New Game!
New Game! may appear to be just another run of the mill cutesy anime that stars an entirely girl and women cast, but the show is surprisingly both informative and emotional. The show is endearing, and features heavy yuri (young lesbian love) themes, but never in a way that detracts from the overall narrative.
The first season premiered last year, and introduced audiences to 18 year-old Aoba, a high school graduate who gets a job in the design department of her favorite video game development studio. Although mostly a setup for the much more dramatic second season, season one of New Game! does a decent job capturing what it’s like to start working for a small game developer. My first job after college was at Kabam, a mobile game studio in San Francisco, and most of the issues and problems that Aoba has to work through mirrored my own experiences. I never caught my boss staying at work late to parade in her underwear though.
New Game! truly comes into its own in its second season that aired this year. Noted as New Game!! (the show choosing to not go as New Game+ baffles me to this day), the second season spends its first few episodes reacquainting the audience with the dynamics of the varied cast. It’s not necessary to watch New Game! to understand New Game!!, although you’ll miss out on some of the better inside jokes if you do.
What I love about New Game!!, and what I think other gamers will latch onto, is how it acknowledges the skill gaps within the gaming industry. As more and more tools for creating video games becomes available, more and more gamers are trying their hand at making their own games. Even for those that aren’t, they look at video games more critically as they grow older, and do their best to understand how a developer might have come to design a certain character or implement a specific mechanic. But for gamers just starting out, whether it’s making a game or trying to analyze one, a sense of accomplishment is almost immediately associated with a sense of discouragement. Beginners can just never make something that rivals that of a pro.
Aoba’s struggle to draw as well as her supervisor, who she looks up to, always ends with her coming up short. Not in the “haha, let’s all have a laugh and try again later” way either. There are moments where Aoba genuinely seems to give in to the hopelessness of her situation, making even the most stone-hearted gamer tear up a little bit.
If New Game! is a love letter to developers who have already begun their journey into game design, then New Game!! is for the gamers who are wondering if they should even try. It speaks to all of us, telling us that this passion of ours can become a career if we want it to be. But we have to want it, and we have to know that, even if we try our whole lives, we may never reach the level of skill that we aspire to be. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though.
