New Game! Is about Aoba Suzukare a new character designer at Eagle Jump a video game company and it catalogs her journey into her profession into game character design and her integration into the company and its dynamics and structure as well as trying to achieve her own personal goals in her profession.
New Game! Is more than the occasional cute girl or sol gag manga that’ll go on for chapters of cute comedic moments it focuses on office scenarios typically cute but at the same time it mixes in a good deal of direction that the characters want to grow towards and take proactive steps toward developing in their respective fields and accomplishing their own projects as well as showing some of the upsets that can occur.
The series isn’t stringently dedicated to depicting an accurate portrayal of what it's like to work in a company setting let alone a game company one but it gives enough as to give you a general simplified portrayal of it the author balances this in a way such that you can still relate to the characters as they deal with their own frustrations and arcs.
I think it's important to note that unlike a series like Bakuman which albeit exaggerated in some ways had a lot of detailed insight into the workings and bureaucracy of Shonen Jump as well as insight into making manga that sells the experience in a very committed manner.
Bakuman will go into the technical aspects of its topic like applying screen tone or panel layout or writing/brainstorming storyboards that are very true to the story it's trying to tell which was a manga about two guys wanting to write manga for a living and as well Bakuman tells a more linear story never veering from the set goals.
In contrast New Game! Is more lackadaisical as it's tied to a 4-panel comic strip style and I would say that this style can either come off as lukewarm or relaxing
whereas when you read Bakuman you want to eagerly flip the next chapter to see the characters take another step towards fulfilling their goals whilst New Game! does do that it mixes in sol cute moments that slow down the series so depending on what type of reader you are this is can be annoying and boring or it won't really bother you.
On the other hand New Game! doesn’t ever feel like an eager relay to the end of the cover kind of reading experience for the reader it's more leisurely something I read on a break whenever I have time and the benefit of this is that I can really slowly be with the characters and the story and I don’t end up reading 100 chapters in one whole this isn’t to put one storytelling style over the other they both fit for their respective series Bakuman is hikers climb up a steep frostbiting mountain while New Game! It feels like a steady but enjoyable climb with a bunch of friends.
Maturity and Cute Girls
One of my favorite parts about this series is the genuinely poignant maturity of the characters issues which are tied to their own jobs whether it's trying to communicate better with the rest of your co-workers, rising to higher positions of leadership, and the anxiety that comes with that managing task, struggling to learn new skills plus the innate learning curve too and persistence to approach the difficult task and asking colleagues around you for help which I find to be the most important thing whether its work or trying to learn anything new you need to acknowledge your lack of knowledge and experience and yield to let other people help you so that you don’t have any wasted effort on your plate.
Working hard and working smart are intertwined you need to find out the most effective way of working hard that will yield the best results.
While the characters are most definitely tied to the fact that they’re the market appeal of the series based on being moe and cute and I will say that they’re not the highest feats of human complexity but I really enjoyed the individual goals of each character that surrounds Aoba
Aoba: is trying to strive to be a good character designer so she struggles, in the beginning, to meet deadlines for designs and accustom herself
Hifumi: struggles with interacting with people fluently in verbal conversations face to face and prefers text messaging she also is one of the most experienced characters is forced to rise to a leader experience despite her anxiety
Nenechi:__ has to be one of my favorites as she initially joins Eagle Jump as a temporary debugger whilst also being in college and she gets interested in programming and sets about trying to learn programming which is a steep hill experience for anyone as she sets about teaching herself C++ in self-study and also asking more experienced programmers she meets through her connections and Eagle Jump
These driven characters combined with a cute style and lackadaisical approach really will endear you and motivate you which is what it did to me
