This review has been a long time coming for me. I first discovered Imitation Crystal earlier this year (in 2020), and when I first completed their other work, Spectral Wizard, I set about reading every other manga of theirs I could get my hands on. Since then, I’ve read Game Club twice, and am currently reading it a third time.

Game Club is a seemingly straightforward slice of life manga about a school club that focuses on video game development, and sometimes playing video games together, but there's a bit more there than meets the eye and elevates this work, or at least sets it apart among other slice of life works.

Imitation Crystal is a self-published author and to the best of my knowledge, most of their works have primarily seen an online release. If you read through what’s currently translated of Imitation Crystal, you’ll begin to notice a pattern in their works - depression and suicide are a common motif, but I’d say these topics are never handled in a way that feels gratuitous or edgy. Instead we’re left with works that cover how characters cope with their depression, how it has affected them, or their outlook in life that would lead them to feeling that way. And it’s not just for depression, characters in Imitation Crystal’s works often carry strong outlooks regarding life, that while not always realistic, end up feeling really convincing in the context of the work.

Game Club is a really good example of this at work. Suwa is a fragile boy who gets easily attached. He’s in emotional tatters after his pet duck, Junko, died, and so he carries around a rubber duck with him. Suwa keeps a lot of his feelings close to his chest, but he seems to place a great deal of emphasis on giving value to inanimate objects because they, unlike living things, are permanent and will never leave him. This means that a rubber duck, unlike his pet duck, will always be with him.

Morishita, on the other hand, is a girl with anger problems. It’s unclear at first what exactly she is angry at, but she easily gets into fights with others. She breaks objects and then promptly throws them away, and she’s often seen visibly angry without any clear indication why. It’s an interesting setup for this work and quite a bit of the conflict in Game Club comes from Suwa and Morishita’s ideals clashing with each other. Suwa’s a boy who guards himself from reality (maybe in this case, the reality of getting attached to something living) and Morishita, who wears her emotions on her sleeves and confronts reality head-on. Neither character is really willing to compromise on the way they think and it leads to a lot of tension between the two that ends up paying off really well.

I’m a big fan of slice of life as a genre, maybe because a lot of it leans heavily towards escapism. What’s not to like about characters having strong bonds with each other and engaging in silly activities? It’s a nice escape from the anxieties of real life because slice of life anime and manga are often so far removed from negative real life experiences. Sure, you have something like Hitoribocchi which has a main character with social anxiety, but even then, it’s something that’s heavily played up for gags. Of course I’ve met my fair share of people who don’t express the same interest in slice of life and maybe that’s the biggest turnoff someone might have when coming across Game Club, but it’s not really a work that leans towards escapism to work. Instead, it feels pretty real. The process of making games isn't something that's really taken lightly and it made me appreciate just how much work a completely amateur game would require. Yukina, the Game Club's president, even sees the process of making games as a creative outlet for your emotions, especially the negative ones.

And even if you can’t really relate to the process of making games, Game Club speaks quite a bit to how silly playing games, especially with your friends can be.

I had a lot of fun with the segments where the characters would play games because it reminds me a lot of playing games with my friends and the sort of silly, and maybe aggravating, experiences you can have, especially with friends who enjoy griefing.

In one chapter, Yukina goes through the games she’s made and because she doesn’t like playing games that are too hard, we’re treated to the sorts of silly games she made in order to circumvent this. Game Club has a lot of chapters and moments like this that prevent it from being bogged down too much by its conflicts, and unlike a lot of slice of life works out there, it feels very based in reality and relatable as a direct result of this. It doesn’t feel blatantly escapist, but instead nostalgic.

And speaking of Yukina, or Prez, she’s my favorite character in the series. She’s the main character of Game Club and often plays the straight man role. She’s a really down-to-earth character who takes an interest in weirdos. She’s dependable, hardworking, relatable, but even still, there’s a central mystery surrounding her that drives quite a bit of the events in the story forward that adds a level of intrigue to her character that you don’t normally see in characters that fill her role in the story. She’s the glue that holds the rest of the cast together and grounds the rest of the characters in reality a bit. Characters like that aren’t often interesting, but I think because of how consistently relatable she is, I found myself getting pretty attached to her.

I’m a big fan of Imitation Crystal’s art. Considering the sorts of topics the author tackles, a lot of the time it prevents the work as a whole to feel too bogged down in depression and creates a dichotomy between cute and simple art, and darker topics, which isn’t fully the case in Game Club, though it is something that’s still sort of at play. The art starts out pretty rough and amateurish in the beginning, but it gets markedly better as the series progresses. The characters are often given some visual gimmick that makes them really recognizable, and this is true of all of Imitation Crystal’s works.

To finish off this review, Game Club feels like Imitation Crystal’s answer to the slice of life genre, and it made me feel a wider breadth of emotions than I expected it to. I found myself wanting to really know what would happen between the characters and what would become of the Game Club. The ending itself is a mixed bag, it’s something you’ll either appreciate or hate, but I think given the rest of the work, it fits pretty well. Though it might seem intimidating at 11 volumes, each volume is around 60 pages long, so it’s not a heavy investment at all. I think Imitation Crystal is an author that deserves way way more attention and I’m looking forward to reading more of their works in the future.