Shogi. Shogi never changes.
When Will Ayumu Make His Move? (the title is curious) is, like last week’s lamentable offering, a show about Shogi, a storied chess-like game endemic to Japan, regarding which I will not retread my previous introduction. Specifically, it’s a show about fresh high-schooler and former Kendo club star Ayumu Tanaka joining the Shogi club. Why? Because he’s fallen head over heels for its president (and only other member), Urushi Yaotome. However, Ayumu is resolved to not confess his feelings until he can prove himself by beating her in a game of Shogi.
Sounds harmless enough! Let’s have at it!
Oddly enough, the show starts with this dynamic already established, rather than showing us how we got here. Not only that, Urushi can already pretty much guess what Ayumu’s motive for joining her club is, though his particular hang-up is a bit more mysterious. The jig would basically be up in scene one if not for the fact that Ayumu, while a shockingly candid and straightforward person (even when it comes to complimenting Urushi in ways that put the high-strung girl off balance), has a comically flat affect and the poker face to end all poker faces.
Now, this is a bit of an issue for the show on a constructive level. Sure, getting to the point where Ayumu is in the club couldn’t burn much time, but starting from there would allow a somewhat better sense of progression. When you think about it, you kind of know he’s probably never going to win a game – not in an early episode at least – and thus he’s not going to confess. The show would be over if that happened, after all. So putting us so emotionally close to the endgame (even if his Shogi skills need work), means there’s not a lot of wiggle room for developing these characters.
True, that needn’t be a hard-line stance. Kaguya-sama: Love is War also started with a premise about a delayed confession, and it ultimately got that over and done with well before the end of the story. But let’s be honest, Love is War is a shining and glorious exception to typical media rules about things like the divinity of Status Quo and not abandoning your premise. More often you get things like Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle where, after north of twenty volumes in the manga and many plots and subplots that keep things moving, Syalis is still held “hostage” (if in name only) in the Demon Castle and still does most of her mayhem in search of a good night’s sleep. If either of those things ceased to be elements, it wouldn’t be the same work.
While the show does put itself on thin ice, it at least sets up something of an arc it can putter around with in short order: Urushi wants to get up to four members so the Shogi club can be official, and while Ayumu is initially unimpressed by the idea (since it would cut down on his alone time) he’s convinced to put his all into making it happen for her sake.
After spending most of an episode deciding this in the midst of the sports festival (an event that the unathletic Urushi is less than thrilled about), we do get one member recruited – Ayumu’s old friend and kendo rival, Takeru Kakuryuu, who will be otherwise known as Sir Not Appearing at Club Activities since he has his own romantic bother to walk home with. One best case scenario for Ayumu established, the hunt is on for member #4.
Along the way, we mostly get a series of vignettes as the show moves through all the required beats of school life. Culture festival, Christmas, New Years, Valentines, Finals, and White Day all come and go. For Christmas, Ayumu even wins a handicap game, but he loses his nerve after a couple interruptions to the mood, and he’d previously been fairly adamant that things had to be on an even keel.
We also get a number of lower-deck sequences for Takeru and his unspoken mutual crush, Sakurako. In essence, their interpersonal dynamic is a gender flip of the main couple, where he’s the high-strung and easily embarrassed one, and she’s the flat affect but potentially forward one. There’s also a running gag where she’s able to trivially hypnotize him with a coin on a string.
All in all, there’s actually fairly little Shogi in this anime about the Shogi club. But then I already sort of established that most games would be foregone conclusions until this thing is ready to wrap it up, so that’s probably okay.
With the new school year comes a new character: Ayumu and Takeru’s kendo kouhai and incoming first-year, Rin Kagawa. Rin initially tries to steal her senpais back for the Kendo club, but on losing a duel to Ayumu over that, joins Shogi instead, getting the Shogi club its requisite fourth member. And if you thought Ayumu was comically serious… he was, but Rin dials it up with her extreme competitive nature and occasional lapses of common sense. She also seems to have been in Ayumu’s current position regarding him in their Kendo days (she didn’t want to confess until she’d won, which she never did), though in the present she seems to support him more than she wants to win any potential romantic competition.
Well, support in her own way, which is weird and harsh like most things she does. In any case, her arrival completes the cast seen in the opening!
After that’s established we get… more of the same, pretty much. The last couple episodes do try to have an arc – Urushi goes on her class’s school trip, where she finds herself missing Ayumu and ultimately realizing that she does like him, even as her friends tease her about it. Meanwhile, Ayumu gets some hardcore tutoring from Rin, so it seems like he’ll have upped his game. When they play after her return, Ayumu manages a win… but it’s revealed to still be with a handicap, and thus it still doesn’t really count. No confession today! At least the lower deck couple are left on a strongly implied kiss over in the library.
And… that’s the show. I know it’s very sparse, but that’s what happens when you get a slice of life romance that’s really heavy on the slice of life. Most of it is just the lead characters talking in various normal situations and playing off each other.
To the show’s credit, the chemistry is surprisingly good. Urushi is adorable, and not a generic adorable either – she has her own quirks and persona, and her design isn’t a particularly common generic. Because she’s easily flustered, but impish enough that she wants to retaliate when that happens, she plays very well against the normally stoic-seeming yet straightforward Ayumu. The supporting cast is also good. The Takeru/Sakurako couple gives us some scenes of different romantic tension, Rin is actually a very strong addition and (as is often the case with the romantic spare in these sorts of productions) gets a lot of pathos that helps us understand and empathize with her. And Urushi has her friend, Maki, and Maki’s spare other girly girl friends to maintain the teasing from a different issue as well as help her work out her issues.
Most of these characters aren’t terribly deep, but they serve the purpose they need to serve and come off as at least a little charming. When the show has the pitch it does, that’s really all you need.
That said, this is still a very static piece that appeals to the status quo. The timeline has moved up around a year between when the show started and when it ended, and in that time we haven’t seen Ayumu make much meaningful progress with his Shogi, and while Urushi now openly admits to herself that she likes him back, it’s not like that seemed far off at the start (as Maki, I’m sure, would be keen to insist). We do get some progress for Takeru and Sakurako (or so it seems), but they’re not the focus.
Adorable, but not the focus.
When Will Ayumu Make His Move? is a show that does very little wrong. The warm and fuzzy scenes are warm and fuzzy. The funny moments at least elicit a smile. No character is hard to watch. There isn’t a kludge of unfit drama to rain on the parade. Everything is fine.
But on the other hand it’s a show that does very little notably right. It’s not a bad RomCom like Nisekoi, but it does kind of make you appreciate the really good titles like Kaguya-sama, Toradora!, or Dusk Maiden of Amnesia all the more for how they went above and beyond the call of the standard formula
At the risk of damning this show with faint praise, When Will Ayumu Make His Move? is mostly harmless. It won’t hurt you, and it will entertain you passably for about half an hour at a time. It’s worth a C, though I did consider giving it a C+ just on the force of Urushi being consistently entertaining, and deserves at best a casual watch if you want something to wind down and chill with or at worst a slow and graceful fading into obscurity.