#195: Hi-sCool! Seha Girls (2014)

 

Director: Sōta Sugahara

Screenplay: Sōta Sugahara and Masayuki Kibe  

Voice Cast: M.A.O as Dreamcast; Minami Takahashi as Sega Saturn; Shiori Izawa as Mega Drive; Yuji Naka as Center

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

The immediate thing to talk about, re-interested in video games again, is in mind that I missed a great deal of the history of gaming even in my childhood, but especially after the mid-2000s onwards when I left video games in favour of cinema as a hobby. If I decided to invest in a console whose content interested me, it would also have to be a console that took to my tastes, or if a PC was able to be sustained to play idiosyncratic games, as even in my childhood I was more inclined to odder and more colourful games. Only limited pocket money undercut me, missing out on a lot of titles which are sadly very expensive to buy second hand, the kind due to an unfortunate habit of the medium being young and archiving not fully invested by all by admirable individuals (or publishers), are titles that would have to be sustained on emulation to preserve and play them whether a good thing or not. Some thankfully are restored and re-released, hopefully something that will grow as a sevrice, but a lot of videogame history is still out of reach.

This is of note as, whilst the past is full of deceptively hard games, and some terrible games regardless of age, what we call "retro" appeals particularly in the nineties, a time I barely sat through, is important in both the background of today's review and place in its history I have growing fascination with. This was the fifth generation of consoles came to be, and this is actually worth bringing up in this review as, whilst one of the consoles talked of in the show comes in the sixth generation, this was the time in the nineties which would tragically lead to Sega's downfall, the video game software company who was once a hardware developer too here celebrating itself here by collaborating with Sōta Sugahara, one of the creators of gdgd Fairies franchise.

It is impossible to think of their legacy in this odd premise, to use anthropomorphism to their hardware as cute girls. Entering Sega Highschool, where their anthem is as short as can be if you know the famous "Sega!" musical cue in front of their old games, they are Mega Drive, Saturn and Dreamcast. They represent a history where Sega would leave the hardware race. Under the shadow of Nintendo, whom had a chokehold on gaming, Sega found a success especially in the West with the Mega Drive, here portrayed a bookworm who is intelligent but cannot dance to save her life. Saturn, portrayed as the straight faced figure aghast at the absurdity, has a complicated history as a gaming system: the fifth generation was when three dimensional polygons over sprites became a factor, leading to the future but also leading to great sprite based 2D art being dismissed, and a lot of consoles like the Saturn awkwardly having tech added to have 3D games, a console which was a failure in my home country of Britain but has a cult legacy of a longer time in Japan. Dreamcast, here the eccentric and silly one, whose ability to access the internet sadly comes with a long load time, probably deals with the most tragic of the three real consoles, a console which innovated in the likes of internet connection, but only lasted between 1998 to 2001, leading to Sega giving up hardware fully.

There is a lot of this show, a farce where the trio have to win over a hundred medals in games to graduate, that requires knowledge of Sega to get the jokes, but also one which paradoxically does not do this enough or not embrace this in the end fully. I think, in hindsight, this would have been a much better show, alongside the issue of how quickly and abruptly it concludes over thirteen episodes over eleven minutes each, if it had really stuck to being a time capsule to Sega's rich gaming past, and its weirder productions, with the gdgd Fairies template allowing for affectionate parody and a lot of deeply surreal results of mangling old properties or them straight faced.

The first episode continues the trademark of gdgd Fairies of inane conversations between the main cast, but it is immediately followed up by one of the two best episodes, parodying Virtual Fighter (1993), a game I did have growing up with the Saturn. You do not really need to know the game for the jokes, though they went as far as reference famous real players in competitions; instead, the humour about when the game fails or what can be exploited. You can still find it funny when the episode mocks certain moves being so destructive they can be spammed, Dreamcast borrowing a Virtual Fighter character's diving head butt for wiping out most of the opponents, or when the game has to drag in unexpected competitors. You learn, with a giant beetle getting involved, that Sega did make a game based on the (problematic) Japanese activity of capturing beetles and having them wrestle each other, or an anime connection, that alongside the Saturn in Japan being a well of tie-in video games, Sega and the console were the genesis of Sakura Wars, a franchise originally in video game form, set in an alternative 1920s Japan, which in still going and has animated adaptations.

The other great episode does not even need references to be funny, its subject Space Channel 5 (1999) already an eccentric product, a musical story with sixties sci-fi space pop aesthetic about a female reporter stopping an alien invasion of a space station by dance. Already it is strange, it is stranger when the main leads have to worry about ratings as her fellow co-reporters, and then the game malfunctions, when a fighter from Virtual Fighter (the Australian Aboriginal character Jeffrey) becomes a ratings hit with just being shirtless and only able to say "I win!", and when Saturn gains the affections from a dwarf character from the fantasy game Golden Axe. It is weird, in a perplexing way, that part of the running jokes is Saturn being forced into a bikini to increase the ratings; it is funny she is docked medals in the end due to offending family standard groups, but again throughout the series having a console I did have become the gazed over female character is weird. That she is the one, in the series' running gag, viewed as the most attractive one and sexualised, that did become strange for this and raising a completely awkward question about these shows about anthropomorphising an object probably not wise to delve into for the sake of taste.

The thing of note is that, at thirteen episodes, there is not a long time to really delve into this premise, especially as no sequel or spin-off was ever commissioned as an immediate tie-in, a huge issue with many of these micro series. This, with its ultra obscure references, had enough to parody for a longer time, causing one to think this had to be cut hastily in production by its swiftness in closure, or the more likely issue, that micro-series in their nature really have an issue of being too short to stick out unless you have something really idiosyncratic on your hands. gdgd Fairies was a one-off in many ways, from others I have seen, just for having a second season, let alone a theatrical film and spin-off, where they already established the premise and could run into stranger and more creative directions, even a multi-episode arch involving time travel paradoxes. The humour is curious here as well as after a while, it does not jump fully even into the videogame structure baring recreating gaming scenes as action sequences. Automatically you would think a lot of it would be hard Sega references, including titles never released outside Japan, such as one episode being around the arcade mecha game Border Break that never came to the West, but instead a lot is light hearted slapstick and silly dialogue you would get into other shows. It never gets as weird as gdgd Fairies sadly, nor as weird as Sega could be, as we never even get a reference to Seaman (1999), a virtual pet simulator if you had a human faced fish creature you could talk to and had Leonard Nimoy as your guide.

Neither is there the dubbing pond from gdgd Fairies, where the voice actors for real adlibbed over footage of pre-existing computer models, and many of the games covered are eventually Sega's more modern games rather than ones famous and included in the opening credits, even divisive ones like Altered Beast (1988) which, whether you think is good or overrated, is also among the weird things that company made worth intentional humour. The Sonic the Hedgehog episode, as the company's main intellectual property, is played as a straight faced Sonic animation. It clearly was a moment where the production cannot go with its flow, in case of mocking the blue hedgehog character, but also presents the annoying fact Sega is known for most people only for Sonic. That is not to dismiss that character's lasting impact, to kids and fans, but aside from some retro titles, sadly Sega in terms of archive is not as easily assessable as one would hope. It is also not a great episode, evoking the issue I have seen in micro series and this one has that it really does not get a lot done, and in the time it does have available squanders episodes to material not as funny as its earlier highs.

Even in spite of its energy and moments of funniness, this does creep over the show, and neither can it help to still be melancholic for an odd climax. Deliberately so as it refers back to the main trio not being young women but the video gaming hardware, which is impossible to look back onto without the actual history. You can call it a nostalgic celebration of their glories, which is admirable, but it is stepped in knowledge that, history being recorded by the winners it was not even their rivals Nintendo who beat them in the fifth generation nor the sixth, but upstarts Sony. A technological company, Sony struck gold with the Playstation One and then had a juggernaut called Playstation 2 that maimed the Dreamcast. Nintendo survived, but Sega eventually made and produced software for other companies, and whilst games still appear which are distinct, many of their idiosyncratic choices have had to be put on the wayside. Alongside disappointment in the final production's slightness, one cannot help but also feel a little depressed by its finale too, only tempered by the fact that, even if a lot is rarer to come by, people still talk of Sega's legacy in all its vibrant idiosyncrasies. 

In terms of my own history, I transitioned very quickly to the original Playstation after the Saturn, both consoles with weird titles I wish I then had the money, space and wherewithal to horde even if, honesty, I was not even a great gamer in skill back then. Looking back, this era in general the show mostly nods to, even the Dreamcast released within this period, was an era of incredible flux. That Playstation I transitioned to was the console which off most of the competition in this weird time of doomed endeavours, companies like Atari dying after their Jaguar console failed, full motion video and digitized characters being seen as a good idea, and only getting re-evaluated by a small minority of indie games of note decades later, even Nintendo making the bad creative decision to have a Virtual Boy, and a lot of historical dead ends. This sympathy for the losers of the era, the games never released outside Japan, the doomed spectrum of cult hits and oddities, also includes how Sega bungled through this time. That sadness cannot help to permeate what is just an okay micro-series, one which when worked was funny and sweet, but could have been a lot of inventive and had more episodes in the end.