The Video Game Critic

Weird title, right? It's the name of a new anime series that started airing a few weeks ago. The premise goes like this; The Mega Drive, Saturn, and Dreamcast are personified as high school girls that go to a school where they are apparently the only three students. They have to earn coins in order to graduate. How do they earn coins? By playing Sega games, of course. And by playing, I mean actually going into the game worlds. I figured since this is a gaming forum and all, that some of you guys might enjoy watching a quirky show about Sega consoles. It's a pretty funny one. The episodes are about 10-15 minutes long and they're 4 episodes in. They've already played some Virtua Fighter and Space Channel 5. I'm looking forward to seeing what other games are featured. Hopefully Nights Into Dreams and Skies of Arcadia show up. And if Sega is using this show to explore their roots, hopefully we can see some of these old franchises that get featured in the show rebooted in the actual video game market.  

That's a really weird story, lol.

Still, I go through periods where I watch a ton of anime and then I can go years without watching anything. I'm currently the latter, but this sounds like it'd be worth checking out. Are the scenes that take place in the video games using the actual graphics and clips from the game or are they drawn?

The art style is 3D CG models. When they go into the games, they change their appearance to match the games. The Virtua Fighter characters look like they do in the Saturn game. Ulala looks like she does in Space Channel 5. They haven't gone into any Genesis games yet but I assume when they do, the art style will match the game's sprites. There isn't actually anything drawn in the show. I prefer my anime and cartoons to be drawn but here it only makes sense to have CG.