Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki

 Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki (弱キャラ友崎くん) is a 12 episode slice of life romance based on the light novel series of the same name by Yaku Yuki.  The series originally aired during the Winter of 2021 and had 2 OAV episodes released later that continued to story as well as a second season that aired in the Spring of 2024.

    Tomozaki Fumiya is a loner second yer high school student who struggles to interact socially and focuses almost exclusively on the platform fighter Attack Families.  His focus in the game is unwavering, which has lead him to be the top player in Japan.  He agrees to meet up with the second strongest player in the country when they find out they live in the same area.  To his terror the person trying hard to unseat him is a popular girl in his class, Hinami Aoi.  While at first disappointed that her rival in Attack Family is her pathetic classmate, she decides that Tomozaki just needs a push in the right direction to better himself.  She decides to set up a series of video game like challenges for him to overcome as a way of building his confidence and social skills, so that he can fit in better with his peers.

    Tomozaki reluctantly goes along with her plan, driven by his obsessiveness with completing tasks.  SHe starts off by forcing him to start conversations with ransom girls in their class, moving on to longer interactions with some of the more popular kids.  As he clears his low level missions, some of the classmates begin to take more notice of him, helping to boost his confidence.  Not all of his interactions are positive though, particularly with a rivalry between him and the top guy in class, Nakamura Shuji.  Nakamura is frustrated at his difficulty in playing Attack Family against Tomozaki, not knowing hes the best player in the country.  Tomozaki begins to build a friendship with a bookish girl in his class, Kikuchi Fuka.  Hinami believes that Kikuchi may be the best target for Tomozaki to try and date.  The end goal she set for him in his training is to get a girlfriend by their final year of school.  He lacks confidence in his ability to accomplish all of the goals she has set for him, but is willing to give it the best try he can, unwilling to compromise.

    This isn't a new style of romance, we have seen this countless times before where the main character is a socially inept loser who tries to change themselves to achieve a new life among their peers.  Tomozaki is yet another listless, self deprecating, anti popularity character.  He's thoroughly convinced that hes never going to be anyone that amounts to anything socially and has little understanding about the need for anything differently.  He goes along with Hinami's plans out of a desire to overcome the goals laid out before him.  Through her guidance and his constant work, he becomes familiar with his classmates and begins to develop relationships with him, but hes really just following her walk-through.  At too many points in the show does it feel like a walk through of a dating sim game.  His classmates have the appearance of one dimensional characters, with easily recognizable personalities and predictable story arcs.  It felt like a lot of what Hinami was having him do was copy the play through patterns for the best girl endings.  

    Then about half way through the show something changed and the story arc become more interesting and believable.  Hinami tasks him with becoming the campaign manager for another girl in class who is running against her for the student council.  The girl, Minami Nanami, is energetic, well loved and outgoing.  A whirlwind of energy and enthusiasm.  While he isn't able to convince her to make him her campaign manager, she recognizes some use in him and makes him a strategist of sorts, build a strong closeness in a short amount of time.  The build up to the election and the fallout after she loses to Hinami developed into an interesting section of the story which carries on into the conclusion of this first season.  Instead of being a series of random, increasingly difficult tasks, that did little to entertain, the second half of the season and the culmination of the built up stories between the characters become more enjoyable.  It difficult through through the course of the story to ignore a hidden agenda that Hinami has and the real possibility that shes doing all of this as a way to craft her rival into her ideal boyfriend.  In the end the story redeemed its self and became an interesting take on a familiar concept, the ugly duckling evolving into the elegant swan.

The series is available in sub and dub formats on Crunchyroll.