Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – there’s this fancy fictional sport that seems to be played primarily or solely by girls…
And you’ve stopped me. And probably rolled your eyes at me for using that tired intro that I think I’ve used at least annually on this blog. But if the intro is predictable, overused, and passionless, then perhaps it’s fit for the material on offer this week.
To begin properly (after a little preview of the Circlet Bout battles) we’re introduced to the future. You know it’s the future, because everything is done with projected holograms, from traffic control to personal tech to advertising billboards. Wowed by the city of the generic future is our main character, Yuuka Sasaki
Her hologram smartwatch leads her to a place where, thanks to a case of mistaken identity, she ends up participating in a game of Circlet Bout rather than simply viewing it. She may have known absolutely nothing going in, but despite being against the reigning champion, she manages to hold her own until a system crash forces a draw in a game of Augmented Reality (or MR – Mixed Reality, as the show would have it) boffer larping.
How “Mixed Reality” lets these girls do impossible flying leaps and flips is never explained, but you just want to see the cool clashes, right?
She finds this incredibly fun, and wants to face her opponent again. To help her, a weirdo accosts her after the match and gives her a new better smartwatch bracelet thing, promising it will help her. Ultimately, it turns out to have a foul-tempered AI trainer that gets called either Seig or G-kun in it, but that’s not immediate.
Two years later, she transfers to a school known for their strong Circlet Bout team, only to discover that the team has been decommissioned and the last couple members are fighting to resurrect it with the unusually stubborn student council representative.
And you start to see one of the issues with Circlet Princess through here – it is every other cute girl weird sport show mashed together with basically no originality. The first few episodes are the weird newbie superpower from Aokana in the fighting game style of Angelic Layer, leading into the table scraps plot of Girls und Panzer, including this sport being somehow female-only so far as we can see.
I don’t want to call this show a ripoff. When you get down to it, there’s nothing new under the sun, and it is at least borrowing from everything in its subgenre rather than just living in the shadow of one other particular entry. Because of that, it’s more accurate to say it’s a pastiche of its type.
And, sometimes, that could be fine. It’s generally better to bring something new, unique, or interesting to the table, but it’s also possible to mess up telling a basic and functional story by trying too hard to be something else. Especially in genre scenarios that have very tight conventions, standing out is rough, and in some ways better done on the strengths of the characters and their emotional journey than on having bullet points that have never been bullet points for this sort of show before. Circlet princess is nested deep down; it’s not just Sports or Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, it’s the weirdly popular combo of Cute Girls Playing a Fake Imaginary Sport Solely for Cute Girls to Play. That’s a lot of tropes it’s inheriting from the start, so I could cut it some slack.
Too bad the characters are generic as all getout. Yuuka is herself very simple – she’s a cheerful bumpkin who wants to do good at the game. And somehow super-important.
We kind of accept a little of that in main characters, but the rest of her squad is also pretty generic. First up, with multiple actual notes, we have Reina Kuroda, the stick-up-her-nethers representative of the student council who seems hellbent on shutting down the club. She eventually joins up after getting over the fact that her big sister was their former ace, and never removes the stick.
Ayumu Aizawa is next. She’s the hacker. We pretty much never see her actually fight since the format is 1v1 bouts and best of three despite teams being at least five big. She has a few grace notes about her dad being the founder of MR tech, but basically she’s the support girl who explains technical stuff.
The third most common fighter after Yuuka and Reina is Miyuki Kasahara. She… um… uses boomerangs? Technically this girl gets, if memory serves, the first of the obligatory “one girl’s issues per episode” episodes where we learn about her formerly being in track and field and, um, somehow having trauma exploitable by a bully girl because of it? In terms of personality, she’s painfully generic with a side of idiot that is eclipsed by Yuuka’s larger side of idiot.
Finally, there’s Nina Averin, the latecomer Russian FPS streamer whose episode is all down to technical angst about poorly excused issues with using gun in Circlet Bout. She’s basically nerd #2, not as nerdy as Ayumu.
The basic pattern of the show is to form the team, centering around a practice match with another school. Then it’s right on to the double-elimination Princess Cup, where the girls compete for all the glory and to have Yuuka meet that ace, Chikage Fujimura, at the top of the lists.
In this we get the homeopathic attempts at character building episodes for Miyuki, Reina, and Nina. We then get Yuuka’s moment, which is two episodes long: one for her to lose, because this is a double elimination tournament so they can do that, and one for her and the girls to turn it around by chilling at her home out in the boondocks.
They explain Yuuka’s “power” in here. Poorly. Evidently she executes moves so quickly the MR system loses track of them, causing her to appear to teleport. I’m pretty sure that’s a pretty big bug and also that your basic five senses could still follow a moderately athletic schoolgirl even if she desyncs from her holograms, but let’s assume the writers of this didn’t know much about game design and just sort of heard about speedrunners clipping out of bounds with high-velocity tricks like Backwards Long-Jumps in Mario 64 without understanding the conditions required to make even a pretty broken game cough up those results.
Getting back in the saddle gets us Ayumu’s time in the sun, but then it’s cruise control to the obligatory finals.
And I know I seem to be rushing through this, but this show is so stock and so uninventive that I really shouldn’t need to outline every lame enemy of the week. Do you honestly care about the girls whose lame trick is having their logo be so red that you kinda see cyan after staring at it do and how they go down? I didn’t think so. On with what we’re really here for.
Fanservice!
Naturally, the finals come down to team Yuuka versus team Chikage. Yuuka, throughout this, breaks her weapon repeatedly and re-manifests it in cool new forms. The first time there was a weapon break was back when she lost a bout, which was the first time we saw any weapon break. Her AI assistant trainer also stopped talking when that happened so folks kind of assumed he was deleted or something, very tragic and hard on Yuuka, sure, but she came back trading her big two hand sword for… a dinky little sword. That leveled up to a pair of dinky little swords. Versus Chikage, the pair of dinky little swords level up to… brass knuckles that look like dainty princess gloves.
I think we’ve got some retrograde motion there, but who am I to judge. Oh, right, a reviewer. They didn’t really sell most of these stages as cooler than the original big sword.
But, recall, double elimination. After Chikage’s first defeat, the board is reset for a final overtime 1v1 between Chikage and Yuuka to decide it, during which Chikage shows off that in addition to being able to “overclock” (clip through time) just like Yuuka, she can also level up from sword to fisticuffs just like Yuuka.
Throughout this, Ayumu’s dad, who is barely seen but who is also Chikage’s sponsor and the shady individual who gave Yuuka her AI trainer in addition to being the godfather of MR, watches and babbles about human evolution and the future.
And all I can say to this is… my brother in Haruhi, you invented Super Smash Girls. I’m sure every pubescent boy in your setting thanks you for devising a “sport” that gets the girls doing absurd showoff moves in skintight leotards, but I doubt it’s anything that profound.
Anyway, it looks like Yuuka loses, but then she gets an apparently time stopped believe in yourself and the fun of circlet bout speech from a not-dead G-kun, has a lame little transformation where her gloves get slightly bigger and she sprouts a tiara of hover gems, and she punches out Chikage to win their rematch.
The last episode then gives us a very long tail explaining how the following season main character school is on the bottom again, thanks to rules changing to be full team brawls rather than serial 1v1s. Somehow this means an extremely broken single player can no longer dominate (despite the fact that they could now run the board, logically thinking) and also fixes the crash bug that happened if two players tried to Overclock at the same moment (despite the fact that handling five times the bodies would presumably burn more processing power). We’re told they’re bringing in a coach and see a random dude for a second. Is this anime based on a game? Oh, look, it is. I’m just going to assume that Coach is the player character and bid this one farewell.
Circlet Princess was not a good anime. It ardently refused to give us anything but fanservice to justify its existence. That’s all it is. You watch it if you want to see cute girls in sexy leotards with just enough extremely tired plot to claim you’re not just watching cute girls bounce around in sexy leotards.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I’m not opposed to fanservice. I get it. But even Harukana Receive, which by virtue of being the girls’ beach volleyball anime was chock full of germane sports fanservice, brought more to the table. I called it out for being generic, but it at least executed its genericness with some degree of passion, some illusion that it wanted to create a good show.
Circlet Princess doesn’t clear that bar. And that leaves me deeply torn on its grade. It is a watchable show. It won’t hurt you, it won’t insult you, it won’t leave you a lesser person for having watched it. Its dead horse beats still crudely function but there was just nothing to connect to, to remember, or to come back to. And it actively punishes you for trying to think more deeply about it because of how nonsensical the setting and mechanics are, with not even the kind of fig leaf that is applied to the likes of Flying Circus in Aokana or Sensha-do in Girls und Panzer.
In the end, I’m going to be ruthless and give Circlet Princess a D+. Anything you want out of this show, you can get by googling art of the characters.