If Her Flag Breaks

This show is an absolute clusterfuck.

Kanojo ga Flag wo Oraretara, or If Her Flag Breaks, is a 2014 anime about a boy named Souta Hatate who can see flags. It is properly abbreviated as "gaworare," but I'm going to call it KanoFlag because I never bothered learning the proper abbreviation when it aired so I'm sure as hell not going to bother using it now.

KanoFlag belongs to an increasingly common subgenre of the harem that I like to call "gimmick harem." Like other harems, it has a notable cast of girls, most of whom have at least some sort of vaguely romantic interest in the generic male protagonist, but instead of being based around wacky fanservice hijinks, the show focuses on some novel, out-there idea. Noucome, for example, where the protagonist deals with being forced to make difficult decisions. Invaders of the Rokujouma is another, this one centered around all the characters fighting for room in the apartment. Most of these are adaptations of light novels, and presumably because the writers wanted to write harems but didn't know how to do fanservice in text form, they are almost entirely devoid of actual ecchi material--which as I'm sure you all know, is a large part of the reason you'd want to watch a harem in the first place. It's a terrible genre, and KanoFlag is one of the worst examples of it that I've seen.

KanoFlag's gimmick is that Souta can see flags, presumably referring to event flags, and knows how to break or advance them. This ends up being a vague power that the writers seem to have no idea how to handle consistently. Sometimes flags are things like romance flags or death flags. I can get that. But when you include things like a flag denoting the direction a character is going to kick a ball, or have flags he can't break or that respond differently to being broken, things become a lot more convoluted. It's either the most OP thing ever, or it's completely useless.

The plot seems to aim for complex, but it only manages to hit other adjectives starting with C: complicated, convoluted, and confusing. I've watched this show twice (for some reason) and I still haven't quite managed to grasp the plot, which seems to have something to do with an old king and a guy becoming a flag. It really doesn't help that the show paces the plot in a horrendous way, alternating between episodes packed with nothing but generic harem fluff and episodes where all the exposition happens at once. And the plot it tries to focus on is pretty heavy, too, so the tone of the show ends up getting whipped around, snapping back and forth like a flag fluttering in the violent wind. At the end of the show, they go to an alternate reality, everyone turns into a D&D class, and they fight a boat.

Then, of course, there are the characters. This show has some of the blandest, least interesting characters I've seen in anime, and it has a lot of them. The harem has over a dozen members by the end, in fact. Keep in mind that this is only a 12-episode show, meaning that the show is absolutely bloated with these boring, bland faces with unmemorable character designs. With so many characters and with a convoluted plot to cram into such a short space, they receive almost no development and remain generic archetypes. In fact, they fail to even live up to the standards of most generic archetypes, instead feeling more like tokens. You have the token onee-chan, the token tsundere, the token trap, the token robot girl, etc. No one develops past that. They just stay a sea of boring, redundant faces.

I honestly don't know why I stuck with this show to the end, despite being able to tell it was so bad from early on. There were only two things I actually liked about this show, and that's Megumu and when they went "gao, gawo!" at the end of every episode. Don't watch this show. I don't know how anyone could actually enjoy it, especially when there are better alternatives. It's dumb. Just...don't do it. One star.