Hi Score Girl II
ハイスコアガール II (High Score Girl II)
- Comedy
- Romance
- Love Polygon
- School
- Video Game
- Episodes
- 9
- Duration
- 23 min per ep
- Aired
- Oct 26, 2019 to Dec 21, 2019
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
It’s 1996, and high school life is still measured in arcade matches for Haruo Yaguchi, Akira Oono, and Koharu Hidaka. Now in their second year, the trio remains as devoted to video games as ever, bound by the same competitive spark that first pulled them together years earlier.
What started as rivalry and friendship has quietly shifted into more complicated emotions. As Haruo, Akira, and Koharu try to make sense of feelings they don’t quite know how to name, they lean on friends, juggle school days, and keep returning to the games that have always been there when everything else gets confusing.
Otaku Consensus
High Score Girl II lands as a confident finale: Yoshinobu Yamakawa’s direction and Tatsuhiko Urahata’s composition turn arcade rivalry into unusually tense romantic escalation, while J.C.Staff’s adaptation keeps the series’ retro-game specificity intact rather than using it as decoration. Critics and fans consistently praise the weighted Koharu-Haruo-Akira dynamic and the 1990s arcade texture; the recurring caveat is that the full-CGI character presentation remains an acquired taste, especially for viewers expecting conventional 2D rom-com polish.
Why You Should Watch
Watch High Score Girl II if you want a romance where the emotional language is competition, not speeches. It scratches the same itch as Tsuki ga Kirei for awkward adolescent sincerity, but filters that tension through fighting-game habits, arcade etiquette, and the strange intimacy of sharing a cabinet with someone you cannot easily talk to. Viewers who like love triangles with actual stakes for each participant will get more out of this than from louder, gag-first school comedies. The season is also unusually compact at nine episodes, so its pacing has little room for filler: the character turns, game references, and romantic pressure all point toward closure. If you grew up on Street Fighter-era arcades, it adds another layer of recognition without requiring you to be a game historian.
Key Characters
- KKoharu Hidaka(VA: Yuuki Hirose)
Koharu is compelling because her arc treats jealousy and competitiveness as active choices, making her more than the usual sympathetic second option in a love triangle.
- AAkira Oono(VA: Sayumi Suzushiro)
Akira stands out as a mostly silent romantic lead whose personality is communicated through play style, timing, and the way others orbit her presence.
- HHaruo Yaguchi(VA: Kouhei Amasaki)
Haruo remains funny because his game-obsessed tunnel vision is both his social flaw and the exact reason he can connect with people others misread.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
J.C.Staff continues the series in full CGI, an unusual production choice for a school romance and one that preserves Rensuke Oshikiri’s exaggerated, slightly rough-edged character silhouettes rather than smoothing them into standard TV-anime designs.
- 2
The romantic tension is structured around competitive play rather than confession scenes alone; reviews singled out the rivalry between Koharu and Akira as having motivations with real emotional weight.
- 3
The retro gaming texture is specific enough to include recognizable fighting-game logic, with critical discussion pointing to matchups like Guile versus Zangief as part of the show’s nostalgic vocabulary.
- 4
At nine episodes, the second season is leaner than a standard one-cour TV anime, giving the finale a compressed rhythm where school life, arcade sessions, and romantic decision-making are tightly interlocked.
- 5
The score is credited to Youko Shimomura, a composer especially meaningful for this material because her career is strongly associated with video game music, reinforcing the series’ arcade identity from the production side.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- High Score Girl II aired from October 26, 2019 to December 21, 2019, finishing as a short nine-episode season rather than a typical 12- or 13-episode cour.
- Fun fact 2
- The anime adapts Rensuke Oshikiri’s original work, with Yoshinobu Yamakawa directing and Tatsuhiko Urahata handling series composition.
- Fun fact 3
- AniList classifies the show with very high-confidence tags for Video Games at 96 percent and Coming of Age at 88 percent, reflecting how strongly viewers associate it with both arcade culture and adolescent maturation.
- Fun fact 4
- Its reception is notably strong for a niche CGI retro-gaming romance: the research data lists a MAL score of 7.94 from 89,166 votes and an AniList score of 78 out of 100.
- Fun fact 5
- The central trio is voiced by Kouhei Amasaki as Haruo Yaguchi, Sayumi Suzushiro as Akira Oono, and Yuuki Hirose as Koharu Hidaka.
Studios
- J.C.Staff
