You know, the experience of watching these episodes of Hi Score Girl is wonderful for many reasons.  But one of them is that they’re a reminder of how gobsmacked I was when reading the earlier chapters in the manga – how it consistently surprised me and exceeded my expectations at every turn.  The feeling I’m getting from the anime is exactly the same as from the manga, which I guess means that J.C. Staff is getting the big stuff right.  HSG is first and foremost a testament to what great writing can do, but the anime still has to make the right decisions in bringing it to the screen.

I really do love this series unreservedly, I admit it.  The feels here are incredibly legit – authenticity is at the core of everything.  I still remember what being 14 felt like, and Hi Score Girl brings it all back like nothing else.  Haruo is at the center of everything of course, and he’s a character of tremendous depth and subtlety (as I think you’re starting to see).  This is a major theme of the series and I don’t want to undercut its impact by talking about it too much now, but the way the world views Haruo and how he views himself is incredibly important.  The desire to be an individual in a society that prioritizes conformity is no small struggle, and it’s a big part of this story.

I would love to get into all the reasons why Haruo is a great protagonist but again, most of that is probably best left to play out over time.  What’s already been spelled out is how passionate he is about his, well, passions – as witness his indignation over Hidaka mistaking his PC Engine GT for a Gameboy (a serious insult if ever one was uttered).  He’s playing it while he’s supposed to be writing an apology letter for hanging out in arcades (there’s a special level of Hell for school snitches, I think).  Japan’s obsession with arcades – both pro- and anti- – is a bit mystifying to me, if I’m honest.  If a junior high kid wants to spend some pocket money at a game center, why the hell should the school care?  Social engineering is not one of my favorite elements of Japanese child-rearing, if I’m honest.

Ah, Hidaka – how the plot thickens with your entry.  Full name: Hidaka Koharu (Hirose Yuuki, not an actress I know well but so far quite good in this pivotal role), daughter of a liquor store owner who’s just installed three game cabinets in front of his shop.  Smart, responsible, not too social, on the quiet side but a veritable chatterbox compared to Oono.  The third point of this triangle – and yes, it is a triangle, there’s no point in denying that.  There’s some reflexive distrust of triangles in anime, I know, but I encourage the viewer to have faith with this one.  If the right characters make up the vertices, a triangle is a shape of tremendous mystical narrative power…

Hidaka is so very different from Oono, but I love that about them.  I love the soft moments with her, such as when she corrects Haruo’s observation about Zangief “doing leg kicks with middle-aged men” (it’s actually the Cossack dance with Mikhail Gorbachev).  I love how she scolds Haruo – not for being a gamer, but for being too willing (he refers to himself as an “eyesore”) to accept the scorn the normies of the world (of which she’s one, at least nominally) heap on him for it.  Hidaka is a girl who glides through life without getting too passionate about much of anything – Haruo is a boy who’s singularly passionate about what he loves, to the exclusion of everything else.  How could she not be fascinated by him, at least a little?

The love for games is not the big draw for me in Hi Score Girl – as I noted earlier, I was never a big-time gamer myself.  Yet, paradoxically, I find Haruo’s pure love for gaming no less engaging because of that.  And I appreciate the degree to which this series communicates the charms of these things, why Haruo loves them.  I like the fact that the devs on both sides of the world clearly had a sense of humor (even if gamer boys like Haruo didn’t always get the jokes).  The “Genpai Touma Den” gag is a perfect example – it’s two puns rolled into one, and only Hidaka gets the RL one while only Haruo gets the gamer otaku one.

I think the moment when Haruo watches Hidaka’s dad install the “Super Street Fighter II” game board may be the funniest moment of the season so far, but Hi Score Girl is full of such moments – and of equally brilliant ones that are a lot more serious.  It’s a strange series that doesn’t really conform with any genre norms, and that no doubt limits its potential for commercial success even in manga form.  But if what you want is a emotional realism, heartfelt nostalgia and compelling characters, HSG is a gold mine.  It’s never gotten the breaks it deserves (even if it had, I don’t think it would be a mega-hit) but I’m grateful to have an anime at last.