So this was an interesting anime initially. You know the whole concept of anime based around board games that people play professionally is always an interesting concept to me. However, it seems that this anime did everything in its power to keep things weird. Now a lot of anime will do something like that to keep things weird, but this was a bad weird. Not the good kind of weird where there is a lot of obnoxious humor or a very unusual setting or something that can get you interested or wanting to keep up. No this was the bad weird.

First off, everyone is an eccentric. I get that you probably have to be some kind of character when you play Shogi professionally, but these guys all took it to an extreme. I mean the only person who did not have some kind of weird quirk was the only character who was on the brink of failure. That is not generally good for an anime. When say eccentric I really mean it too. You had the sadist girl, the I guess fashionista or princess, the prince, the bitch and so on. Yeah that was something that was really weird for me.

Then there was the whole loli aspect of things. I mean yeah I get it people like to have this kind of narrative but seriously. Every couple of minutes we have one of the Ais making some kind of joke or statement that can be misinterpreted? That got old and weird very fast. Especially when you included the younger friends who were clearly too young to know what was going on. However, I guess that was the only real appeal of this anime. If you did not have that kind of crap going on in the anime this anime is actually a pretty poor game anime.

I guess maybe this anime was designed for people who have an understanding... like and advanced understanding of how the games work. However, that is a pretty niche market. True if I took some time and did some research yeah I would likely be able to find all sorts of information on the various different strategies and things they spoke about. However, there are plenty of other anime out there who can make that a natural part of the anime. I guess that is what you get for making this from a light novel. I guess that it is not too bad to show off how intense the matches are. However, they can only really be that intense when you go off and know something about where the game is going.

The last thing that really annoyed me was the whole high schooler aspect of things. I mean yeah I get it we have the youngest Ryouuou ever and that was the whole bit they did for this. However, having that whole love story thing mixed in really kind of weirded me out. Why did Sora have to be a part of this whole ordeal. If anything she detracted from the anime pretty badly since for some reason there was a need to make her into some kind of love triangle. The fact is that you did not need her. She was just in the way of the entire anime. You could have made this anime work just using the two Ais and making a weird sort of love triangle out of that with them working to get their masters approval and all that stuff. Nope we had to have Ginko and pretty much every other female that Yaichi had any kind of interaction with his potential love slave. It was almost like this was written as the script for a visual novel and they they decided it was not good enough.

Like I said they keep things weird in this anime it is hard to really want to recommend this anime with all the various issues that it has had over the course of the season. The whole anime is pretty predictable as well. You can almost see the loli misinterpretation coming or the beating coming or the lose coming or whatever. I am not sure what could have made this anime better but maybe if the focus was on Shogi and not all the girls wanting to get in the pants of Yaichi, then the anime could have been a real success. However, I guess that is not what the audience wants these days which makes anime hard to watch.