If Her Flag Breaks is a show that you think you have figured out in Episode 1. The introduction is somewhat interesting, but ultimately very basic. The Main Character, Souta Hatate, has an ability that allows him to see “Flags” (literal tiny flags on people’s heads, representing the gaming concept of an event flag that determines something will happen) and, with an instinctual ability, manipulate them. We see this with him breaking a man’s death flag (causing the infamous death-by-truck to swerve the other way) and later, when he joins his new school, by striking down a lot of friendly or romantic overtures with precision, breaking the related flags. This is the interesting part.
More standard, Souta runs afoul of Nanami Knight Bladefield – the shrill, tsundere-like, young-looking blonde girl cast from the same mold as Sakuya from Isuca or Lisha from Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle or a zillion others. She has no flag on her head but her tsundere nature is obvious to the audience as she notices what the main character is doing and bullies/convinces him to not maintain his absolute isolation. Immediately thereafter they encounter Akane Mahougasawa, who is too friendly to have her friendship flag broken anyway, beginning the part where our lead is doomed to the attentions of a gaggle of girls.
Literally a minute and a half into this show, I had what I thought was going to be a pretty good notion of where it was going to go: the main character and the blonde tsundere would be pushed together, even though she’ll be worst girl and no work will ever really be done to establish what either would see in the other, much to the frustration of the audience as more interesting and personable options would be introduced. The supernatural aspect would be used as a vehicle to introduce new girls to the harem, and everyone would live happily ever after except for the viewers living miserably ever after.
Mercifully, this is one of the few times where I’ve had such a clear picture of a show’s expected flow so early and then been as wrong as I was here. This seems to be deliberate on the part of the show: it wants you to believe it’s going the lazy harem route, and to that extent it does go a fair distance down that road before really showing its hand regarding anything else.
In any case, it turns out that Souta has been assigned as the sole resident of Quest Dorm, an out-of-the-way dorm that starts very run-down. While trying to spruce it up, Akane gets a death flag, which almost fires when she crashes through a weak floor. As she lays injured, Souta desperately tries to break the flag, and is ultimately only able to do so by kissing her, overwriting the Death Flag with a Love Flag that indicates survival and is stronger. Despite this, they’re not really an item for the rest of the show, as it’s much more a “nobody gets anywhere” sort of harem and Akane is so over-the-top friendly that she’d happily share.
This leads to an effort to rebuild Quest Dorm as a decent place, which sees the recruitment of Kikuno Shoukanji, Souta’s surrogate big sister, and Mimori Seiteikouji, the student council president who seems to be set 100% to genre tropes… even when they don’t actually apply to her situation. Also added is Megumu Touzokuyama, a boy so girly that he makes Mikoto Yoroi look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who befriends Souta mostly to entirely because Souta recognizes him as male. The dorm is rebuilt and all the girls (including Megumu) move in with Souta so that it won’t be closed down.
Of course, that turns out to be a problem of its own, as the school board is a wee bit jealous at the existence of a co-ed dorm and the student council president misreads their grousing as an attempt to challenge the dorm residents to win at the sports festival or else Souta would be expelled. They didn’t say any of that battle school crud and in fact try to protest, but Mimori just runs with it 110%. In order to keep Souta (who she does seem to have a crush on, as poorly as that’s introduced) from being expelled (which he should be in no danger of), she recruits another girl, Rin Eiyuuzaki, who is rough and tumble and has a problem with guys and always wears archery gear as her standard uniform, to train them.
Rin is probably my favorite of the girls, and leads to my favorite joke in the show. When alone with Souta, he asks her what kind of boy she would approve of, and she waxes poetic about her childhood friend, Soda, who she did everything with when she was but a wee tomboy, and looks up to, and clearly has a thing for. Souta notes that it’s a bit odd, since his nickname was Soda when he was a kid, and he remembers having a cool friend. You’d expect this to be dragged out despite how blindingly obvious it is, but instead Rin reveals that she keeps in touch with “Soda” via text message, sends a message off… and is right there when Souta’s phone chirps and he reads off the exact message. The timing and delivery on the entire sequence is perfect for what it is. Rin joins the party properly thereafter (with Souta being sure to say the nice things he thinks about her, lest she develop a Yandere flag), and the Sports Festival can begin in earnest.
This episode also introduces Ruri Ninjabyashi, an android girl who serves Akane, and Tsumugi Ryuukishibara, the loli-looking granny. I’m glossing over them right now because one of this show’s (possibly intentional) sins is having loads and loads of characters thrown at you, and I want to be clear when they become relevant that they’re in the show.
Also in the show is the first hint of the heavier stuff. We get some backstory from Souta: he has no real family (Kikuno being a friend who declares herself his big sister), because he is the sole survivor of the sinking of a cruise ship, the Premium Ambriel, over which he carries a lot of survivor’s guilt. That was also when he got his flag power, being gifted it by a strange little girl named Sakura, who bade him discover “the truth of the world”. Finally, it also seems that Souta has a flag of his own – a really, really nasty looking Death Flag that he can’t break, which to him means that sooner or later (probably sooner) he’s going to make a final exit. Part of the reason he kept apart from everyone was that he didn’t want other people to be hurt when he did pass. This is heavy stuff, but at least at first the show tends to not linger on it. Wait just a second and you’ll be back to the soporific, harmless harem comedy with no drop of drama in it, so it’s easy to forget.
Also easy to let fall by the wayside are hints of a fantasy alternate universe (perhaps) to which Souta and the gang seem to be connected, particularly through Ruri and something beneath Quest Dorm.
The sports festival actually happens, with a lot of focus on the final relay race. During this, it’s made clear that Nanami really doesn’t seem subject to flags, as Souta says the right word to make each of his other teammates light up with a victory flag, only for Nanami (in a team with him) to end up injured. Carrying her with a surge of actually giving a damn, Souta manages to cross the finish line… behind one of the clubs. But while everyone mopes about how they lost, it’s pointed out (in another playing-with-genre moment) that they only needed second in the relay to earn first overall, meaning that even with Mimori’s absurd challenge, both Souta and Quest Dorm can stay.
That winning, however involves going on dates with the most central cast members (except Nanami, who is having far too much of a fit of tsun to be anything other than a punchline). These go about as you think, with some mundane beats through, with Megumu utterly failing the part of boy, Akane having a frankly normal date, some decent jokes out of Rin, and a sweet at-home bit with Kikuno. The episode is mostly just this puttering, but does end with Ruri helping break in to the secret basement/cave area, and the arrival of an apparent world-hopper with some degree of Flag sensitivity, Mei Daimyouzamurai.
This leads into some interesting stuff with Mei, her bosses in the “Council of Seven Virtues”, and more about Souta’s ability and place in the world… but not before more puttering! Everyone goes on a school trip, for which Souta is double-booked courtesy of Mimori, leading to him being at the beach a lot. It’s not very pleasant, since he can’t really touch sea water without throwing up for reason of Premium Ambriel flashbacks. Charming. While there he meets a little orphan Popsicle seller girl, Kurumiko Daishikyougawa, and befriends her, noticing she has plot flags that gradually upgrade.
As it turns out, she’s an orphan because her parents were crew on the Premium Ambriel, and she feels some degree of regret over the scorn she knows Souta suffered, because it was her parents’ job to provide for the safety of the passengers, and not his fault that only he lived. Eventually, while talking, they get stuck in a seaside cave by the rising tide, and she starts to generate death flags, which Souta breaks by inviting her to be his adopted little sister and come to school with him and his friends, ending as they’re rescued by Ruri (and the others).
Enrolling her turns out to be a little more trouble, though, which results in Souta having a day out/date with Mimori and Mei solving it to the tune of gaining her own clingy little sister archetype, as tsundere as she may want to be about it.
We then get the first real dive into the heavier material, as Mei and Souta confront each other on the school rooftop. In a surprisingly meaty sequence, she shows Souta a host of other parallel worlds, ones in which he didn’t exist and the friends he has now died either directly or indirectly as a result of his absence, such as Nanami being crushed by the episode 1 truck, Akane falling to her death through a rotten floor, or Kurumiko drowning in her ‘special spot’ tidal cave.
This is where I really started to revise my opinion of the show, as it looked by now like it was more trying to be the Bizarro version of Steins;Gate (LINK AND DELETE). As in, Steins;Gate might be technically classified a harem, but the focus is more on parallel timelines and the main character’s ability to alter fate (and the limitations thereof), as well as not feeling like your typical lazy harem because all the girls get majorly rounded. On the other hand, If Her Flag Breaks seems to be having the same components: Time-and-dimension madness including some death and sorrow on one side and harem romance on the other, but with a completely different focus and balance. Here, the drama and plot are kept deep in the background, while the harem material, which instead of being good character study is pure comedy that seems to revel in how harmless and by-the-book it can be, is forefront at almost all times.
That still isn’t quite right, but it’s a lot closer than my guess in episode 1.
In the last parallel world, we see Souta give a pep talk to an alternate version of his teacher (younger than the real woman, and very different in that she also seems to be kind of his alternate?) on the burning Premium Ambriel. This causes her, in that universe, to trade her death flag for a Protagonist one, ensuring that she’ll be the hero of that world’s story and live to see it through,
After being shown this, Souta ends up potentially being victimized by his Death Flag, coughing up blood. Mei, moved by the kindness she saw in him, uses her power (a weak, artificial version of his) to literally wrestle with the flag, ultimately delaying its activation. Before she passes out (but after Souta does) the little girl who gave Souta his powers – Sakura to him, known as Sacrament to Mei – appears. She apologizes, but doesn’t want Mei interfering with Souta learning the truth for himself any longer, and gives her a tap on the forehead before disappearing. After this, Mei becomes a normal resident of her current world, with no more knowledge about flags, the Council of Seven Virtues, or other timelines, fading into irrelevance as the cold-type Tsundere.
The next few episodes reinforce backing off from the plot, as we launch into summer vacation and get a bunch of comedy setups and payoffs, like a surprisingly effective “Wrong Onsen” moment where Rin is the one to find Souta and help him escape. Ultimately, this leads to Ruri turning into a nendoroid version of herself for a bit and everyone visiting Nanami’s homeland, the Principality of Bladefield, where she is a princess (a fact that has been known, but irrelevant, for a while.) While there, Souta meets her little half sister Hakua Berserker Bladefield, a very forceful little girl with a verbal tic of repeating herself.
Despite some serious material (a Ruri-model assassin coming after the princesses, the death of the king, and the revelation that the crown prince they knew as a brother and not the old king was in fact their father), this movement is mostly just jokes to get Hakua to school with everybody else, with a little salt of plot on the side.
This section does have my second favorite joke in the show: as the Ruri-model assassin bears down on the group, Ruri steps up, declaring that even as things are, the killer robot is her sister, and she has to face her one on one. After said dramatic speech, Ruru jumps out in the way… but recall she’s currently in a body the size of a cue ball; the assassin version little doesn’t notice stepping right over the interposing Ruri. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it plays with typical expectations in a funny way.
The salt of plot is that it seems the Council of Seven Virtues has its hand in the running of Bladefield, letting us briefly see them and their leader (or chief agent?), Number 0. There’s also a fairy tale of Bladefield that has eerie similarities to Souta’s situation, and the ominous note that the Souta-figure in the tale does ultimately die, trading his life for the lives of all his friends.
Coming out of that, it’s time for the school festival! The first episode of school festival is focused on a beauty contest with all the girls (and Megumu) competing, and is the only episode in the show that I think is really wasted. Most other episodes, even if they’re heavily overbalanced to comedy, keep the jokes and scenarios moving fast enough that they felt really stacked up. This one just falls flat.
Once that situation is ended, we meet our mercifully last character, popular idol Serika Ginyuuin, who befriends Nanami and Souta when they help her hide from her fans (except Nanami, who is a super fan but able to contain herself unlike the mob). It turns out that Souta helped her in the past when she was feeling low, not that she recognizes him. He also doesn’t remember that time all too well, as he was at his lowest and seriously planning suicide at the time, and helped her gain a “success” flag out of a desire to do one last good thing. We gear up for a silly dance party… and then the plot hits full force.
As Souta watches the concert, he begins to see the threads of fate, and then everything stops cold as he bears witness to far more than just flags, viewing the base code (represented in binary) of the world. With time stopped, Number Zero appears and explains – this is a virtual world, and Souta’s burgeoning power has caused it to freeze. If he remains, he could crash the server entirely, effectively destroying what he knows as the world.
Faced with this, Souta agrees to help Number Zero with her issue, which will protect this and all the other virtual worlds in the process. Thus, he leaves his dimension, essentially being unplugged from one Matrix-style simulation only to be loaded into a higher-level one where he will be using his evolved abilities to fight Angel Boat, a rogue AI that the Council of Seven Virtues needs taken out. As Souta exits the world, the girls other than Nanami (who has always been outside the scope of his abilities) lose their memories of him ever existing. And with that, we are ready for the last two episodes of If Her Flag Breaks.
The penultimate episode follows two lines: in one, Souta does battle with Angel Boat (which manifests as a number of “angelic” goons, basically white cyclopses with feathered wings) in order to purge it from the networks of the real world, which it is trying to take over. The reason this is a problem at all is because the real Principality of Bladefield, a tiny and irrelevant nation, wanted to use a super-powerful AI to become a world power. He does this mostly by manifesting death flags on the individual angel subroutines, causing them to abruptly cease, but he also does some flying around and beam battling, because what anime action sequence would be complete without a beam battle?
In all honesty, this feels like someone looked at The Matrix, didn’t like what they saw, and decided to correct its foibles. The action is, let’s face it, nowhere on the same sort of level, but the ideas are actually interesting. Here, the masters of the scenario simulated not one world, but many, and those world simulations run faster than time in the real world. Souta, as our version of The One, has abilities that stand out as being able to break through the rules of the system and interact with it on a core level. I will admit that I’d kind of like to see a little more hacking-style combat and less “Well we know how to animate a fantasy battle so let’s just do that”, but the concept of his flag-power and how that turns into code-power is on point and on theme. Sadly, the show has very little room to actually address the big ideas, which leaves the final production in an awkward state.
While this is going on, time passes in the world Souta left behind, taking the girls all the way to graduation. Souta’s vanishing, and everyone else’s amnesia, sticks like a splinter in Nanami’s mind until, before leaving Quest Dorm forever, she breaks into the sealed room that was once Souta’s and finds the one artifact left behind: a faded letter he had, which Nanami realizes is in her own hand. At this, Ruri appears, and we learn the truth of Nanami.
It turns out that Nanami, like Souta, is actually a real world person loaded into the simulation. Specifically, Nanami is Souta’s sister, but when they were loaded up he was given a different background, and after she went into the digital world to save him, Number Zero separated her Self and her Memories, the latter of which ultimately, as their own being, managed to escape containment and hide out in Ruri until, at this point, they’re able to merge again into the true Nanami. With this, she’s able to connect to the other girls (and Megumu) causing them to remember Souta and find their way into the higher layer of the digital where he is.
It’s in good time as well, since Souta is wearing down in his battle against Angel Boat, especially when they bring in a facsimile of the Premium Ambriel as their flagship. He angsts, worries about his Death Flag, and then the rest all appear to give him hope and help fight back with their own fantasy-style techniques. Premium Ambriel and the other Angel Boat manifestations merge into an angelic eldritch abomination cruise ship (oddly resembling Magic: the Gathering’s Emrakul quite a bit), and before the final hit, Souta is sent to flashback land one more time.
Here, he sees a different version of the Premium Ambriel disaster. It’s unclear in what reality things happened this way, but in this timeline he’s there with all the girls as the ship burns. He sees and tries to lead to safety a mysterious little girl no one else can see (not Sakura/Sacrament this time, a different one) and, on the way out, ends up helping a man free of some debris only to be pinned himself as a different section of ship collapses. The man flees, though saying he’ll get help, and the little girl, introducing herself as Laplace’s Demon, confronts Souta about the nature of humanity. Eventually, hope bears out, as the man does return, bringing several more men and all of Souta’s friends to help get him out of trouble. However, a column collapses and falls, and Laplace’s Demon stops time just before it squashes all the would-be rescuers.
She reveals that everyone is fated to die, quite immediately, except for Souta who has no death flag. Souta, however, offers to take all their deaths, even if doing so will strip him of his connections to humanity, his memories of his friends, and ultimately drive him to despair, ruin, and suicide thanks to the merged death flag, choosing to both help the people he cares about and believe in the goodness of humanity. Laplace’s Demon takes the deal, and thus Souta is given the giant death flag we know he has. Back in the battle with Angel Emrakul Boat, Souta uses the collected death and misery of his own flag, transferring it over onto the final boss, causing the last manifestation of Angel Boat to shrivel up and die.
Souta is awakened in the real world by Number Zero. She lays out the basic rules, including that he’s going to be the only one who remembers what happened in virtual worlds. Number Zero, further, gives some wrap-up exposition that Souta was plugged in because he was injured and members of his family had high potential for… exactly what he did, that he hasn’t actually been out that long by Real World time, and that Sakura/Sacrament and Laplace’s Demon were (are?) fragments of Angel Boat that it cast off in order to go rogue, being tied to different facets of humanity in a way that was meant to keep the whole thing, for lack of a better word, moral. She also reveals herself at the end as both a Nanami look-alike and the founder of their house, so you figure that one out.
Later, Souta goes to the same school he went to in the virtual worlds (presumably with his sister, Nanami) and, at Quest Dorm, meets Akane for the first time again. He saves her from the collapsing floor, since apparently that structure was really weak, and in the wake of that moment she seems to remember something of her other lives. As the credits roll, we see all the other girls (and Megumu) suggesting that they’ll all find their way together again and everything is going to be alright. The End.
Stepping back a moment, I said in my review of Beatless that if I have a pretty big delta from the “general assessment” of a show, I can at least usually pinpoint why. I bring this up, because If Her Flag Breaks doesn’t seen to be very well regarded, while I ultimately found it really fascinating and unique, and certainly more worth watching than many of its competitors.
However, unlike with Beatless, I do understand why this show isn’t held up as well. Its big problem, in my mind, is that it doesn’t have an audience it’s actually going for. If you’re here for the lazy harem junk food, then the heavy moments early and especially the sci-fi fantasy ending with virtual reality and beam battles and the SS Emrakul isn’t going to play. We cut off Souta’s relationship with his harem, and by the end of the show we’ve only seen him reconnect with Nanami and Akane, and the former of those in an entirely different way than how they related to each other while not knowingly brother and sister. On the other hand, if you love the Science Fiction, you’re probably going to be at least a little bit frustrated that it only really takes up the last two and a half episodes out of thirteen, and doesn’t have the time and space to explore its ideas in the deep way that, say, Steins;Gate does. A serious sci-fi fan is probably going to find the harem comedy tedious as all get-out, especially since it’s as harmless as it is.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about the comedy, because it’s kind of in an interesting place. On one side, it is very well-timed and well-delivered. The jokes are fast and the show keeps them coming, rather than lingering painfully on any particular scenario… at least most of the time. But there’s a degree to which they’re not as funny as they could be because, frankly, everybody is too nice. You know Akane’s never going to be hurt or offended by anything, so she doesn’t give great comedic reactions. Most of the other characters are the same way; they’re blindly happy to make Souta happy, and that doesn’t make for really funny moments.
This is why Rin is my favorite of the girls and Nanami my second pick, because those two (along with Souta himself) can express an actual range of emotions during the comedic bits, and thus work in a way relating to traditional comedy. For instance, during the date episode, Nanami is bored at home, and at the beginning she made sure to show off an advert for a limited time cake that she absolutely does not want no sir no way not from Souta. After all the dates, the girls are in the bath, and Nanami asks after that thing she asked for, only to be horrified as all the other girls are confused since no shopping trip for Nanami was ever mentioned on any of their dates. That’s funny – she’s hoist by her own tsundere petard and gives a good reaction. We also cut to Souta leaving the cake box on the handle of her room’s door, so it’s still “harmless”, but at least it was comedic in there for a moment. As for Rin, her near-breakdowns and brushes with Yandere psychosis are also more traditional comedy – she’s suffering, but it’s distant and absurd enough that it’s funny and not painful along with her. Similarly, there’s a joke where Akane leads everyone in holding hands and spinning for their friendship, which conjures a twister of sorts as Souta exclaims “This black magic again?!”. Souta, there, is uncomfortable and confused, so it’s funny.
But, and you may be thinking this, the jokes I highlighted as my two favorites aren’t like that. And that’s because they, and some of the other humorous material that works in the show, are on a different wavelength. Specifically, the show works best in the comedy department when it deals in absurdist humor and/or humor that relies on the audience’s awareness of genre and playing with expectations. This is the strongest material in the show – when we see Souta deflecting friendship and even romance flags from over-the-top extras by telling them things very precisely to tell them off, it’s really funny because we’ve seen the less excessive versions of those characters be the main plot hooks of other shows. We know how the script is supposed to go, but Souta just flips it. Sadly, as Nanami convinces him to not just break all the flags coming at him, we don’t get a lot of this script-flipping later on. There are the two jokes I pointed out, which both do it on the audience, and Mei does a little when she first appears, but sadly the element of comedy that was most germane to the show and works the best is probably the one they use the least.
Thus, a lot of the “comedy” space is actually filled with cute girls doing cute things, which is harmless, and perhaps a bit soporific, and not really funny. Some jokes land, but more joke-space is just kind of dead air. This is where the fast pacing really saves the show. Since they don’t linger on any one joke, it’s more okay that they only occasionally do an actually funny one, since they’ll get to one of them soon enough and have at least a couple that work in some degree each episode, at least while the show is still doing comedy.
So, what’s the final verdict on If Her Flag Breaks? Well, to digress a little and go back to the “It doesn’t really have an audience” problem, that’s also a problem with another piece of media with ties to The Matrix, Dark City. In my mind, Dark City is an amazing film, but the blend of classic Film Noir and philosophical science fiction likely lost a good number of the Noir fans (who couldn’t get behind the aliens, psychic powers, and so on) and a good number of the Sci-fi fans (who were bored with the dames, detectives, and so on) – so while I love it, I do understand why it didn’t do as well or get as famous as certain other movies.
Now, I don’t like If Her Flag Breaks anywhere near as much as I like Dark City. Not that they’re particularly comparable, since Harem Comedy and Film Noir are about as far from each other as you can get, but If Her Flag Breaks has lower aspirations, weaker executions, and worse blending of its material. But… I still like If Her Flag Breaks a good deal more than it seems like most people do.
At the end, I rank this show a B. Whoever you are, you’ll probably find something to dislike about it… but you’ll probably find something there to like as well. How’s the comedy? Some of it is weak bordering on homeopathic, but other bits were legitimately funny. How are the characters? Well, some of them are flat but others are pretty decent. How are the ideas? They’re pretty good when we actually address them, but we do it so rarely and with so little overall time that they can’t really shine out as bright as they should. It’s a fine show, but not more than that. Would I recommend it? Well, I’d recommend Dark City, but that’s not really fair to If Her Flag Breaks so I guess I’d recommend the anime as well.