Shoujo-tachi wa Kouya wo Mezasu Episode 12: Girls Beyond the Wasteland (Final Impression)

“Only the ones with passion burning in their hearts can grasp their dreams in this cruel wasteland!”

I don’t know why I had such a want to watch this, but I did. And I watched it all, and here we are at the end of this show. And the day of the first day of sales has arrived, and what will happen with Team Rokuhara? Well let me be honest and say that I didn’t even know how to start this review because in less than 10 minutes into the episode without any build up or tension, we learned that Rokuhara did indeed beat Typhoon in their little contest. And getting the news so suddenly, I didn’t even know how to react. Literally it’s just the team walking to the club room, Kuroda on the phone and then giggling to herself, and she says they won. That’s it. And I thought something would go wrong in the next couple minutes because I swear, I was less than 10 minutes in, we got the important news already. But no they really did win, and I just sat there…blankly, for the rest of the episode.

And then the rest of the episode, they go out to eat at a restaurant and celebrate their victory. Ahh…fine. It turned out in the end, Asamori-san completely sold out immediately and ZEGA (which totally isn’t Sega) called Kuroda to make plans to make twice as much as the 3,000 units they sold. As for the Taiga game, they also sold out, but they were only asked to make 2,000 more, so Rokuhara ended up winning. And the thing is, Asamori-san is a low price game so it’s easier to buy it than Taiga, which is a full price game. Also, Asamori-san is a casual simple game that panders to the otaku audience (yuck), while Taiga is more deep and mature. So Asamori-san selling more wasn’t too big a deal. I guess? So yeah, they won.

And so after that they all celebrate, help Kuroda’s brother with his debt as well. Kuroda confronts everyone and asks them if they want to make another game with her, but a game where they have a more flexible schedule and can make a game where they don’t have to worry if it’ll sell or not, just any type of game they want. But everyone’s like No way, Kuroda, that attitude won’t work in the wasteland or some other crap I didn’t care about. And then in the very end, there was some stuff with Hosokawa that didn’t matter at all, and the show ended with the team hanging out on the roof, the girls painting the stuff that you see in the ending credits.

Final Impressions

I did not like the ending. At all. They didn’t make the build up to the day of the sales exciting or anything, and I felt that just in a matter of seconds we learned they won and that’s it. And then afterwards it was so happy and chill that I thought something was going to happen to change things, but nope. We were just given the news, and we were supposed to be happy for the team. But I wasn’t. I was blank, because I didn’t feel anything.

I thought that with this show, we would learn more about how to make a game. And even though  the anime was supposed to be about making a game, this anime didn’t teach us anything or show us anything. We had the writing, but we never got to see what the plot was or events that happened. We had the programmer, but we didn’t see how the game was put together. We had the artist, and we did see some of the art, but not most of it. And the voice acting episode was boring. Also, Kuroda did a lot of work in the background and I wish we could have seen that more. I don’t like comparing, but with Shirobako I felt that I was part of the studio making the anime. With Sore ga Seiyuu, I felt I was there with the girls with their voice acting. But here, I didn’t feel that because we never got an in depth look at things. The plot of this was making a game, and that’s certainly what they did, but there were other things that got in the way that now that the anime ended, it was completely unnecessary.

So Yuuka had this crush on Bunta, which we saw because she got angry at Bunta while also being jealous. The show looked like it wanted to bring in some romance, maybe a love triangle. It did stuff, like give us drama regarding that issue, and gave us an entire episode with Yuuka and Bunta. Kuroda at one point did show a little interest in Bunta, but nothing ever happened. They were really pushing the romance but did nothing with it, and I should feel glad but I’m not because what is the point of bringing in potential romance when you’re not even going to do anything with it? Why bring up the boring and dumb drama when no one is going to end up with each other? It just means that the time related to the romance stuff could have been used for other things.

I wasn’t a fan of the other pieces of conflict they tried to do. The story was a huge problem, but characters were as well. I did not feel attached to any of them, and when I actually had grown fond of Andou, she did things that were way out of line and didn’t get any kind of punishment, and so I ended up not liking her anymore. And with the other characters being bland, and Kuroda annoying me at times too, I just didn’t care about any of them, or their problems, or with the outcome of their game. Bunta was the main male, but he was just so plain and he was too wishy washy. Kuroda was the main female, and sometimes I found her irritating by not taking into consideration the workload for the team, but it all didn’t make sense until we learned she was making the game to pay her brother’s debts. But still, even though it did make me interested for a while, the matter was handled quickly. Atomu was plain and forgettable, Andou betrayed me, Yuuki is also forgettable but it’s still funny that a small shy girl like her loves drawing porn, and poor Yuuka was useless for a long time. Also, tt was funny how in their celebratory dinner they talked about how nice it was that they could be honest with each other, but I felt that sometimes they weren’t.

Animation? Mediocre. Quality was just not good. Taking one good look at it and you feel surprised that this was produced in 2015/2016. Sound is another thing that I didn’t care for. I don’t remember the OST. The opening song was okay and I liked the singer’s vocals, but I ended up skipping the opening after a few episodes. The ending theme as well.

The show started off good, and I will admit that I had some good laughs such as when Kuroda tried acting out tropes in real life and them going wrong. It’s just that this was not a strong show. After a couple episodes it started to decline on me. The characters did not develop, except for maybe Kuroda. She was a girl who was always alone but she opened up herself more and likes being in a team, but she is still a boring character along with everyone else. They have no substance. We didn’t learn anything about making games, and even though we watched them make a game we didn’t really know what their game was about. We didn’t go into depth about it, which was disappointing. All in all, I have to be honest and say that this show really wasn’t so good. Though I’m not particularly mad about it, maybe because I used up all my anger and frustrations on Prince of Stride. Though this show wasn’t as bad as Prince of Stride, it hardly did any better. Which is sad, because this show also started out promising but it let me down as well.

5/10