She’s immediately smitten with Keita’s pure and all-encompassing love for games: the first time they talk, he goes off on his fascination with the back covers of videogame boxes. The joy Karen takes in games is from working hard and achieving, and from having like-minded people like her game club to do that with. She can’t do so much as go for a swim without establishing rules and making a contest out of it. That innate competitive drive extends to her taste in the games she secretly plays: we see her diligently practicing her Puyo Puyo (don’t you look down on it they play it at Evo) and marathon speed-running Mario games until she starts to hallucinate. Karen is a type-A personality whose “perfection” in the eyes of the world at large is an act that she aggressively pursues and hones. Gamers! loves disasters, and it invites you to watch, rubbing its hands together and cackling. The rom-com farce that ensues after Keita turns down Karen’s invitation argues in part that slamming people together solely on the basis of a single shared interest is a recipe for disaster. Gamers! is not interested in the power of a common interest, games, to unite its cast of neurotic kids. He befriends other game-lovers, and their prickly personalities lead them into a love pentagon defined by misunderstandings, second-guessing, jealousy and well-intentioned plotting. We hardly see any of these people again, aside from Karen. Instead, Keita says no to the games club. He’ll butt some heads, right? But ultimately gamer camaraderie is going to win the day and his life will be deeply enriched by these like-minded misfits. Surely our hero will get to know these people. A dead-eyed girl is zoning out as she grinds out Elphelt combos in Guilty Gear. A stoic guy in HyperX headphones is racking up kills in that popular US import, Call of Duty. One such stage is that game club, a remote office in the back of the school campus where things are comfortably familiar. Games are no cure, just one of the stages upon which their insecurities play out. However, specifically because these characters love games so much, they bond for a moment and then immediately start to judge and turn on each other over the particulars. Games do bring people together in Gamers!, just as the show leads with broad parodies and specific references to ensnare viewers. Our hero Keita is quiet and socially avoidant and games are the only joy in his life, until Karen, the most popular girl in school, appears out of nowhere and tries to recruit him into her secret video game club. Gamers! spends its first episode lulling audiences into thinking they’re going to get exactly what they expect from an anime called Gamers!.
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