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I spoiler-free don't recommend watching Girls Band Cry (GBC), for two main reasons:

1. It's the kind of story you'll either hate (because of the 3D-CGI animation or how unreasonably unsufferable the MC is or any misc. reason) or you'll fall for the experience right away and become addicted. If you'd hate it, why watch it? If you become addicted, you'll waste your life by re-re-watching it and searching for or creating fanart and buying merch - in stark contrast to what the series' theme song says!

2., Girls Band Cry is like the cursed apple tree standing in the middle of the Garden of Eden. Eat ... from it, says the snake and your eyes will open, suddenly seeing the whole television anime industry is naked... 99% of seasonal produce are always poorly drawn partial animation at a mere 7-13 fps and giving "hand-made 2D" look a bad name. For bonus, there are uninspired and uninteresting plotlines and pro seiyuu who cater to assumed "high-pitched loli maid" expectations of the otaku, rather than expressing anything meaningful.

GBC entered such a market, shining with 30fps of often motion-captured but always expressive and continously fluid 3D-CGI animation. (Nota bene: as much as possible within sub-Hollywood budget allocated to a freely broadcast original TV show lacking LN / manga source support.) Yet script-writing and episode directing are stellar for both comedy and drama, music hits are memorable, non-music hits also... Main characters have personality, strong presence and very real emotion, even though the show uses no seiyuu, per se. All five members of Togenashi Togeari are voiced by teenage rock musician girls, whom Studio Toei and Universal Japan label recruited to form a real-life band and gave them a crash course in voice acting for anime - based on the reasoning talented musicians have good ears so they'll quickly get the hang of it. The producer was right: Nina's and Momoka's VAs are super talented, even star-crossed and Subaru sounds refreshingly realistic, they are easily par for their beautiful visuals. You've found your angels, even if they are fallen ones with just cardboard wings...

After you've witnessed all those miracles, you get expelled from Paradise: post-GBC the japanese animation industry still continues to roll out the same garbage as before, this past summer, this autumn, coming winter season. With your newly opened eyes it becomes gruelling labour to watch the poorly drawn partial animation, the mockery of hand-made 2D style and digest the soulless and all-around juvenile and/or cynical plotlines, while listening to seiyuu who try to sound like chipmunks. You may even give up on anime or at least be unable to (re)watch anything you haven't seen and accepted pre-GBC!

Is it worth discarding your whole anime baggage for the sake of a singular show projected from Paradise? It's not a trivial decision, but a surprisingly large number of japanese otaku voted YES enthusiastically (and many foreign fans as well, even though GBC wasn't legally available for them until August and not conveniently available until Nov 2024. Fansubs ranged from evil-memed MTL to highly controversial regarding a crucial scene). More than half a year later GBC disc sales are still crazy high and TogeToge live shows are 25x overbooked. Even the famous BanGDream / MyGO franchise went to GBC for a collab, which helped them through difficulties of delayed game development. Maybe, maybe the industry will see the light and begin to change - but in the meanwhile you'd lose 3 to 5 years of anime enjoyment. Decide for yourself whether it's worth it!?

[Note: Some spoilers ahead.]
"Tsuki Guile Kirei / As The Melee So Beautiful" is a rather accurate description for "High Score Girl" (HGS) anime. For a young teen romance it has parallels with 2017's celebrated "Tsuki ga Kirei / As The Moon So Beautiful" series. Meanwhile the story never loses focus of its video arcades theme, the main characters play person-vs-person fighting games obsessively. Haruo, the boy MC even receives occasional guidance from his entrant of choice, the famed american Street Fighter warrior Guile-san.

The rudeness of neon blood on screen could form unsettling contrast with a rivalry which turns into affection, but the director manages to ... balance visuals with the story. I think the anime surpasses its manga origins in success of execution and general opinion holds HGS on TV is best described as "charming". The simplistic, low framerate,cheap CGI animations blends tolerably with gaming footage copied verbatim from actual vintage CAPCOM titles. Characters are drawn in caricature-like "nendoroid" style but still easy to emphasize with - after all, we are in the post-Yapari Park era and poor animation is OK if the studio has a compelling story and the heart to tell it.

On to characters: Haruo Yaguchi a.k.a. "Forcible Fingers" is a single-minded action games otaku who has suprising facets of personality: he cares about those in his neigbourhood or at school and appears to grow at a suprising pace as the series progresses, eventually taking up work before school hours. Him being the focus of two cute girls' affection isn't unexpected: the carefree and jolly lifestyle he leads early on must be enviable to the cram-school oppressed young ladies.

Although there are two ladies for our guy, HGS is not a harem, already the OP makes it clear who wins in the end. The clever and beautiful heiress Oono Akira hails from an elite family and has adopted voluntary muteness in the face of excessive strictness shown by her private tutor. She sneaks out to play fighting games at video arcade and has achieved unparalleled success, like 100+ consecutive wins, able to capitalize on her piano-trained manual skills and martial arts induced tactical prowess.

Haruo initially defeats her but only through the use of obscure and unethical / unfair movement combinations. Oono expreses her excitment over a true rival through physical violence and a gaming pals' bond quickly forms between them, aided by Haruo's tolerance for injury and his ability to decipher the girl's emotional faces. On the other hand, there is a limit to how interesting and mysterious the completely mute princess Akira can be, so the manga author relies on time-skips to keep the story flowing. Yet it is done in an unobstrusive manner and allows for some great dramatic scenarios.

Unusually, the main couple avoids the theme of love and by the end of the anime (first season) they seem to have progressed from pals straight to virtually waifu / husbando status. Thus a third character enters to form a triangle: Hidaka is a diligent and calm schoolgirl who secretly finds her life boring. She quickly falls for Haruo in Oono's absence and takes up gaming to approach him. Hidaka quickly finds out Haruo is playing games ever more just to be able to keep up with Oono as she returns one day from the USA but she refuses to give up on hopeless love.

The re-union of Oono and Haruo doesn't go smoothly and Hidaka reacts by doubling her gaming efforts, eventually curb-stomping the depressed boy who has abandoned PvP arcades for fighting console CPUs alone at home. The shock of such humiliation by a rookie motivates Haruo to re-learn the path of the arcade warrior, in time to become helpful in a big crisis for Akira. Hidaka sees firm proof that she became the third wheel but still refuses to give up and proposes a daring love gambit.

That's where the HGS series has ended as of now, but 3 OVAs are already scheduled for March 2019 (ooh the long wait...) The franchise may even earn a second cour of 12 eps and further OVAs, based on already strong Blu-Ray sales in the japanese market. All in all, the outcome of HGS's TV adaptation is great gratification for those who have followed the manga and witnessed its protracted copyright clash with a certain game industry brand. The franchise was in grave danger but come out victoriously!

The anime isn't without faults, but one has abandon pure enjoyment to notice them. OP sounds a bit weird and has apparently been composed with the grand sponsor's screen chime as the main theme... ED is childishly cute, but its references to fringe theories are jarring: what does NASA's conspiracy have to do with Lennon's killing? Animation sometimes feels like a Powerpoint slide struggling on a Celeron netbook. The MCs "delinquency" or lack thereof may seem shallow from a US point of view, they are not true "rebels without a cause" but that's probably the most creators could show to socially strict japanese audiences.

Some side characters should also have received more or more evenly distributed screen time, I mean HGS has the best mom and best bro ever! The mid-episode ad breaks for modern games are nerve-wacking and best skipped. Certain gamer otaku gags / visual clues occur in the series but quite hard to note and decipher, yet fansubbers did a great job of referencing them. (Incidentally, the series isn't available overseas in a business-like manner until end of 2018. One has to turn left at the Indian to find it now...)

Can one watch HSG as a non-gamer? Certainly! I'm no gamer, only played prboom / doom for a few weeks over a decade ago. Never been to arcades, thus unaffected by nostalgia and solely recognized the in-game character of Guile from some movie poster. Yet the anime's story is compelling enough to suck in the viewer, the ladies are cuter than anything "moe / tsundere" trends have ever produced and gaming is even better integrated into the story than with Wotakoi, up to par with MMO Junkie.

I even dare to say HGS is 2018's Kemono Friends: a miracle borne from peas thrown to creators instead of a production budget, subbed on a tablet by some anon sitting on a bench at Comiket. Embarrassing comments are prohibited though, so I finish this review here!

My review of True Tears isn't free of SPOILERS, but I try to take a novel point of view in this controversial visual game based anime. I see it as a percursor of almost one decade for 2017 spring's celebrated Tsuki ga Kirei series (a.k.a. As the Moon so Beautiful). I won't say TgK is an adaptation, but the creators obviously took a hard look at True Tears and borrowed what's good from the story:

- The male protagonist is a literary author in both series

- The MC's love interest is a sports girl in both cases

- Both male MCs frequent a folk dance circle and ... participate in the historic festival, where the love triangles culminate

- Girl MCs re-locating serve as the event which catalyzes the relationship

- The female love rival has a major role in eventually cementing the MC couple together in both series

- Both series have unqualified happy end, sort of, which is rare in Japan, due to different culture

- There don't appear to be truly vile characters in either series. Some have undignified motifs, but they are victims of circumstances, rather than consciously ulterior.

- Girl MCs have a kind of butthurt attitude, which may lessen viewer sympathy for them

On the other hand:

- The MC male friend is well rounded-off within the True Tears storyline, an aspect lacking in TgK or only found in it's after-ED comic sketch scenes. Regrettably the sidekick's role is a bit painful in TT, due to:

- True Tears having an unnecessary all-girls-on-MC harem aspect, a leftover from the visual game storyline. This theme is only prominent during 2-3 episodes about halfway into the anime series, but luckily gets discarded by the end and never wades into NSFW territory.

- True Tears has a spiritual depth missing fom TgK, which may or may not leave a hiatus in viewers, depending on personal opinion. Miss Chicken has a mystic air around her, which partly masks the fact she's way too young to be part of any love triangle.

All in all, just because Leonardo, Michelangelo and Bach crated nigh unsurpassable masterpieces, doesn't mean museums discard the vast body of work left by their lesser precursors. Their creations still hang in galleries and visitors observe them on their own merit as well as poining out what kind of inspiration they provided to those giants of art. Giants are tall since they stand on the shoulder of men and dwarves and all deserve praise. Thus, I think True Tears is worth watching in it own right as well as a reminiscent if you have seen TgK.

All reviewers here, including those with a positive, neutral or negative opinion, have a common weakness: they are not japanese. You see, the Up From Poppy Hill movie is special as it exclusively targeted japanese audiences with the main theme of nostalgia and cannot be really understood or properly interpreted from an american or euro-centric point of view.

In this sense, Poppy Hill is much like Pom Poko: they are so far removed from gaijin (foreigner) experience that it is hard to grasp what they should be about and exporting or licensing them may even be seen as a mistake. Other Ghibli movies are set in ... fantasy lands or in a romanticized historic setting, thus almost equally approachable for domestic japanese and foreign audiences.

Poppy Hill is slow-paced exactly because it wants to convey nostalgia towards the pre-1964, slower paced and allegedy more wholesome Japan, as opposed to hyper-ness of the "economic marvel" era of 1970-80's or the depressing and increasingly decadent "lost decades" since 1990.

Note how several wide agle scenes glorify soot-spewing factory chimneys or smog rolling over the harbour or the endless stream of rickety moto-rickshaws and mini cars negotiating unpaved roads. All those things however, only mean something to (older) japanese people themselves and those foreigners who have long followed proceedings in the island nation.

Anyhow, the movie itself isn't flawless, even if we only consider its culture-neutral elements. The bespectacled student council president is easily 10x as cool a guy as the protagonist and quickly grabbing the younger sister, they easily steal the show from the main couple. The ship captain's participation in Korean War isn't really explained, may be even perceived as contradictionary, considering Japan's well known, post-1947 strict "peace constitution". The role or significance of Umi's apparently extra wealthy grandma remains unexplored.

On the other hand, Goro Miyazaki seems to have greatly improved as a director beyond the Earthsea shipwreck. He definitely has an eye for comedy, those slap-sticky school club scenes work for all audiences of Poppy Hill. Maybe he should focus on Porco Rosso-like projects, stories that don't try to take themselves too seriously? I feel Poppy Hill somehow owes to Porco Rosso, more or less the student posse are the former air pirates? Yet, the more desperate parts of Poppy Hill sometimes feel forced, as if drama wasn't Goro's strong point.

This series shouldn't work because it's stupid inside and outside, a heir apparent to the abysmal Slow Start from last season. Yet, it does work somehow. There were 3 stellar episodes, 2-3 idiotic ones and 3-4 passables, not a bad ratio considering the sorry state of contemporary anime. Pinkhead protagonist is extremely annoying but the character interactions are interesting and often funny and occasionally scary, despite the overuse of stereotypes. We just look forward to new episodes of Comic Girls every week and can't explain why, the Jappari Park of 2018?

With a bit more thought given to the script, though that's a contradiction for this ... kind of near-zero IQ series, C.G. could have become a truly memorable franchise, especially if the animation budget also got a boost so as not to use blurred photos here and there. Anyhow, C. G., supported by good OP and ED, is still worthy of an "idle-minded" colourful and loud marathon watch for the summer.