I'd been aware of this show since the initial trailer, I think I just got it in my youtube recommendations but it may have been on a social feed, either way I thought this is gonna be great! I'd already watched high score girl a few years back (I just realised I'm still highlighting titles like I was doing in my school essays, guess old habits die hard lol), and really enjoyed that for all the arcade fanservice and surprisingly good story and characters (in fact as I'm typing this the Opening and Ending themes are floating around my head, despite not having listened to them since I first watched the show), so to see a modern slice-of-life/cute girls doing cute things show about arcades? Yeah I was interested.
The other main gimmick is the main girl Lily is British (if this was a youtube video I'd insert the national anthem and a bunch of memes here, but this is a text post so instead you have another text aside). What surprised me was that this is taken a lot more seriously than most other anime's I've seen, Lily speaks exclusively in English throughout the first episode, and the communication between her and Renji (the other main character) is a big part of the story. With that being said, both Lily and her mum's voice actors are clearly Japanese VAs trying their best to do English accents, it's better than a lot of other shows but still a bit immersion-breaking (surely there's some English VAs living in Japan they could've used?). That aside, the show actually proved to be very easy to follow without subtitles for me! For a refresher, I've passed JLPT N5 and used to be around N4 level, but I'm incredibly rusty and have almost no opportunities to practice, so watching without subs is usually a crapshoot for me, but there were only a couple of phrases here and there that I didn't understand here! I'm looking forward to seeing how this element develops throughout the show!
So what about the arcades? Well this is only the first episode but we got to see a decent amount. One of the first games we see is just straight up Tetote Connect, the Taito rhythm game (that I swear was killed off a year or so ago?).
Very odd choice but hey maybe this is setting the precident that all the games shown here will be real ones like in High Score Girl! Yeah nah, the only other licensed things I can recognise are Vewlixes, everything else is of the anime classic legally distinct variety. Within the first episode we see
Legally distinct Taiko No Tatsujin
Legally distinct Daytona USA
Legally distinct House of the Dead
and Legally distinct Puyo Puyo
This one really threw me for a loop because the guy is playing it with a mahjong control panel? This isn't completely unheard of (at least one of the Tetris Grand Master games supported playing with these panels), but I'd never seen a Puyo Puyo cab setup like that, definitely a research rabbithole to dive into some other time.
Even weirder is they're shown playing legally distinct puyo puyo on the vewlixes later on, maybe there's two different versions of the game? Like how IRL we have the old JAMMA Puyo games and the newer Puyo Esports arcade? (I am thinking way too much into this lol).
The Alice In Wonderland theming for this version is very cute though
There were some small things I noticed (noticably the daytona game runs at 20fps??) but in general everything looked pleasent. Actually quite a few of the backgrounds stuck out to me for looking really nice, I guess even with a noticably small budget you can still have a nice art style (I've been using them for the background of this post, graphic design is truly my passion). The opening really didn't stick out that much to me, felt very generic, but the ending took me by surprise because it starts off as speedcore?! It goes all over the place with different rhythm-gamey sounds until they show the artist and everything clears up a bit
Overall I definitely enjoyed the first episode, likely gonna be looking out for new episodes as they drop week by week. Very cool to see a show like this about arcades in the present day considering their presumed diminishing presence, would be interesting to see some kind of commentary on that in future episodes but I'm not holding my breath.
I may write more posts about the show as it carries on, maybe post more live-reaction style stuff to my bsky account, either way thanks for reading!
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