Tomozaki has been compared and contrasted with many anime of its same nature. I’ve seen it be compared to Oregairu, solely for the fact that they’re both coming-of-age stories about a high schooler that slowly breaks out his shell and learns how to make friends. There’s also anime like Gamers!, Bunny Girl Senpai, and Oresuki, where there’s not that much in common except they both are slice-of-life rom-com. While Tomozaki might seem like a rehash of the ‘loser becomes popular, girls start to like him’-type of anime, it isn’t a derivative of any of the aforementioned anime. Back when I was reviewing the first few volumes of the light novel, I compared Tomozaki to an infamous and controversial book from the mid-00s, called ‘The Game’.
In The Game, Niel Strauss, the author, first learns, and then dives deep into the PUA (Pickup Artist) community, eventually meeting up with some of them. Strauss, throughout the book, learns how to ‘pickup women’ effectively, which ranges from learning how to ‘talk to women’, to learning how to emotionally manipulate them into having sex with you. What does Tomozaki have in common with this? The whole premise of the series revolves around Tomozaki taking advice from someone who has treated life like ‘a game’, and promises to show him how life can be fun after you ‘gamify’ it.
The person who promises to show Fumiya Tomozaki the fun in highschool life is Aoi Hinami. At the beginning of the anime, Hinami is shown to be your prototypical popular high-school girl—that is, until they accidentally meet up with each other not knowing who’s who. Tomozaki (nanashi), who’s on top of the ‘Attack Families’ game (a Smash clone) leaderboard, gets invited to meet up with the number two player, Hinami (NO NAME), after playing a few online games and discovering that they live close to each other. Tomozaki’s GameStop fit and terrible posture triggers Hinami into calling Tomozaki “a loser who’s going nowhere in life” and “[...] garbage without the slightest spark of ambition”. While being harsh, Hinami does have a point. Tomozaki has never attempted to break out of his shell, and as a result, has no friends in school and derives all of his enjoyment from playing games. Tomozaki’s understanding of how ‘real life’ works is that people like Hinami have ‘high base stats’ while people like himself are ‘bottom-tier characters’. Of course, this is true to an extent, but this is more decided by your socio-economic position rather than by your parents messing up your stats while giving birth to you. With unknown motives, Hinami decides to show Tomozaki how she looks without makeup, showing him how you can ‘improve stats’ and how his fatalist outlook on life is self-defeating. Hinami, knowing that Tomozaki grinded his way to being the top of the Atafami leaderboard, knows he is capable of working towards goals and offers to teach him “[...] the rules of this game one by one.” Tomozaki, being enticed by Hinami treating life ‘as a game’, takes up her offer.
Most of Hinami’s ‘tips’ to Tomzaki are common sense, such as buying new clothes that look good on you, having better posture, attempting to reach out to classmates to talk to them, and getting a haircut that makes him look like he takes a shower more than once a week. She also has ‘tips’ for him that range from strange, like wearing a mask and pretending to have a cold in order to ‘practice his smile’ under the mask, to straight-up weird, like practicing ‘conversation starters’ on index cards like how someone would study vocabulary for an upcoming test. They meet up before and after school in order for Hinami to give Tomozaki ‘goals’, some short-term like ‘talk to the girl that sits beside you in class’, to medium-term like ‘finding a girlfriend’. Shaping these goals like RPG quests, while still being daunting to a loser like Tomozaki, further pushes Hinami’s narrative of treating life as a game and gives him something to work towards, making him feel like he’s making progress. Yes, this is a strange way to attempt to push yourself out of being a loser, but it does help Tomozaki, so it’s good for one thing at least.
While I’ve been mean to Tomozaki for most of this review so far, I’ll give him credit for one thing—once he puts his mind to something, he can find unique and useful ways to succeed. Whether it is Atafami, ‘de-geeking’ himself, or various other things, such as becoming the ‘brain’ of an election campaign. While Tomozaki is easy to understand, Hinami is a very mysterious person. Little is known about her and her backstory; all we know about her is that she’s the best at everything she puts her mind to (except for Atafami, which Tomozaki is better at). Unlike other girls that are ‘the best at everything’, it’s clearly stated that Hinami wasn’t born into being who she is, and has worked around the clock to become who she is. Her motive behind her tireless drive of being on top isn’t known in the anime, but it’s clear that she views life as something to be the best at, not something you should enjoy. The only reason she even cares about Tomozaki is because he always bests her in Atafami, no matter how much she practices. There is an idea of Aoi Hinami. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real her. (While Hinami is nowhere near as psychotic as Patrick Bateman, it is funny to see the two compared.)
Along with Tomozaki and Hinami is a supporting cast that is sometimes hard to keep up with, due to how many are introduced in a small amount of time. Thankfully, the supporting cast sticks around and aren’t tossed away once they’re not important for the plot anymore. Going from female to male order, our first side character is Yuzu Izumi. Izumi is the girl that Tomozaki has to ‘talk to three times’ to attempt to acquaint himself with her. They form a friendship after she requests that he teach her how to play Atafami, since her crush plays it. Minami Nanami (known as ‘Mimimi’) is from what I can tell the most popular side character. She is an energetic and cheerful girl that is persistent (although not as much as Hinami) at track and field (and formally basketball). What separates Mimimi from Hinami is that Mimimi is a lot more sincere and less cynical than Hinami. She’s a hard worker, but is a lot more emotionally driven and vulnerable. She’s very friendly to everyone, even to outcasts like Tomozaki and her best friend Hanabi Natsubayashi (known as ‘Tama-chan’). Unlike Mimimi, Tama is quite abrasive, to the point where it gets her in trouble sometimes. She’s similar to Tomozaki in the way that they were unsociable (Tama’s only friend was Mimimi while Tomozaki had no one at the beginning of the anime). Her small stature and irritable nature make her an easy target of Mimimi’s hug attacks on her. Last, but not least, for the girls is Fuuka Kikuchi. While Kikuchi is also in the same class as Tomozaki, they often talk in the library while during lunch breaks. She’s a ‘fairy-like’ reserved bookworm that loves the books of ‘Michael Andi’, which I thought was originally a pseudonym for Stephen King, but now think is just a made-up name. She’s an aspiring novelist who becomes friends with Tomozaki over Michael Andi books. Kikuchi isn’t that connected with any friend group involving other characters, but is on good terms with everyone. Moving on to the fellas; Shuuji Nakamura is the first character to be introduced in the anime. He challenges Tomozaki to a set of Atafami, which turns into multiple after he refuses to believe that he’s not as good as Tomozaki. He’s overly competitive and shown to be quite temperamental, especially when it comes to Atafami. He is the one that Izumi has a crush on, being unaware of it while at the same time having a crush on her. Takahiro Mizusawa, whose good friends with Nakamura, is as level-headed as Nakamura is overly-aggressive. He is an aspiring beautician whose smooth-talking and good looks making him attractive to girls. He’s the closest thing to a ‘role model’ that Tomozaki has, seeing how popular he is. Mizusawa is a perceptive person, being the first person to notice (other than Tomozaki’s sister) that Tomozaki was intentionally trying to make himself more popular (“You read a de-geekification book!”) Other side characters that play small roles are the ring-leader Erika Konno and the goofball Takei.
When I started the light novel last year, I thought Tomozaki was just going to be generic wish-fulfillment garbage that was somehow more popular than other generic wish-fulfillment garbage. I admit it now that I had the wrong assumption about the series. The closest it gets to being ‘wish-fulfillment’ is the fact that someone as ‘perfect’ as Hinami would go out of her way to help Tomozaki in the first place. Once I realized what motives Hinami might have, then it became clear that she isn’t doing this to satisfy the reader—rather, she’s doing this out of self-interest. I gave the first volume a two out of five stars, mostly due to how cringe-worthy Tomozaki can be. In light novels, you get to see more of Tomozaki’s inner monologue, which is a double-edged sword. Tomozaki’s inner thoughts are agonizing to read since he’s a young man that’s analyzing social situations like he’s playing a video game. Is that normal? No, it isn’t. Usually when a loser like Tomozaki starts analyzing life as ‘a game’, it means that they’re up to no good. Tomozaki though is a very genuine person. He sees this as an opportunity to integrate into the real world. Sure, getting a girlfriend would be nice, but he doesn’t want to become a two-timing player. That would be antithetical to his character.
A theme that takes a while to come up, but is important to the series, is the question ‘Do I really want to do this?’. Does Tomozaki really want to ‘master the game of life’, or does he want to just stay being the best at Atafami online. In Tomozaki’s case, getting out of his comfort zone and learning that there’s a whole world outside of video games is invaluable. He doesn’t have the same drive to be on top of the social ladder as Hinami though, which sometimes puts them at odds. While they both love games, and love treating life as one, Tomozaki and Hinami have drastically different opinions on how one should live life. While Hinami may be feeding him bad info on what the purpose of ‘mastering the game of life’ is, at least she was kind enough to show Tomozaki how to do so in the first place. From what we know, Tomozaki didn’t have anything going for him except for his skill in Atafami before meeting Hinami. Without his chance encounter with Hinami, he would probably waste his time in high school, playing games and being socially withdrawn, and would spend his time at university the same way. If he wasn’t given this opportunity, there’s no telling if he would ever get out of his bubble. Even if Hinami’s outlook on life is overly-cynical, she’s given Tomozaki a way to enjoy life outside of video games, which is invaluable.
What saves Tomozaki from becoming a monster is his moral compass. If he was a guy that wanted to become a ‘lady-killer’, he could use Hinami’s teachings to manipulate girls into liking him, causing this series to be a harem instead of a slice-of-life show with rom-com elements. I’m sure Hinami would help him with that if he was interested. But Tomozaki doesn’t see the point of asking out a girl that he doesn’t like, so he could never do that. Bringing back up the book ‘The Game’ I mentioned in the beginning. While it shows the glamorous lifestyles that ‘professional’ PUAs live, it also shows how vapid their lifestyle really is. Once you make having sex with as many women as you like your most important goal in life, you lose your soul and the ability to see women as anything else but playthings. Throughout the book, the readers can sense how this ‘PUA training’ requires you to see women as lesser beings that are meant to be conquered. Other than the whole emotionally manipulating women thing, it’s the biggest tragedy in the book. The problem with books like The Game is that it leaves readers (mostly young men who are unsatisfied with their life) wanting to live the same life Strauss lives in the book, even knowing what it does to a person’s brain. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to learn how to be more confident and outgoing. What books like The Game end up doing however is ‘either unintentionally or intentionally’ promoting a lifestyle that is morally bankrupt and transactional. I would also apply this to Mark Manson, or any other ‘self-help’ author, books, but I haven’t bothered to read any of them. The only reason I bothered to read The Game was because back in the day, men on image-boards would tell others to read it every day—it was to see what the hell they were trying to inflict on my teenage brain. All of this relates to Tomozaki because this series has inspired some young men to get out of their rut and try to stop being a ‘loser’. While it isn’t completely against anything PUA-related, it’s more of a ‘young man learns how to reintegrate into society’ series rather than a ‘young man learns how to bang several women’ series.
What I like about Tomozaki is that it’s shown that above all, what got Tomozaki to ‘de-geek’ his life is gain some self-confidence. Even if he still puts himself down, the fact that he isn’t moping around all the time is a definite step up. Of course, Hinami’s help was essential in this. Getting a haircut, buying and wearing ‘trendy’ clothes, and other tips helped ‘normify’ himself, but nothing fundamentally about his character has changed. To state it like I think how Tomozaki would; while his ‘character’ has the same skill set, everything got buffed. He doesn’t need to invent a whole new persona to be able to relate with others—all he needs to do is make an attempt to connect with his classmates. I believe that this lesson is important to young men who may have a misunderstanding that you need to completely rework your personality when it comes to relating to others. Of course, being a spineless twerp is undesirable, but behaving like someone you aren’t to try to impress others is just as unnatural and off-putting. It’s hack to say this, but ‘being yourself’ is the best course to go (unless if you’re a detestable person). Perhaps I’m only one of the few people that came away from the Tomozaki series with this interpretation, but I hope others can see this as well.
If you’ve gotten this far into the review, you’re probably wondering “Does this guy think there’s anything bad about Tomozaki?”. The answer is yes, I do have some complaints. My first one has to do with Tomozaki being ‘the best’ at Atafami. The fact that he’s never reaped the benefits of being the best, like going to tournaments and winning prizes, or even being sponsored, is quite odd. I can excuse Hinami from not doing this, since while she would probably love to go to a competition to stomp everyone she faces, being known as a top-rated Atafami player isn’t one of her top goals. The only logical reason I can think of is that he’s an ‘onliner’, or someone who’s only good when playing online, and nowhere near as good when playing on the same console. I’m not that much of an ‘Atafami’ player, but from what little I know, being the best online isn’t anywhere near the same as being good at LANs (you could say this about any online competitive game though). Maybe the potential fame and chance to be embarrassed scares him away. Or he’s afraid that he’d look like a weirdo there. To his defense, ‘Atafami’ players (Western ones at least) are quite known for being unhygienic, so he wouldn’t look too out of place there. The premise of Tomozaki and Hinami being first and second on the Atafami leaderboards in Japan, respectively, is still a bit absurd, but I can forgive it on the basis that Yuuki Yaku, the author of the original light novel, had to have a basis for Tomozaki and Hinami to meet. Perhaps I would’ve gone with ‘best at his school’, or ‘best in his prefecture’, but it doesn’t matter that much. The animation is middling as well, but not bad enough to put me off.
Another thing that makes the show hard to watch at times is Tomozaki’s inner monologue. I know the only thing he can relate social climbing to is ‘leveling up’ in video games, but it does get grating to hear him continuously make references to ‘leveling up’ and ‘gaining EXP’ in relation to real-life situations. Other than it being painful to watch, it portrays gaining friends and becoming more popular as an overly transactional thing. To Tomozaki’s defense, this is the only way he can portray this to himself, and Hinami, the queen of social climbing, pushes him to think this way. As I stated earlier, he uses his new-found ‘skills’ to become less lonely and gain friends, which I can’t blame him for. He’s a good guy that unfortunately became a ‘loner’ due to misconceptions that manifested in his mind. By the way, these inner monologues are more cringeworthy in the light novel, so be prepared if you decide to read the light novel.
At the end of the day, the Tomozaki series has an increasingly important message to its fanbase of young men (and women too). Young adults today, in America at least, are increasingly more disconnected from the outside world and have no life outside of the internet and work/school. This has been exasperated by the pandemic, which made it impossible for many young people to safely go to social outings (go to bars, attend parties, go on vacation with friends, etc.) There’re many reasons for this, ranging from the rise of indoor entertainment, the lack of belief in the future of our planet, or, most likely, just not ever learning to make friends. These are reasons in America, but they could as easily be the same for Japan. What I respect the most about Tomozaki is that the message it sends. That your standing as a ‘bottom-tier character’ isn’t something that’s set in stone. That with some self-improvement, such as ‘cleaning up’ and attempting to talk to others around you, you can increase your self-confidence, and in return be able to ‘rehabilitate’ yourself in society. While this is way easier to do as a teenager than as an adult, it’s still possible. The message in Tomozaki is also way less cynical than the message in any PUA or self-help book. Tomozaki doesn’t trick anyone into being his friend—they enjoy the little dweeb for how passionate he is about Atafami and other things he sets his mind towards. Hinami on the other hand IS a deeply cynical character, but she and Tomozaki serve as good foils to each other, showing that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I’m perhaps one of the only people that got this message out of it. Without it, I think that I would consider Tomozaki an average show. Even without the message, Tomozaki is a fun show to watch. If you’re into slice-of-life rom-coms, then you’ll like Tomozaki. It isn’t that much like Oregairu or anything else that I've seen people compare it to, but it’s still an enjoyable watch. And if you enjoy the anime, be sure to read the light novels, since the anime only adapts the first three volumes, and (as of me writing this) six volumes have been officially translated and released.