was CG, their expressions and movements actually felt natural. In other words, this is a show where you won’t have to hear Gigguk scream “BAD CG” at the top of his lungs. The CG was actually very well done! The animation itself was a bit jittery at times but in other times, it was rather smooth. In some cases, it looked like they used 60 fps of animation (such as Hidaka’s reveal in the final episode… you’ll know what I mean when you watch it)… and I never thought I’d say this but doing a 60 fps animation section was the thing that felt out of place more than the actual CG.

The soundtrack was amazing in season 1… it was even more amazing in volume two. Simply just too incredible to describe. Go buy it. That’s all that can be said.

Overall Thoughts

Needless to say, these past 24 episodes have been one hell of a roller coaster ride. Thinking back to the very beginning of the show, going into the 3 extended episodes which served as Season 1.5, and then into the ending… and my GOD… THAT ENDING… I can only think about how this show left me in agony each and every week as I wanted for a new episode to come out.

Very few shows made me feel pain like that. Even shows that aired this year like The Promised Neverland and Vinland Saga which hold my attention and grip me with excitement still made me feel like I could wait the extra week. I remember when Thursday would roll around and I would just be like “Oh yeah! It’s The Promised Thursday! Get Hyped!” I wouldn’t sit here and obsess over the next episode like I did with Dororo or Steins;Gate. Steins;Gate still, to this day, has been the biggest perpetrator of making me scream and curse at my monitor when an episode ended because I knew I had to wait a whole week just to see another episode.

You can now add Hi Score Girl to that list of shows that made me do that.

At first, I thought the first season was great. Much joy was had when I found out about the 3 extra episodes. Then my hype levels spiked even further when I discovered the second season. I enjoyed this series so much that from the onset of season two, I couldn’t wait for Saturday to roll around so I could see what happened next. Then, as we inched closer and closer to the ending, that fix was needed more and more. So much so that for the final episode, I was literally doing anything I could to make the time pass by so that the subtitled release could come out and I could watch it.

When everything was said in done, I was left in shock. The ending to the series wasn’t cliché. It wasn’t what you expected. Some people may even be heartbroken over it but at the same time, it’s an ending we didn’t expect but an ending we could be satisfied with.

I always believe that the ending is paramount. It can make or break an entire series and even though our hearts cried out when we didn’t get the ending we wanted, the way it did end was probably the most wholesome way that show could have ended without falling into a cliché trap.

That is why I am doing something I very rarely do. I am going to go ahead and give Hi Score Girl II, and by proxy, an overall rating for the entire series and 5/5.

Geek culture love stories don’t typically get much better than this. Sure, the show had some flaws in it and the CG animation could be a deal-breaker but the story and the characters were so well-developed that it made you forget about the art which has always been one of the driving forces behind a show and its score. When you can take art completely out of the factoring process because everything else hit on all cylinders, you know you have something special on your hands

Hi Score Girl was that something special.

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My advice to myself when thinking about a possible epilogue OVA