Tesagure! Bukatsu-mono is a 12 episode anime consisting of roughly 11 minutes each. It is animated using the program MikuMikuDance (MMD), therefore the anime as a whole can feel like it was on an extremely low budget (which it probably was). The anime takes place in only a few settings (club room and assembly hall being the main ones). Despite that, it still looks fairly decent thanks to the simple aesthetics and colorful palette.
The anime is not based on any existing works and starts off with three high school students, Yua Suzuki, Hina Satou and Aoi Takahashi during club recruiting. They effectively force the first year student, Koharu Tanaka, to join their club. However, they don't know what their club is about yet and thus the whole point of the series is for them to brainstorm every day, activities for their club. It often goes onto a tangent as each person tells what comes to mind when they think of the chosen club activity for that day, then lists out the tropes within manga and anime that had used this activity as its plot. The characters often pay out the clubs to humorous effects.
Their aim is to find a new twist to the tried and tested club activity, throwing out ridiculous ideas. Finally, the four will then try it out, usually with a twist and eventually decides that it was a bad idea. Activities discussed and acted out include baseball (combining it with watermelons splitting, thus they play it blindfolded), soccer (where each player must speak a haiku before doing something with the ball), shogi (combination of the board game and twister), tea making, astronomy and cheerleading. There's a wide variety and covers off the most common club activities.
Tesagure! Bukatsu-mono is unusual and weird, and can seem very boring since at the end of the day, it is basically four students sitting around a table discussing random topics. There's frequent usage of puns, which obviously does not work very well when you are not a native speaker of Japanese. Despite that, there are various moments where the jokes work. The interactions between the characters are genuine, with Koharu often teased for not understanding Aoi's puns, and often at the end of jokes.
It's a good thing that each episode is only 11 minutes long since the content wouldn't have supported a longer format as it already felt stretched out at times. Regardless, in the final episode where Yua and Hina graduates and leaves their legacy behind with Aoi and Koharu, it is fairly sad. Considering that it is low budget and uses a freeware, the quality isn't bad at all in terms of the voice acting and theme songs (with the ending theme particularly good, the lyrics of both themes are meaningful and very literal). Overall, Tesagure! Bukatsu-mono has the potential to be a funny slice-of-life anime but unfortunately the jokes doesn't work enough of the time to keep viewers entertained for the whole duration of each episode.
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