Rounding out a February of warped love we have Saekano: the harem romcom about making a dating sim visual novel. On paper, Saekano is about the trials and tribulations of otaku Tomoya Aki as he tries to transition from fan to creator, expressing his love of 2d despite, perhaps, the prospect of an extra dimension of romance being closer than he thinks. In reality… well, let’s take a look.
Saekano consists of two seasons, the second season being given the .flat or ♭ subtitle, and a movie which receives the subtitle Fine or Finale depending on just how much you want to localize titles. The three entries tell a consistent story with a definite beginning and end when taken together, and so I’m going to address them as, essentially, one thing.
We start off with Tomoya suddenly, thanks to a very vague encounter, having a desire to create his perfectly ultimate “gal game” (presumably non-eroge dating sim visual novel). There’s a big problem, though, in that Tomoya has absolutely no creative-person skills that could actually be applied to creating a visual novel. Sure, he has a goal, which I guess qualifies him as a Director/Producer sort of person, but he can’t handle the script and dialogue nor can he do the art.
Luckily for Tomoya, he knows a couple classmates who have just the skills he need. There’s senpai Utaha Kasumigaoka, who unknown to most of their peers is actually a famous writer. She both likes Tomoya (not that he’d notice, being obsessed with 2d) and kind of credits his help advertising with her success, so while she’s sharp-tongued and somewhat harsh she’s also a clear recruit for the project. There’s also his childhood friend, blonde twin-tailed Eriri Spencer Sawamura, who is unknown to most of their classmates a famous erotic manga artist, whose skill could quite easily cover for the art components of the visual novel.
Rounding out the initial team is Megumi Katou. Who is she? Well, she is, it turns out, the mysterious girl who Tomoya saw at the exact time and place to create that magic moment that inspired him, so of course he has to bring her on. Not that he likes her or anything, but he does need her to model for the heroine in the game. She has an intense case of flat affect (veering sometimes into deadpan snark) and initially no care nor interest for anything to do with otaku affairs, but she’s also not opposed so into the group she goes.
Actually getting this team together for real takes a fair chunk of the first season. Both Eriri and Utaha come down hard on Tomoya, and initially refuse to sign on to his mad plan since he doesn’t have it terribly well formed. However, interacting with Megumi does seem to function as something of a muse, and gives him both the inspiration and reality checks he needs in order to form his vision a little better and convince the other girls that he really has something worth working on.
As they actually get down to business and start to form the backbone of the game, we realize there’s one other skillset that’s missing: music! Luckily, Tomoya has an in on that too since his cousin, Michiru Hyoudou, is in an amateur band. Michiru, however, protests that she loathes otaku culture, so she’s disinclined to take the job until Tomoya both does a stint as band manager (an office with which she hoped to lure him away from otaku life) and reveals to her that all her bandmates are nerds and she’s been performing largely anime and game sorts of music, which her friends kept from her because they knew her disdain for the topic. Seeing things in a new light brings her around, and the project now has a composer and seems to be on track for Tomoya’s goal of releasing the game at Comiket.
Now, I want to take a moment aside and dig into what I think is Saekano’s biggest core fault – the thing that, whether the show ends up with a passing grade or not, does the most damage. It’s one that I think most people would find odd to pick out as a negative, but that in light of the whole thing I really do feel has the worst impact.
For that purpose, I’ll go over again these characters I introduced.
We have Michiru, the cousin with a crush who didn’t realize that the topic she hated for taking her precious cousin away with her should have been her ticket to bonding instead. She’s something of a tomboy musclehead. She’s a little bit of two archetypes, but also rather familiar, and she is a much more minor character than the other three girls.
We have Utaha, the gloomy intellectual girl whose long, dark here accents her persona that’s dour with a hint of affectionate spice. Naturally, her core talent is something brainy, specifically writing, and she’s given the position of leverage and superiority as senpai. Essentially, she lives a very familiar character type.
Then there’s Eriri. She’s blonde and has twintails, so of course she’s a mega-tsundere. As a tsundere, she gets a specialization that’s seen as more driven by emotion (that being art) rather than by logic, and her story is one about fits of passion being the order of the day. She’s also a rather familiar character in just about every sense.
And you’ve got Megumi, the flat-affected everygirl who serves as something of a blank slate, where impressions will be made upon her by the events rather than her coming in with much if any baggage. To her credit, Megumi does have moments where she shows off some wit behind that general lack of inflection and we can guess that there’s something proactive rather than purely reactive going on in her head, but her inner world is largely kept hidden compared to the other girls, rendering her again a familiar character type.
In abstract, there’s nothing wrong with familiar character types. Archetypes are broad, and being able to be defined in one by a combination of a character’s most major personality and visual attributes isn’t a strike against: they can still be flat or rounded on their own.
The problem with that is that Saekano is meta. It deals with the barrier between “3D” and “2D” and wants us to believe that Tomoya, at the start, has a lot to learn about real people and the real world if he wants to create engaging fiction that others can connect to. But while the show tells us this, it fails to show it because the supposedly “3D” characters that Tomoya interacts with most fill the roles of “2D” archetypes with very little variance from the script. While in theory Tomoya is learning new things by his interactions with the team, especially Kato, and escaping his “2D only” shell, from the perspective of the audience it seems almost as though his experiences should confirm his 2D biases, because the world around him conforms to that sort of existence.
It’s hard making art about making art, because you have to be able to draw a line between the world of the creators (who are themselves creations) and the world of their creations. Saekano tries to do that by saying, loudly, that it’s there, but while it talks the talk it can’t walk the walk. Contrast this with Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!. That show does manage to make its creators and creations distinct: the characters live in a grounded world, but create art about more fanciful worlds. Further, the characters never really try to create something that’s like their own types, and their types are kept away from the commonplace because Eizouken uses a very non-standard art style.
I’m sure you could re-render those characters as something common, but as they’re presented to you they don’t have the look and feel of the fakery they create. Saekano’s characters do. Eriri and Utaha even call each other out, multiple times as they cat fight, as just being the one particular archetype. And it rings true. If Saekano was going to stick the landing in a full and powerful way, that accusation needed to not ring true. It needed to be an in-joke, a bit of teasing that the audience could say was really false, so that there would be a separation between the fiction we’re seeing and the fiction they’re making.
With that out of the way, I should be hopefully able to go through the full story of Saekano rather quickly.
One bit of story takes place around Summer Comiket. Tomoya’s game is by no means ready, so he instead acts as more of a helper than anything. This includes interacting with his cute kouhai (who of course has a crush on him) Izumi Hashima, who is becoming something of a manga artist herself. Her creation is something that Tomoya finds really moving, and so he goes the extra mile to promote her and help her sell out. This doesn’t sit well with Eriri, who feels like her work can’t afford to be merely good when she now has a rival for Tomoya’s fandom who seems unrefined but great, sending her into a volatile emotional state that will last until the first game project is completed.
We also meet (or rather met) Izumi’s big brother, Iori, who is a hanger-on to a very major doujin circle and who Tomoya resents for chasing fame and fortune rather than art for art’s sake. Their conflict is… kind of dropped as an idea because Iori is too much of a dork, but we’ll need to remember him and his big-shot circle for later.
As production winds on we deal with script problems (getting a very nice Utaha-romantic episode), Megumi problems, and finally as Winter Comiket approaches, art problems as Eriri’s mood sends her into a slump that threatens the deadline to release for Winter Comiket. She retreats to a cabin in the mountains (her family is rich) in the hopes that a lack of distraction will let her power through the final illustrations, and as her emotional meltdown reaches its crescendo alongside a nasty fever, she has a breakthrough, creating evidently some of the most brilliant work she’s ever done, but having to be bailed out by Tomoya with a little help from a friendly Iori.
Iori’s driver for the “care for Eriri” plan happens to see her last work for Tomoya’s game, Cherry Blessing, and takes interest. This is relevant because she’s actually part of the industry, a bigshot director Akane Kosaka, who in other scenes is something of a good mentor to Tomoya while also being about the least pleasant person to be around imaginable.
Eriri’s sickness causes the deadline to be partially failed despite her fervent attempt to clear it in time: they can’t go to Winter Comiket with professionally produced product, but they can home-burn CDs of the finished game in time to market something and get the glorious collaborative work of Eriri and Utaha out there to the world. Naturally, Winter Comiket goes amazingly well in the end, and it seems Tomoya’s little Blessing Software circle is the new hot ticket.
We then enter a phase where the show and everyone in it seems to ask “What now?”
In my opinion, the arc to create the first game, Cherry Blessing, and sell it at Winter Comiket, would have been a perfect little story on its own. It still would have suffered from that big problem I mentioned earlier in the digression, but as a plucky underdog story even one about the creative process, a good deal could be forgiven. However, that plot ends roughly halfway through the second season, and what follows is not just a long tail but rather a full extra plot that’s rather transformative for the story as a whole.
Eriri enters a burnout slump, and Tomoya takes a soft hand trying to get the group going again. At the same time, Akane Kosaka comes calling and, it turns out, makes an offer to poach Eriri and Utaha. Mostly Eriri, but having seen their work before she believes Utaha is needed to bring out Eriri’s best. Where to? An actual industry job, working for the latest release of a famous, long-running series. It is a life-changing, career-making sort of offer, but the girls still have to deeply consider it because they’re a package deal and because it would mean abandoning the guy they love and the circle he loves.
At the same time, Megumi really steps up to the girlfriend plate. Prior to comiket, Eriri had the best arc and Utaha the best scenes (ironically playing against type, with the emotional one having a thinky appeal and the intellectual one having an emotional appeal) but as they grow distant grappling with the offer, Megumi’s deadpan tone but ability to pull out unbending force becomes a source of strength for Tomoya and the ailing group.
When Tomoya learns of the situation, he’s naturally a bit torn and torn up. On one hand, he knows just how much this job would mean for the two girls, and wants to wish them the best. However, he knows it also means they’ll be leaving him for someone else in the same field, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow. During this phase he does manage to get in good with Akane and hear her opinion – he’s too soft to be a director, and it’s because he’s coddling his talent that they haven’t been able to work, meaning that it’s best for them in a lot of ways to go with her. We are expected to believe that she’s speaking earnestly from experience and that her abuse is what Eriri in particular really needs. Far be it from me to say that creators don’t often perform their best when challenged, but Akane is super-nasty when she’s turning up the heat in a way it’s hard to imagine working well in specific rather than abstract.
Eventually, the girls decide, tearfully, that they do need to take the plunge, and Tomoya finds the strength to see them off with his blessing.
Blessing Software, however, will continue. Tomoya still has a vision that wasn’t realized with Cherry Blessing (it having ultimately been more Utaha’s production) and Megumi, having shown her devotion to the otherwise disintegrating circle, essentially becomes assistant director while Tomoya slides in to the writing role. They onboard Iori and Izumi to more or less round out the skill set, as while Tomoya’s writing is still amateurish compared to Utaha’s, it now comes from a very real place of experience with the 3D world (or so we’re told) and thus has a spark in it that shines through. Thus, they commence creation of the titular “How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend” (despite protests from Megumi regarding that title)
All does not end up being well though, as Akane suffers a stroke just as the pro project Utaha and Eriri are working on hits crunch time. Without Akane’s bulldog energy, the suits want to call time and cut budget, even though the artists aren’t satisfied with their art. Tomoya is called in, and for the sake of his friends he steps up to the plate in Akane’s stead, negotiating a final push period for the two of them during which he’ll be out of town taking care of them and making sure, in his own way, that they hit their goals while Akane convalesces.
This comes at the expense, however, of critical time for How To Raise a Boring Girlfriend, with Tomoya having to choose to prioritize saving the girls who abandoned him from a tight spot over seeing through his own vision in the time and place he might have initially wanted to. Megumi is naturally not happy with this… and Eriri and Utaha knew that would be the case, and evidently made a secret pact that if they called on Tomoya for business help here and now, they would both forsake their own dreams of happiness with him in order to make sure his relationship with Megumi was patched over properly in the wake.
It turns out they needn’t have worried too much, though, as Megumi is evidently a greedy girl in affairs of the heart, and more than willing to sink her claws right back in given half the chance and some admissions from Tomoya, setting the two up finally and predictably as the official couple.
At last, we’re treated to an epilogue. After an initial fakeout where it looks like Megumi and Tomoya’s relationship goes down the tubes many years later, only for Utaha to appear and pick up the pieces, the truth is revealed: it is many years later, with everyone as adults… but Tomoya and Megumi are doing fine, the bad route was just Utaha’s idea for a “sequel” to Cherry Blessing. Speaking of which, Blessing Software has become a real legitimate game company, and everyone is celebrating the new hiring of Eriri and Utaha! This formally gets the band back together as adult professionals, ready to create the next big thing in the Visual Novel industry, and beyond. The End.
I’ll be honest a big part of me is biased towards Saekano because, as a creator, I like to see takes on the creative process, and for all that its characters are very 2D Standard, the Cherry Blessing arc does give this very good and satisfying “newcomer underdogs make a cool thing! Look at all the work that took!” sort of satisfaction.
However, the Cherry Blessing arc is inseparable from the How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend arc, what with the turnover coming partway through the second season. That arc has its strengths as well, showing us the few points where the characters don’t just feel like archetypical slot-fillers, but it tends to leave a more sour taste in my mouth because it’s not fun, nor is it charming, nor is it really building on what the first arc actually showed. If the first arc had more of a barrier between the in-character reality and fiction, or had dealt more with the grim realities of the situation rather than treating every step along the way as something that wacky hijinx or a romantic moment could solve, the second arc would have landed better. Instead, it’s a nasty swerve.
Each of the show’s two components works better in isolation from the other. But, simultaneously, they can’t exist in isolation: one flows into two without an ideal sharp distinction, and two needs the characters from one in order to execute its storyline. That’s the downfall of Saekano: divided against itself, it scars what could otherwise have been fun and leaves unsupported what could otherwise have been dramatic and powerful.
That said, Saekano is not a bad show. I enjoyed most of the episodes, and for all I’ve groused about the characters being 2D, that’s a description of their flavor rather than their shape, with most of them having at least some rounding to them. There was no one I found tortuously annoying, either: Eriri had her bad moments (when we get some troubled past where she was abjectly not good to Tomoya) and Megumi is an archetype I usually don’t love seeing, but they were ultimately watchable.
All things considered, the full package of Saekano – both seasons plus the movie – gets a C out of me. It’s fine, I guess, but at the same time it kind of falls flat.