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I love college anime. It's such a surprisingly small niche, especially when you exclude sports anime. Among it are fantastic shows like Genshiken, Tatami Galaxy, Nodame Cantabile, as well as solid ones like Golden Time and HenSemi. So how does Uzaki-chan fit in among this crowd of classics? It doesn't. In fact Uzaki-chan is the anime equivalent of the annoying freshman who doesn't realize he's not in high school anymore. The main difference between a high school and university setting is the amount of maturity and depth that you can tap into, beyond the limits of high school. Uzaki-chan lacks any of this. There is ... absolutely nothing about Uzaki-chan that differentiates it from a high school anime besides the one episode with alcohol (which arguably is usually covered in high school anime anyways with the cliche "drunk off sweet sake" bit). So I'm going to try and cut Uzaki-chan some slack and compare it against generic high school SoL shows. When judged by these standards, do it fare any better?

No.

Uzaki-chan is the epitome of a flavor/meme of the month show, the likes of Umaru and the Hestia boob ribbon. Replace Uzaki with a more generic design and I guarantee nobody would have even heard of this show or known it was airing. She is the "teasing kouhai" trope (executed poorly) this time with BIG BADONKERS. She has no depth beyond that. Sakurai is epitome of the boring, "I just want to enjoy my peaceful life" protagonist. Ami and Itsuhiko play the token 3rd wheel dedicated to advancing the romantic plot (or what little exists of it). You could maybe, MAYBE still make a decent show with this cast if you played it up as a parody of hypergeneric romcom SoLs or something. But Uzaki-chan isn't a parody, it's literally just that. Hell, when Itsuhiko comes in and expresses an interest in speeding up the romantic progression from a snail's pace to something more reasonable, Ami literally channels the writer and tells him that would ruin in. They don't even try to hide it.

Well maybe the humor is at least somewhat well-executed? If only we could be so fortunate. Uzaki-chan as a show expects its viewers to be retarded. In fact it basically calls you an idiot. Explaining the joke is bad, laugh tracks are lazy. That stupid shocked cat and Ami's "eating" hand motions are the visual equivalent of a laugh track. "Haha that thing that just happened was supposed to be cute and/or a joke. Did you get it? Haha make sure to laugh cause that was a joke and I will not allow you to miss it." It's obnoxious.

The soundtrack is nothing special. The animation and art are either par for the course or lazy. There's a particular episode (which was likely sponsored by the Tottori Prefecture Tourism Board) in which at least half of the backgrounds are literally just IRL pictures from Tottori with a filter over them. The entire episode is basically just a tourism ad, it's truly bizarre.

Is Uzaki-chan worth watching? If you're starved for a terrible, turn-your-brain-off-and-waste-a-few-hours show, then maybe. There are still much better options out there, even when we exclude actual good shows. Otherwise no, you ought to skip this one. As long as you've seen a handful of fanart pics of Uzaki, you've already got the gist of the meme and the entire show.

[Spoilers Ahead]

I'd like to say that this movie left me at a loss for words, but frankly it was the complete opposite. Absolute garbage that crossed the border into absurdity. "Plot holes" don't even cover it. There were legitimately more holes than movie. Why do players physically recoil when tanking hits from virtual bosses? How can the blades of their swords interact with each other when they're not actual physical objects? They're just little handles for Christ's sake. WHY THE HELL WASN'T EIJI ARRESTED AT ANY POINT FOR MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS OF AGGRAVATED ASSAULT? How is Eiji able to bounce off walls like a bouncy ball ... to the point where he's basically teleporting? Don't give me that HURR DURR BUT MUH NECK ENHANCEMENT DONGLE nonsense. They literally stressed """realistic physics""" as the backdrop for the action in this movie. What was with the absolute lack of normal scrutiny and coverage that would have exposed the plan of Generic Evil Villan #3 in a matter of hours? How the hell does any of this make any economic sense? Seriously they pump in a degree of economic jargon without ever explaining how this service actually generates profit. There's no way this sort of system is economically feasible for anybody involved, be it the company that owns it or the companies that give massive discounts and free stuff to people for things that have nothing to do with drawing in customers to their stores to generate more revenue. What do the vending machine companies get from giving out free drinks? That's not going to incentivize people to buy more drinks than they already would from vending machines. And why oh why do they keep throwing the concept of code and hardware compatibility out the window to mish-mash data from separate, non-identical systems like SAO/ALO/GGO/OS?

These people praising this movie for its "high quality animation"? Braindead, every one of you. The 3DCG on plenty of the bosses was legitimately cringe-worthy for a normal tv show, let alone a high-budget movie. The fight with the 100th Floor Boss that apparently wow'd so many people? Half the time it was borderline incomprehensible. The transitions were jarring and often lacked proper flow. I thought I had accidentally hit 2x speed or something. When Asuna hopped in, I was legitimately so confused as to why Siluca was suddenly falling from like 100m up that I had to re-watch those few seconds half a dozen times. Everything else is either par-for-the-course or slightly above par for a high-budget anime movie released in 2017.

The soundtrack? Sure there were good parts. It featured kalafina so I'd be surprised if there weren't. But a bunch of it sounds like a straight up rip-off of Fate/Zero tracks (and after finding this I'm sure of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRCbJSpj9y8).

Everything else I can say has probably been said before. Kirito going from pathetic out-of-shape nerd to super saiyan athlete in a day or two, the ridiculous villain plan, the ability to read memories but not just make a simple copy of them, the complete lack of reasonable involvement from the authorities, the melodrama, the fact that nobody just takes off their Augma when they see people around them having seizures, etc.

I decided to finally watch this so I could start watching S3, but at this point I'm not even sure if I want to. I'm struggling to think of a single anime film that has irritated and insulted me this much. 2/10, saved only from a 1/10 because of the visuals and soundtrack. If the rating scale went to 0/10, I'd give it a 1 for sure.

[Minor spoilers]

There are some things in the world that man was not meant to understand. This nugget of wisdom is one I cherish, as it was bestowed upon/yelled at me by a homeless woman outside of my local subway station. It reminded me that there are lessons to be learned from the most unlikely of places. The same can be said of this show. The lesson here is that you can come up with the most painfully, soul-drainingly generic pile of isekai/vrmmo garbage and still have hordes of mouthbreathers climbing over each other to suckle from the tit of mediocrity that you have dangled in ... front of them.

I’ll start with the most controversial and brave observation I have: none of the characters are any good. Maple is, as her namesake would suggest, a sickeningly sweet pile of diabeetus and stunted mental development. She doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing, but manages to sweetly stumble into the position of one of DA BEST PLAYAS IN DUH GAEM. Because she literally put all her points into one stat and fell asleep at her keyboard. Now she’s functionally invincible. Her friend Sally is a blue 2fast4u 1337 G4M3R who put basically all her points into AGI and is functionally untouchable. There are like four other characters who I remember basically nothing about besides a Deus Ex Machina rubix cube and a katana. Finally, their newest braindead recruits, whose names I have forgotten despite them being introduced to me not 10 minutes ago, have maxed out STR and will undoubtedly end up almost as busted as our dynamic duo because the devs are morons.

This leads me to my second observation: the devs are morons. I’ve seen some very poorly designed anime RPGs that fall apart the moment you really think about them *cough* SAO *cough*, but this one takes the cake. It’s fine to not have a super fleshed-out setting for a VRMMO anime, nobody is expecting much anyways. But when your setting has more holes in it than a Dutch dam made of Swiss cheese, then it becomes a jarring distraction. BOFURI tries desperately to convince you that the same developers who can apparently pump out massive batches of content on a weekly basis are also incapable of the most rudimentary playtesting and game balance design. Then when a total noob breaks their game they just sit around in cyberspace dressed as stuffed dolls and remind us of how great Maple is. It’s like it was designed by somebody whose only knowledge of game design comes from speedreading poorly translated copies of SAO and other assorted anime MMOs.

And another thing about the setting: it’s not only horrendously uninspired, but also a blatant ripoff of a host of other properties. I nearly choked laughing when their totally-not-pokemon popped out with the exact same sound as an actual pokeball. There’s not a single skill in this show (besides maybe Hydra) that I haven’t seen before. From Isekai Slime’s Devour to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Naruto’s kage bunshin no jutsu. The devs/admins being depicted as mascot characters is basically the same as another VRMMO airing this season: Infinite Dendrogram.

The art is meh, nothing to write home about. The same can be said of the story so far. The humor is about as bland and formulaic as you would expect from this shriveled teat of a genre. In short, there is absolutely nothing redeeming about this show. If you want to turn off your brain and spend 20 minutes a week slumped in your chair watching generic anime girl #472050583 be dumbcute while drool drips out of the corner of your mouth as you slowly slip into the abyss, then go ahead. For everybody else, rub some braincells together and spend your time watching literally anything else.

I don't understand why a show this bad was not only greenlit, but actually aired. Maybe this too is something man was not meant to understand.