It sets you up to laugh at the harem tropes, then makes you care about the flattest girl in the room. Megumi Kato is the joke and the point: she gets no dramatic entrance, no character theme, just a girl who quietly reads Tomoya's garbage scenario draft and gives notes that hurt. Utaha's stairwell scene, the way she leans in and weaponizes every pause, is A-1 flexing camera work on a conversation that's technically just two people being petty. Eriri drawing until her hands cramp for a doujin deadline is the most honest thing in here, because Saekano actually knows what circle life costs. It winks at itself constantly and never fully commits to being a romance or a comedy, which is exactly why half the audience bails by episode four. Stay for the moment Tomoya realizes his boring heroine has been out-writing him the whole time.

Tomoya Aki is a high school otaku who works part time to fund his collection of anime and light novels. After a fateful encounter with a girl among cherry blossom trees, he decides to design his own dating-sim visual novel with a heroine modeled after her. He sets out to recruit a team: his childhood friend Eriri Spencer Sawamura, the ace of the art club, to draw, and Utaha Kasumigaoka, the school's top student and a celebrated writer, to handle the script, while he directs. Then he discovers that his muse is Megumi Kato, a plain and unremarkable classmate. Undeterred, Tomoya resolves to remake her into the ultimate heroine within his game. The result is a romantic comedy about a small doujin circle trying to create a game that moves its players.