In an industry as saturated as anime has gotten, it's a given that not every show can stand out from the heavy hitters, or even stuff that's similar to it. There are shows that stand out for the right reasons, shows that don't quite stand out, and then you have those that stand out for all the wrong reasons. Sadly, the latter is the case for PuraOre: Pride of Orange, an anime that basically tries to combine three things: ice hockey, the everyday slice-of-life adventures of cute girls, and idols, all while failing at not only balancing them out, but executing any of them in a compelling manner. The story follows Manaka Mizusawa, a chipper young girl who one day finds out her town Nikko is holding ice hockey classes held by the Nikko Dream Monkeys. She convinces her younger sister and other members of her embroidery club to try it out. The girls immediately fall in love with the sport, and through it, they make some new friends and face competition from rival teams, with their manager wanting to shake things up and have them perform victory dances whenever they win.

Yeah, there's no denying it: Pride of Orange is basically a glorified advertisement for a mobile game. A mobile game that shut down not long after the anime finished, by the way, which should tell you how well this show did at trying to advertise it. Hell, the character designs look like they were ripped right out of Love Live (And from what I hear, the person who designs the Bang Dream characters did the designs!!). Seriously, the whole show just looks...bland. Like it was only made to be churned out by a production committee to convince people to buy stuff, that's it. The backgrounds are fine and the animation is smooth, but everything else about it makes it near indistinguishable from other slice-of-life anime other than the hockey bits. I'm speaking as a person who couldn't care less about sports in any way, nor do I know much about sports, especially ice hockey, but even the show's attempts at trying to make ice hockey seem interesting ring hollow because all it really amounts to is "Ice hockey is great!!" without going into detail about why people would even like the sport. The fact that they have Manaka, the single least interesting character in the show, only gets interested in it on a whim rather than something more substantial, tells you just how little the anime cares about the sport its trying to shill.

Speaking of Manaka, the characters. There's very little to them. They're all flat, carbon copies of characters from other shows that were done way better elsewhere. They have no depth, no nuance, nothing to them other than their single defining trait, yet the show expects you to care about them. One character, who is advertised as being one of the mains, leaves the show within three episodes and barely appears after that, yet the show makes her departure and everyone's reactions to it sooooo cheesy and melodramatic in an attempt to wring tears out of you, but it doesn't work because we never got the time to even learn more about this character or find reasons to care about her. Manaka doesn't even get so much as a character arc, as she's literally just a discount Honoka from Love Live. Honestly, the only character I really liked was Naomi, that's it. The absolute worst of them is Yoko, their manager, mainly because of the way she tries to recruit Yu, a girl who quit hockey, onto the team, namely she repeatedly calls the girl on her phone and then stalks her by coming to her house unannounced and browbeats her into joining the Dream Monkeys. Because that's a surefire way to make somebody love you, riiiiiight? Beyond her creepy stalking of Yu, I just found Yoko to be obnoxious and annoying.

Even the soundtrack isn't much to write home about. I liked the ending song, that's it. The thing is, PuraOre tries to mix three things into one package, and is even marketed as an idol series, but there's literally naught but five minutes dedicated to idol stuff, all of which never ties into the narrative whatsoever. You could literally cut it out and nothing would be lost, so for all of PuraOre's posturing over it being an idol series rings completely hollow because it doesn't even do anything with its idol stuff. So yeah, PuraOre's biggest problem is that in its attempts to mix three different genres into one, it completely fails at doing anything substantial with any of them, being little more than just fodder churned out in a bad attempt to copy Uma Musume's success. Is it any wonder the mobile game it tried to advertise wound up being shut down? And don't even get me started on the utterly cheesy dialogue. "The bonds of our hearts connect the puck!" Really? Bleeeegh.

If you're into this type of show, more power to you. But PuraOre: Pride of Orange is just another generic gacha game advertisement that doesn't even do a good job at trying to advertise the mobile game its based on, let alone being a standalone anime. It's not offensively bad or anything, but it's just bland and flavorless.