Hi Score Girl (Seasons 1–2)

Hi Score Girl (ハイスコアガール, 2018) — watch online on iFILM — is a Japanese anime series set in 1991, inside the golden age of the arcade. Haruo Yaguchi is bad at school, has no friends, and exactly one thing going for him: he is genuinely good at video games. That stops being true the day his classmate Akira Oono sits down across from him at a Street Fighter II cabinet and beats him thirty times without saying a word.

Akira is everything Haruo isn't — top of the class, wealthy, composed. She also keeps showing up at the same arcades. What develops between them isn't a conventional romance so much as a wordless competition that gradually turns into something neither of them can explain. The series weaves actual arcade titles — Samurai Shodown, Virtua Fighter, Metal Slug — into the emotional beats of the story in a way that actually works.

The unusual part is that Akira barely speaks throughout the entire run, and the show still manages to make her the most compelling character in it. For anyone who spent the nineties at an arcade, Hi Score Girl hits with specific, accurate nostalgia; for everyone else, it's an oddly moving story about two people who have no obvious reason to keep finding each other. Stream all episodes online on iFILM.