LogFAQs > #969599757

15. Gamers!
https://myanimelist.net/anime/34280/Gamers
Summer 2017 (12 episodes)
My Score: 9/10, MAL Score: 6.78/10
Best Character: Aguri

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2ncZsxz50

Premise: Amano Keita, a normal gamer guy, is approached one day by Tendou Karen, the cutest girl in school. She wants him to join the new video game club, but he surprises everyone by turning her down.

The Good: Gamers is a comedy that uses the framework of an awkward romantic comedy to tell jokes. Fair warning, I had a lot of trouble explaining why I love this anime in this write-up. When I describe the plot in a second, it's going to sound like a standard romantic comedy. It isn't, though. I didn't really like this when I first watched it years ago. It was originally in the 4/10s, and I only rewatched it because I didn't remember it very well. I'm not sure what my past self was thinking, because Gamers is amazing. My best guess is that I kept waiting for it to turn into a normal romantic comedy, and that I got frustrated when it didn't go that way. When I rewatched it knowing the kind of show it was, I finally noticed the brilliance.

The plot is essentially that there are two guys and three girls and they all get caught up in a complex web of crushes, misunderstandings, and awkwardness. Lots of romantic comedies have those things, but usually they're played for drama or are focused on building towards relationships. Gamers, by comparison, wallows in the confusion and uses it for hilarious jokes. It isn't about the characters getting together or drama or anything like that. It's about using romantic comedy plot beats for jokes, and it's amazing just how tangled everything becomes.

Each character believes different things about the relationships between every other character. Almost all of it is misunderstandings, but you can always see why they think that because they misheard a conversation or made the wrong assumption. This kind of stuff always infuriated me in actual romantic comedies. I'm the type who wants the characters to get past the drama and get together. I hate misunderstandings that could be solved by a simple conversation. In Gamers, the confusion is so wonderfully woven together that, even when they do finally sit down to talk and resolve a misunderstanding, they also step on a landmine and two completely different misunderstandings take its place. It was beautifully written and always funny.

The Bad: The final episode isn't great. It's basically one long joke about how DLC in gaming sucks. The episode itself is essentially crappy DLC. I mean, I get it, but its still meh. I was here for the awkward relationship jokes, not the gaming discussions. The first eleven episodes were still magical, at least.

Overall: I don't think I did a good job explaining why I love Gamers. Romantic comedies always have that thing where a character walks in at exactly the wrong moment and hears something out of context and it creates a huge misunderstanding. In those shows, it's played for drama, and the point is about seeing the characters overcome it and grow closer. In Gamers, the focus is on chaining those misunderstandings together into a beautifully convoluted web of awkwardness. The humor comes from seeing just how deep the confusion can get. I had a lot of fun keeping track of what each of five characters thought about everyone else at any given time, and the jokes always made me laugh.

COMING UP TOMORROW:
14: This anime tried to climb higher in the ranking, but then it began bleeding from every orifice.
C35: This character wants to find their mother.
13: This anime is being sent back in time.
C18: This character sees everything in black and white.