This was a show that started off with good promise, but got bogged down in details, so that it lost a huge amount of steam in the process. “Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend” (“Saenai Hiroin no Sodatekata” “How to Train the Ordinary Girl to be a Heroine”), tells the story of Tomoya Aki. He is a textbook nerd otaku, as he also has a blog where he reviews EVERYTHING: mangas, animes, video games. I think he even rates the figurines that one can get as well. His life is wholly, solely devoted to this, and he practically has no time for anything else…except his part-time job to fund all of this madness.

But he has dreams and hopes and ideas and what he wants to do is make a visual novel computer game, but not any VN game; it has to be the Greatest Game Ever for Eternity! This is fueled by a vision of a beautiful girl he saw at the top of a hill, cherry blossoms fluttering about her. Well, he is an idea man, but is skint on being able to produce what he wants. To this end, he enlists the help of several girl supports, for script and art design and music and whatnot. Two of them are in his class, so he tries to inveigle school beauties Eriri Spencer Sawamura (left) for designing the artwork and visual approach, and Utaha Kasumigoaka (right) for writing the game scenario. (more…)