The rules of the game called “Life”
“Life is a god-tier game—or so one famous copypasta goes. But from where I stand, that’s B.S. You get discriminated against or treated poorly for your face, your build, your age. No matter how hard you try if your health fails you in the clutch, it’s all for nothing. All these absurd rules going unchallenged. I am a good example. I just happened to wind up playing Tackfam with Nakamura today after he heard I was good at it. Most of the time I don’t really talk to anyone. Unreasonable and unbalanced. That’s what life is. ‘Only because you are not trying!’ I am sure that’s what some people would say. Just some biased thinking from someone born as a top-tier character. And some noob gamer born lucky enough to enjoy blazing through life on easy mode doesn’t get to talk about life. I should know. I’ve dominated plenty of games in my day. The game of life is garbage.”
With this monologue alone, the audience gets a clear picture of who Fumiya Tomozaki is and his views of the world. And most of us would agree with him, at least in varying degrees. When we get knocked down, again and again, very few find the strength to get up. And with every successive knock, we lose track of what drives us and begin to think none of it matters. Since every single one of us is going to die, does it really matter if we live in the bottom of a bridge or in a mansion, alone or surrounded by well-wishers?
Tomozaki seems similar in his cynical view of the world to Hachiman Hikigaya. With a passion for online gaming and love for the ‘game of life’, Tomozaki passes through life without the need for gratification from anyone IRL (Online jargon – In Real Life, implies the life we lead out of the digital world). With his alter ego ‘nanashi’ being in rank 1st in all of Japan in a popular game known as Tackfam, he seems to have respect for only one person in his life. That being the 2nd ranked player who goes by the name ‘NONAME’. Whom he admires for continuously getting better and being strong in defence when there would be no need for the top players to be so. NONAME would have had to be eating multiple combos regularly as training in order to be this good at defence.
Shuji Nakamura and Aoi Hinami, his classmates are described as ‘top-tier characters’. And he says Hinami doesn’t inspire a sense of likability so much as sheer awe for someone as bad in life at him.
On meeting NONAME offline, Tomozaki is shocked to learn that Hinami is NONAME. She tries to persuade him that “life is a god-tier game, right alongside Tackfam”. She reveals to him that she wasn’t born a ‘top-tier character’ and she got to where she was through effort alone. With nanashi being the only player she couldn’t overcome through effort, she had considered him to be more capable of effort than she was, and she respected him for it.
“Life is not unreasonable or unbalanced. The game of life may look like it has no rules, but it has a beautiful structure consisting of many simple rules in combination. Life is the ultimate godly game.”
The anime proceeds by her offering him to teach the rules of life and how he could get better at it.
While a lot of anime have a good 1st episode, the quality drops from there. I have high hopes for this one and it will be interesting to see how the story unfolds.
Anime: Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki (Jaku-Chara Tomozaki-kun)
Genre: Romantic Comedy, Slice of life
Year of release: 2021
