レトロゲ(1)

This is a cute slice of life series about two girls bonding over a love of retro gaming. You've got Eiko, who takes pride in being the best, showing up first to class, getting the highest scores on the fest, etc, and then you've got Yoshiko, who's always in class a little earlier, scoring a little higher, and has just one extra trick up her sleeve.

The first half of the manga follows a pretty set formula, Eiko shows up to class, notices some retro gaming merch Yoshiko has on her person, and then they get into an esoteric debate about retro gaming ephemera. Imagine the business card scene from American Psycho and replace that with gaming trivia and that's what it feels like. This isn't your entry level "Did you know Super Mario Bros 2 was Doki Doki Panic?" normie trivia either, there's some crazy deep cuts. I didn't realize the first model of Famicom actually had square buttons but got recalled because the broke easily, and while I was aware that there was a Japanese man who was a local celebrity for being able to press buttons quickly, I didn't realize he was actually an executive at Hudson Soft and the actual basis for Master Higgins from Adventure island.

While the grammar is pretty easy and in line with what you usually see for this genre, the vocab gets pretty wild pretty fast since part of the gag is just how obscure and in-depth they can get with their trivia (even one of the reviews from a Japanese reader on Bookmeter says "I can't understand half of what they're talking about"). One chapter sees Eiko using the Trolley Problem to determine the Best Girl from Dragon Quest 5 and another sees Yoshiko comparing the Sega Saturn to Saigo Takamori, Japan's famed "last samurai" which was a whole Wikipedia rabit hole. Technical words for things like memory limitations, software porting, electronics production etc are all over the first half and if you want to build a vocabulary of gamer words you can say around other people, this is your book.

My favorite chapter is around the halfway point when Yoshiko performs a pretty in-depth repair on a Famicom about 30 minutes before class. I repair a lot of old consoles as a hobby and the depiction is very accurate. The way she jerry-rigs a battery to test the power isn't something I've done myself, but I see a lot of gameboy youtubers do it to test mods, and there's even a bit where she retrobrights the shell (which has a bunch of chemical words and I don't think I survived the grammar but I already know what the process is and does so I didn't worry too much about it). In addition to just seeing something that I really love and relate to depicted properly, it's a great chapter because it's the first time the duo stops trying to one-up each other and bonds over something and the story starts to break out of the formula from this point and grows to an engaging and fun climax at by the end that leaves me wanting to read more.

Fittingly I learned about this from the newsletter of a Japanese retro gaming site (shoutout to Project Egg, it's like GOG for Japanese PC games), they mentioned it when the web version first started publishing but I'm terrible at remembering to check web comics so I waited for the collected volume (which they also mentioned in their newsletter) and I'm glad I checked it out. The words and topics are pretty esoteric, but it's still readable and approachable and anyone with a real deep cut interest in retro gaming will appreciate all the detail. It's a very different type of comic from the usual western gaming webcomics where two guys sit on a couch and go "why is thing in game not like in real life" and using gaming as a basis for the characters rather than the final punchline is really refreshing. The artwork is very cute and the technical drawings of classic consoles and electronics are pure technology porn. The comedy is very funny and seeing just how far these two take their obsession while maintaining a completely straight face gets a good laugh (Eiko apparently carries a whole binder listing the worst games of all time with her while having the audacity to wonder why Yoshiko has console repair tools on her person at all times). There's really a lot to like here and I want to see where it goes.