At last! I found a Winter 2015 anime that I actually plan to pick up when it’s complete. I tried to avoid reading up on Saekano beyond what the title said (Saekano = short for ‘Saenai Kanojo/Heroine no Sodatekata’ = ‘How to turn a boring girl into a heroine’), so I almost quit when I accidentally started watching Episode 00 and it opened up with naked girls at an onsen. So not my kind of show at all. But the title intrigued me so I closed that episode and tried episode 01 instead.
A game-loving boy whose name I can’t remember picks up a girl’s hat and is struck by how magical the moment is (uh… he’s a teenager, I guess). He decides to make a romantic visual novel based on that moment and tries to recruit his generic tsundere childhood friend and his generic tall and snarky beauty friend to help him, but they turn him down. Then it turns out his dream girl with the beret is actually his dull unremarkable classmate whose name I also can’t remember, but I really like her. His goal now is to turn her into a heroine that will move hearts, or something bizarre like that.
All I need to motivate me to follow a show is to find one character I like and can latch on to, and that has come in the form of Heroine X (really can’t remember her name, can’t be bothered to look it up… Megumi?). She may seem boring at first, as per the title, but that’s because she’s the only normal person in a cast full of anime otaku/otaku stereotypes. The other girls’ personalities have been seen a thousand times before, same with main guy, so it’s interesting to throw a relatively normal person into the mix and see what happens.
Come to think of it, this series reminds me a lot of Bokutachi wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, especially the sniping and bickering dynamic between the two lead girls. They even look similar, and the black-haired one keeps getting the better of the blonde one, who has a secret passion for pornographic material, and so on and so forth. I wouldn’t be surprised if Saekano started out as a “What if” scenario for that kind of series and took off from there. Let’s hope this doesn’t degenerate into a harem show and that it actually ends well.
It helps that I like video games and dating sims like Tokimeki Memorial so I don’t mind seeing the effort that goes into creating one of them. I enjoy video game parody anime too. If they could wrap this up in 12 episodes, maximum 24, that would be great. When the series ends I’ll watch episode 3 and 4 and marathon the rest if I still think it’s good at the point.
