New Game!! Episode 12 (Final) Review: Make Sure You Buy It!

After a dramatic, competitive yet cheerful run, New Game!! has reached its season finale! This last episode was the perfect wrap-up for this season, delivering everything New Game is about, from cuteness and emotional confrontations to amazing designing quality.

Japanese Original Episode Title: ぜひ買ってくださいね!

Plot

DUN DUN DUN, PECO is about to be released to the market, and the whole team gathers to attend a promotional event, where Yagami is giving a presentation as the leading character designer. Just before they go on stage, she admits to Rin that she’s planning to leave Eagle Jump and Japan altogether to work in a French gaming company and challenge herself. Rin takes it well, having overheard her discussing this very matter with Yamato during the previous episode. Yagami goes on stage, and without much hesitation, she asks Aoba to join her, going off-script and introducing her to the audience as PECO’s main character designer. After the event, Yagami announces to everyone (including a very frustrated Shizuku) that she’s planning to leave, and Shizuku organizes a farewell party for her, along with the PECO launch party. Rin gets really drunk and finally gets a chance to have her moment with Yagami, even though, to my disappointment, that didn’t involve her expressing her feelings to Yagami. DAMN, GIRL.

On the day of Yagami’s departure, Momiji drags Aoba to the airport, giving her a chance to let Yagami know how much of an irresponsible selfish idiot she thinks she is. After all the emotional goodbyes are over, the entire team joins to see Yagami off, and they promise to work together again, someday.

Episode Highlights

Yagami is the incarnation of your worst partner: Completely oblivious to your feelings, a total mess, competitive, unorganized, selfish, casually moves away without telling anyone, yeah, that’s Ko alright. A great professional, but the last person you’d want to have feelings for. Byeee~

Take that, corporate scumbags: Absolutely LOVED the little stunt Ko pulled at the PECO event, even though it was kind of expected. Just goes to show that she has a sense of dignity and respect towards other people’s labour, and that she’s not interested in getting credited for work that is not hers just for the sake of it.

Rin, I mean, come on: It might have been your last chance. She’s moving away, for all you know she’s not coming back, not anytime soon, maybe ever. It was the time, the perfect time to express your feelings! NOW KISS.

Shizuku being ageist: ‘Come back while you’re still young.’ That wouldn’t have been very fan if said by a man, would it? Nice low-key discrimination there. Slap-slap-double-slap.

The way things should be: With one of the main characters departing, I have to admit, the show lived up to my expectations rather well.

Themes & Trivia

Paris syndrome: A mental disorder often manifested by Japanese tourists when visiting Paris, due to a culture shock caused by an ‘expectation vs reality’ kind of thing. There’s also a Jerusalem shock, affecting religious people visiting Jerusalem. Believe it.

Japanese Population in Paris: Last time the Japanese community in Paris was being counted, back in 2013, 16277 Japanese individuals were found to reside there.

See you on the next game!

Fabulous season finale. Aoba and Ko both redeemed themselves, and expressed things they wanted to say throughout the whole season. Everybody go sufficiently drunk, the game was successfully released, tears were dropped on a dramatic departure… what else could we ask for? Great episode!

Hope you all enjoyed the second season of New Game!! I do believe it lived up to everyone’s high expectations. Until the Eagle Jump team gets back together to make another new game, get ready for the Fall 2017 anime reviews on MANGA.TOKYO!