Hi Score Girl: Dash Manga

The year is 2007. The fighting game boom is in the distant past, and the number of arcades is beginning to dwindle. Now 28 years old, Koharu Hidaka is two years away from hitting the limit of what is considered a "marriageable age", but her desire for marriage is nearly nonexistent. Now a language teacher at her alma mater of Minami Middle School, she puts the education and wellbeing of her students far above her own needs. But this brings about change for her when she finds two of her students have turned to playing fighting games at a retro arcade to vent frustration from problems in their lives. Hidaka decides to take these two young students under her wing and use her experience in retro fighting games to guide them through their difficulties, all the while giving herself a second chance at the youth that passed her by. Will she finally be able to move beyond her decade-long heartbreak and find happiness?

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High Score Girl: Dash is the toughest of hard sells that will appeal only to diehard HSG fans. Although billed as a sequel, HSG: Dash has virtually nothing in common with the two seasons of the anime bearing its name. The genre and characters are completely different, and any focus on retro gaming has been forgotten about. The story centers on Hidaka, presumably a character from HSG1+2, but after an eleven year time skip, she has gone through so much character progression off screen as to be unrecognizable. None of her dialogue or motivations has anything to do with her previous self: I utterly fail to see how this is the same character. Worst of all, she has regressed into the very evil that plagued the gamers in the first season. The content of the manga is quite wearisome; Hidaka is a teacher, and the focus is her troubles and woes as a soon-to-be unmarriagable commidity. The content of the manga consists of long dialogue dumps as a vast array of new characters are introduced, or old ones are elaborated upon. There is little to no gaming content. In addition, the tonal shift in this story is quite absolute;now with a focus on bullying and domestic abuse, we have fallen far from HSG1+2's funfilled romp. This mature content takes center stage as it effects both of the new main characters. Although certainly not any kind of dumpster fire, I fail to see any points of interest in this manga, and no one besides HSG1+2 diehards should or even would consider reading this. Its just a pointless story with nothing happening and bland characters.

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