LogFAQs > #923795144

Double overdue AFK recap!

D-Frag Vol. 1
Whose fault: Tombolo
This is a particularly silly moe comedy where a wannabe delinquent gets mixed up with a "game developing club" consisting of four particularly weird cute girls. Ya got the cute/dark loli, the sadist (complete with M guy), and two others that....didn't stand out as much. They all have an elemental type, which is a kinda fun idea for chuunibyou gags if you haven't gotten enough of those already. There's also a rival club that, like, actually develops games once in a while, but is still just the comic relief rival team in a comedy manga. Shenanigans ensue! They ensue so much.

My rating: 6/10
A little strange but otherwise pretty forgettable. I've already forgotten whatever amount of plot there was! There was a competition and we find out that we stole the loli from the "real" gamedev club for...whatever our reasons were IDK. None of the girls hit my strike zone either (unless you maybe count the crossdressing boy?), which is an accomplishment unto itself for a moe comedy. Didn't really have anything to do with video games either.

Di Gi Charat, Vol. 1 (of 2+)
Whose fault: Tombolo
Doing outlandish moe comedy before it was cool! Perhaps it's because it had a decade plus of head start for me, but I feel like this is just generally better executed and more memorable than D-Frag. I'm a bit confused on the canon- I've gone through at least part of like four different iterations of this IP (you've got another one on deck), the tone varies quite a bit, and I have no idea how the timeline fits together or if that's even really a thing we care about. Enhancing that confusion, this is one of those compilation books where a bunch of different manga-ka get together and write a couple episodic short stories each.

Basically you've got three girls working at Gamers, an otaku store in Japan. (it's a real thing that I actually managed to find and blow money on when I went! :D) So I think this nonsense originated as just a set of mascot characters for the store and then blew up. One of 'em even shows up in Neptunia! ...Sorta! Anyway you've got the titular Digiko (or Dejiko, depending on who's on localization duty) who is a derpy space princess, her withdrawn but snarky loli sidekick Puchiko (who as far as I can tell is the fandom's favorite by a wide margin), and Rabi en Rose, a tsundere straight man who somehow manages to always come out on the losing end of her rivalry with Digiko. Shenanigans ensue, frequently resulting in blowing up the store or other wide-scale chaos.

My rating: 7/10
...It wasn't AS great as I remember it, to be honest, although maybe that's a byproduct of the wide variety of tones and art styles and stories inherent in this format. Puchiko still the best but I have a lot more appreciation for Rabi than I used to. She's just a normal girl trying to get by, man. Anyway it was mostly a good time and I can actually name some of the characters if pressed. Kinda tough luck for D-Frag getting lumped into the same writeup, lol. Still, I'll be curious how well further entries have aged with me. I expected this to be more of an 8 or even 9.

Discussion question: What's something that you didn't hate, but just kinda got rendered obsolete by something in the same genre?
---

https://imgtc.com/i/uWMMlnN.png
Tone yo' flab