My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999

Episodes 1-3

I was predisposed to prefer My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999's first episode premise. I'm always happy to have more goofy romances starring actual adults. And hey, I was served well before by a previous series with a story initiated by a girl named Akane escaping heartbreak by retreating into a virtual world. So the premiere of this new show, serving as our intro to this Akane as she encounters the titular Yamada and drags him along on a personality-showcasing bitch session, made for a fun introductory time. I'm happy to have a heroine like Akane, a messy girl failure whose "chemistry" with Yamada amounted to her simply ricocheting off of him in a way that served both of them well.

The main concern I came away with was how well Akane and Yamada could sustain the story through character growth beyond their foundational shticks. To this end, the second and third episodes expand on details about both people and the virtual and social lives they navigate. It also throws a couple of other wrenches into the setup I thought I was getting, primarily because while Akane is an adult, Yamada is not. He's a high schooler. Forget having a love story with Yamada-kun at Lv999; Akane should try waiting to have a love story with Yamada-kun after he turns 18! Though maybe he is 18, he is in his last year of high school. And I'm not too bothered by the minimal age gap of the setup. If anything, it makes Akane come off as even more of a messy disaster, seeing as she swoons over a teenager.

How and if Yamada-kun at Lv999 addresses that aspect can probably wait until we get deeper into the series and the potential relationship. After that initial encounter, our later followings of Akane don't even have her exclusively honed in on Yamada as the center of her efforts to get over her breakup. He still plays a part in it, returning Akane's lost necklace and commenting about the guild's overstuffed item box, which proves symbolically relevant later. But Akane is also coaxed along by her friend Momoko and her understanding of herself to move on from all her figurative and literal baggage. We only have so much room in our item storage and hearts.

It's a good way to demonstrate right after the first episode that Yamada-kun at Lv999 has thematic chops on top of being able to depict growth in its lead character, who desperately, desperately needs it. Everything else around it can feel more slowly circular, however. Having her interest piqued about Yamada's online and offline relationships with fellow guildie Ruri, is a clever enough thread to follow up on next. But even as I generally enjoy following Akane into the messy nightmare spiral that is her own head, we perhaps spend a little too much time filling out the episode with her pondering the implications of Yamada and Ruri's relationship. It leaves us waiting for the next episode to follow up on these revealed offline identities and their actual characterization. Though the social sadist in me was still tickled to see Akane utterly fumbling her interactions at the start of the offline meetup, everyone stared in stunned silence, leaving her crushed by the weight of her failure. Even as the plot will probably work to make her get better, I hope Akane will still find ways to suck.

Getting to know those other characters will help propel the show forward. Yamada himself is particularly enigmatic, leaving his half of the show feeling like even more of a holding pattern. Even the lengthy post-credits scene from the third episode doesn't use his FPS teammates to contextualize him much beyond "Not as much of an insensitive weirdo as they are." Despite his apparent struggles with reading people and emoting, he seems like a nice guy. Whether there's some backstory to this or if he's simply Like That will remain to be seen as we in the audience grow closer to him alongside Akane's floundering efforts.

This makes for romantic writing that might leave Yamada-kun at Lv999 feeling more uneven if its stellar direction did not elevate it. The quality's unsurprising when you find out it was directed by Morio Asaka, who's always excelled at dialing up the presentation of ostensibly simple subject matter. And so even the act of Akane exchanging text messages gets juiced up via choices presenting them on train windows. We're treated to beautiful deployments of shoujo standards like bubble backgrounds alongside more modern flourishes inherent to the story's format, like Asaka knowing precisely when to switch between viewing the real world, the game world, or the game viewed through the real world. They animate Akane's in-game avatar doing that little sideways walk you get out of video game characters when the camera's locked in one direction; it's loaded with that kind of brilliant stuff. So I'm still on board, even with plenty of uncertainty about how My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999 will turn out. Much of that is thanks to the solid foundations of the anime's direction and my appreciation for Akane's character. How the show levels up beyond that will dictate my long-term opinion of it.

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My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is keeping busy keeping up with the new anime season and is excited to have you along. You can also find him writing about other stuff over on his blog, as well as spamming fanart retweets on his Twitter, for however much longer that lasts.