KANOJO GA FLAG WO ORARETARA

DESCRIPTION

CAST

NOVEL ComedyKanojo ga Flag wo Oraretara
OVA ComedyKanojo ga Flag wo Oraretara OVA
MANGA ComedyKanojo ga Flag wo Oraretara

REVIEWS

• 

  ReBuggy

  15/100
  This show is an absolute clusterfuck.

  This show is an absolute clusterfuck.

  Kanojo ga Flag wo Oraretara, or If Her Flag Breaks, is a 2014 anime about a boy named Souta Hatate who can see flags. It is properly abbreviated as "gaworare," but I'm going to call it KanoFlag because I never bothered learning the proper abbreviation when it aired so I'm sure as hell not going to bother using it now.

  KanoFlag belongs to an increasingly common subgenre of the harem that I like to call "gimmick harem." Like other harems, it has a notable cast of girls, most of whom have at least some sort of vaguely romantic interest in the generic male protagonist, but instead of being based around wacky fanservice hijinks, the show focuses on some novel, out-there idea. Noucome, for example, where the protagonist deals with being forced to make difficult decisions. Invaders of the Rokujouma is another, this one centered around all the characters fighting for room in the apartment. Most of these are adaptations of light novels, and presumably because the writers wanted to write harems but didn't know how to do fanservice in text form, they are almost entirely devoid of actual ecchi material--which as I'm sure you all know, is a large part of the reason you'd want to watch a harem in the first place. It's a terrible genre, and KanoFlag is one of the worst examples of it that I've seen.

  KanoFlag's gimmick is that Souta can see flags, presumably referring to event flags, and knows how to break or advance them. This ends up being a vague power that the writers seem to have no idea how to handle consistently. Sometimes flags are things like romance flags or death flags. I can get that. But when you include things like a flag denoting the direction a character is going to kick a ball, or have flags he can't break or that respond differently to being broken, things become a lot more convoluted. It's either the most OP thing ever, or it's completely useless.

  The plot seems to aim for complex, but it only manages to hit other adjectives starting with C: complicated, convoluted, and confusing. I've watched this show twice (for some reason) and I still haven't quite managed to grasp the plot, which seems to have something to do with an old king and a guy becoming a flag. It really doesn't help that the show paces the plot in a horrendous way, alternating between episodes packed with nothing but generic harem fluff and episodes where all the exposition happens at once. And the plot it tries to focus on is pretty heavy, too, so the tone of the show ends up getting whipped around, snapping back and forth like a flag fluttering in the violent wind. At the end of the show, they go to an alternate reality, everyone turns into a D&D class, and they fight a boat.

  Then, of course, there are the characters. This show has some of the blandest, least interesting characters I've seen in anime, and it has a lot of them. The harem has over a dozen members by the end, in fact. Keep in mind that this is only a 12-episode show, meaning that the show is absolutely bloated with these boring, bland faces with unmemorable character designs. With so many characters and with a convoluted plot to cram into such a short space, they receive almost no development and remain generic archetypes. In fact, they fail to even live up to the standards of most generic archetypes, instead feeling more like tokens. You have the token onee-chan, the token tsundere, the token trap, the token robot girl, etc. No one develops past that. They just stay a sea of boring, redundant faces.

  I honestly don't know why I stuck with this show to the end, despite being able to tell it was so bad from early on. There were only two things I actually liked about this show, and that's Megumu and when they went "gao, gawo!" at the end of every episode. Don't watch this show. I don't know how anyone could actually enjoy it, especially when there are better alternatives. It's dumb. Just...don't do it. One star.

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• 

  leesonTV

  20/100
  A ridiculously horrendous attempt at trying everything at once with not one thing working, a complete and utter mess

  I watched this anime around 3 years ago and said that I actually liked this anime back then... god, was I so wrong... I can't even begin to get into how much this anime actually irks me but how about we start on something we all should consider... the story.

  What on earth were they even trying to do here? This anime is a prime example of the writer throwing everything at the board and seeing what stuck (or didn't) because literally, this anime has everything you'd expect and more and the execution of it was piss poor. The story has no real structural integrity, half the time I feel as if the writer didn't know what they were doing and kept writing themselves into a corner after each interaction or scene. It feels jumpy, all over the place in an unorganised and unsophisticated mess.

  And the characters... my lord, HOW MANY? You'd expect a group in a harem to be relatively small, right? Only like 5 or 6 characters? This anime... has 12. FEMALES. I don't know about anyone else but 13 characters to focus on individually in a harem is going overboard... Not to mention, most have every generic personality type in the book, like the affectionate kind, the tsundere, the yandere, the big sister, etc. and not a single one of them are written or developed that well at all, not even the MC, Souta Hatate, isn't safe in any of this. I would overlook those personality types, but the anime as a whole is just obnoxious and annoying to sit through, I had forgotten what Akane's voice sounded like but it's way too high pitched and just becomes irritating to listen to after a few seconds... (no hate to her VA though)

  The OP is way too obnoxious for my taste too and can get on your nerves, the ED is... sort of better but not by much (no hate to musical artists responsible either).

  For the emotional factor, because oh boy this anime has one... I know people love to tear into Clannad for being "cry porn" but if you thought Clannad was somehow emotionally manipulative, then If Her Flag Breaks would redefine the definition of emotionally manipulative... not even joking, this is worse than anything else Maeda has written. Things just become emotional for no reason other than to pad out an already failed attempt of a story and it's only 14 episodes long. When you know you have to pad out something that isn't that long in the first place with pointless emotional fluff, you're doing something wrong.

  On a positive note, Souta's ability to see and destroy "flags" is unique and in concept and execution, makes for a good power. The art style looks pretty decent and the OST was pretty good actually, I just hoped they didn't use the same emotional track for those drab parts though.

  In summary, If Her Flag Breaks was something that had great potential with Souta's ability being the focus. But unfortunately, the good about the series is overshadowed by a garbage story, annoying, unfunny, and forgettable drab characters, dreadful usage of emotional devices and the show's own sheer obnoxiousness which left me despising it. To think that I actually liked this 3 years ago honestly makes me happy now that I have changed my view on anime over these last few years since I would have only been seeking literal dumpster fire anime otherwise.

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