In a funny sort of way, I’m almost glad I’m not a serious ex-gamer where Hi Score Girl is concerned.  I mean, the nostalgia buzz I get from this show just from the character drama is so off the charts that if I was really tuned into the gamer side, I might have a coronary every week.  Even as the casual game duffer I am (and was), I still get a huge kick out of the way the old classics like Mortal Kombat come off here (that bit where Haruo and Hidaka try and figure out what the characters are saying is probably – along with last week’s game board install – the funniest moment of the anime season).  Not even being hard-core I still remember that special thrill when you popped a new game into the console and watched it load (slowly) for the first time, or when a particular favorite’s theme started to play.

The thing is, while Haruo’s love for games is the canvas Oshikiri-sensei paints on, it’s the broader feelings it invokes that are the art itself.  Hi Score Girl is about what it feels like to be a kid – first a 6th grader, then a middle schooler, eventually…  He captures the emotions of that time so expertly that it would be hard enough to believe his memory is that good, never mind the fact that his female characters seem (not that I could really know) to have a remarkable authenticity as well.

The thing about Oshikiri is that he delivers the whole package where adolescent nostalgia is concerned, including ripping your heart out and stomping on it.  Hidaka is a character who wasn’t even present for the first three episodes of the series, which ostensibly set up the whole story.  It would be tempting to make assumptions about her role in that story, and even more tempting to make observations about it that a manga reader really shouldn’t make.  But one doesn’t need to do that to realize that she’s a great character.  She’s inherently more relatable than Onoo in that she actually talks, but she’s incredibly expressive about her inner turmoil to boot.

The untenability of Hidaka’s position with Haruo is pretty obvious. He’s a 14 year-old boy for starters, and thus hardly a savant where girls’ feelings are concerned.  He’s obsessed with his life’s passion, games, and the part of him that isn’t is obsessed with the girl who made such an impact in her brief intervention in his life.  Hidaka doesn’t realize the extent of that last part, of course (it’s pretty heartbreaking when she misinterprets Haruo’s “I might have been subconsciously doing it because I wanted to show a certain person”), but as always in such situations, it’s harder to go toe-to-toe with a memory than an actual person.

Despite the best efforts of Haruo’s mom (with all due respect to Hidaka, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t care who it is as long as her son gets drawn into some normal adolescent entanglements), Haruo still doesn’t quite grasp what’a really happening here.  He doesn’t even notice the giri choco Hidaka’s brought him (home sick with a cold again) on Valentine’s Day.  The truth of the matter is, Haruo isn’t fully present with Hidaka – or at least, he’s not fully engaged with her.  A part of him is always somewhere else, though he certainly feels at ease in her presence.  After the home visit Hidaka realizes this, with a heavy heart.  But for better or worse, she still likes being with Haruo – whatever part of him is present when he’s with her, she likes it, and she likes how being with him makes her feel.

Now of course, Oono reshuffles the deck again (that’s her specialty, really) by arriving back on the scene just when Haruo and Hidaka are developing a real, if casual, relationship.  While a lot has happened for 5 episodes, the truth is that the anime really isn’t skipping anything – Oshikiri-sensei is just (like Mizukami Satoshi) really good at hyper-efficient storytelling.  Thus, without spoiling, you can infer that what we’ve seen so far is effectively setting up the bulk of the story, which is still to come.  How much of it we see in anime form is still a huge open question (the series is almost an ideal length for two cours, a potential disaster in one), but as I’ve noted more than once, with Hi Score Girl’s brutal history I’m just grateful for whatever I get.