As much as everyone wants to make this Karuta game the center of focus, I just don't think that's the strongest point of this show. I found it interesting to learn how the game is played and what makes it competitive at the beginning but ultimately I was more interested in the character relationships and story rather than the tournaments and techniques. To state the obvious, if you wanted to watch Karuta you can just watch real-life Karuta on Youtube.

It was definitely interesting to learn how this game worked for the first half of the show, if you didn't know I encourage you to just figure it out from watching the show. They don't explain everything early on but they gradually drop in more exposition over many episodes so you can eventually piece it together if you have patience. I will note that subtitle quality is essential, the subtitles that omit the pronunciation of the poems will be extremely hard to understand. Pronunciation is crucial for the game, but you only need to know the meaning in select scenes. I love how this game is physical, mental, and literally has poetry to it, also there's no significant advantage for men compared to women so most competition are mixed gender.

The show portrays this game very realistically not just in terms of how it looks but also how things play out in tournaments, is very realistic, in that the protagonists often lose and not for any deep reason or theme, sometimes you just lose to random nobody because there is no plot armor in real life.

For example this Arate guy he's said to be "God of Karuta", he's so good he uses the water breathing technique to play. When you see such a fancy character like this with his own special move you'd think he's gotta win the tornament or at least blow everyone away right? Nope, he just gets shit stomped and drops out early on, which is completely realistic but honestly just not very exciting to watch. And no, that wasn't a comedy beat. A good counter-example I can think of is Initial D, it looks realistic but the actual race mechanics aren't, also the better racer will somehow manage to win even if they're only supposed to be slightly better, that's just better for dramatic effect. This is why I'm just more interested in the characters and story, which the show has plenty of. Chihaya has many traits typical of a female-oriented story, she's really pretty but she never takes advantage of it, instead she compete on equal grounds with others in hard work, in enthusiasm, in dedication, and of course in Karuta. She is in a triangular love situation although she doesn't know it, with the two male leads which I found super interesting because Chihaya is legitimately really hot due to her passion to improve alone. The story begins when these three are in elementary school, they found each other connected through Karuta when Chihaya was the weakest player, but her love for the sport planted seeds in both of these guys' hearts. They were unfortunately separated by going to different secondary schools in a time skip, and we pick the story back up in grade 10.

Now Chihaya is actually the only one still playing Karuta and probably the strongest of the three, she aims to be crowned the "Queen" which is #1 female player in all of Japan but for that she needs to create a Karuta club at school, and also the help of her old time Karuta friends Arate and Taichi.

They would also need 3 more club members to be recognized as a club and I love these club members as well they really bring their own different strengths in both personality and capability to the Karuta club.

Tsutomu for example is a nerd with glasses and his thing is just studying hard. He seemed like a boring character at first because sometimes these stories have a male character that just conveniently has talents and do things for the female lead for free because he's secretly in love with her. That's not the case here at all, none of the 3 members are in love with Chihaya, they all had to get their own motivations to join the club. Tsutomu is actually really cool because he does statistical analysis for the club which is quite important for getting better at the game. Kanade loves traditional Japanese literature and already knows all of the poems on Karute cards but she doesn't appreciate how competitive karute players are totally utilitarian and don't even know what the poems mean. She and Chihaya will have to learn to appreciate Karuta from the other perspective they've never experienced before.

I found these characters to be the best part of the show, however due to the realism, the show struggles to give the characters further power ups when they're already top tier players, simply because there's no more obvious ways to improve. At the beginning of the show it is easy to explain this character is better because they move faster or memorized the poems better. But when they're already top tier, every player is fast and there's no more rational power ups for the protagonists to get. You even start getting some non-sensical power ups like playing slower rather than faster, which is supposed to make sense because you make less mistakes by going slower, but that's not really a power up is it? It's more just a change in style. I'm really curious how they're going to keep this going for 50 more episodes in season 2 and 3.

Loved the setup of the relationship between Chihaya, Arate and Taichi to be easily the most intriguing part, even when some of the Karuta games got old later on. Bonus point for excellent support characters.