You know, it does feel kind of relatable when someone maintains that a game console is a game console, or for this volume of Hi Score Girl, a Famicom is a Famicom. The closest experience to this for me was instead of getting the Gamecube version of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for Christmas, I got the Wii one. This despite attempting to make it clear to get the Gamecube one. Obviously I shrugged it off, but I bet the thought from my parents was it’s a Nintendo video game, so that’s all that matters.
So basically Moemi, handing Haruo a Twin Famicom is not the same as a Super Famicom! Just ask better questions to the retailer or don’t do what you did that had you buying one in the first place!
We’ll get to what Moemi did later on, as that’s one of the major conflicts in volume 6 of Hi Score Girl. But the conclusion of Haruo and Hidaka’s battle starts everything off, as they play each other in three fighting games, and each show how they’ve personally grown with games. In the end, their motivations for why they had to win weren’t necessarily bad (they’re still young), so it’s hard to say they were totally incorrect. For Hidaka though, she ended up meeting and eventually falling for someone who acknowledged her skills, so it’s not surprising the results of it all still pain her.
Still, the fact that it came to deciding how they would interact with each other after their match was unfortunate. I mean, these two are displaying skills and understanding frame data that I definitely was not thinking about at their age! From a competitive standpoint it’s something neat to watch, so that they didn’t find a way to meet up until they just happened to bump into each other some time later felt wrong. But yes, the two had to actually take time away from each other and move on to their current lives.
But ok, what exactly was Haruo doing after that? Playing Tokimeki Memorial. Since we already know Haruo knows nothing about how girls interact, Akira’s sister Makoto makes him play that game so he understand girls’ hearts. It goes about as hilariously as you’d expect, as his choices don’t always work, and then Makoto, his mom, and then Hidaka — all three of them in his room at one point — watch him eventually romance…no one. This experience later on helps him understand the difference between talking to a girl, but until then he just has to live in embarrassment at the choices he’s made and know three important people know of this shame.
The other thing he was doing was hanging out with the Oono’s, one of them personally, and the other from a distance. As mentioned, Makoto has been stopping by Haruo’s place to see his progress, but the two had ran into each other at the arcade, where she got the full arcade experience…wait, I don’t remember seeing Gals Panic at any of my arcades growing up…or being able to win panties at any crane game…Welp, Makoto ends up telling Moemi that as part of the arcade experience, but she also explains the fun she did have going to the arcade overall. While Akira’s still diligent in her studies, Moemi still believes her methods will serve Akira’s education better, so removing Akira’s usual butler that drives her around and maintaining her strict schedule only serves to get Akira sick at one point.
While Makoto gets the pressures of being in the Oono Family, Moemi’s methods begin to grate on her. So she teams up with Haruo to get Akira gifts, one of which ranges on the bizarre looking, to a video game where you can make your own RPG. That was the best out of all them, as Haruo spends some time creating a game, and thanks to Makoto and the butler’s help, Akira can sneakily play it on the Super Famicom to take a break. Unfortunately, she slips up and allows Moemi to find out she’s playing video games in the house.
As you can probably guess after what I said earlier, she had to buy a new Famicom, as Moemi dumped Haruo’s work in the trash. Akira has already run away from her before, yet this was the one where I feel she truly despised her. Sure the other times did not quite endear her to Moemi (she’s certainly run away enough times), but without learning about its origins or bothering to discuss it, Moemi threw away her only current interaction with a friend, and it wasn’t even Akira’s. And now she expects to teach Akira when Akira currently can’t interact normally due to her responsibilities as an Oono?
The only thing that I found interesting is because we get inner monologue because its manga, I could get Moemi feeling pressured about maintaining the family’s status here compared to the anime, but yeah, still not someone to like. So her finally acknowledging her faults after this incident is a fairly big shift in this series. Though, as explained earlier, she seriously just needed to talk to someone to get the right system (and the right game!), but her going out of her way to meet Haruo and apologize was one of the stronger moments in this manga.
The other stronger moment happens not too long after that, which created a scenario where Haruo and his mom do not go to big time gaming event together, Guile ends up flash kicking Zangief at a crosswalk, and Akira eventually proves she really does like crude stuff, but it probably depends on who exactly she’s getting said crude stuff from. But despite the events of this volume, Haruo still has a lot to learn about girls, and he’ll get that lesson next volume since the preview has the two main girls in his room…