It always hurts to watch a bad show with a good show tucked away, trying to find its way out. C3 attempts both comedy and drama, and surprisingly shows it can pull both off, from the thrilling airsoft games it centers around to the banter between teammates in their everyday life, to the frustration of losing the game leading to an unhealthy obsession with winning. But there are extremes, such as a whole episode devoted to a gun appearing as a fox and training the shooter to be the bullet, or the girls firing off all their pellets for no reason other than being trapped in a bizarre dream sequence about fighting a whole school full of faceless opponents. C3 has no concept of what a good line is for “trying too hard”, nor does it fully know how to maintain an atmosphere, with moments of high drama and tension switching into tongue-and-cheek slapstick or continually ruining a lighter mood to show how troubled the characters are. Reorganized and toned down a bit, it could have been a fantastically human sports show that blends into an enjoyable slice of life anime seamlessly.
I wasn’t aware that airsoft was a well-established pastime in Japan until both C3 and Sabagebu! came out between 2013 and 2014, but it hardly comes as a surprise, as anyone who has played before will admit that the adrenaline is undeniable. Initially C3 uses this as the selling point for airsoft, set against a contrasting backdrop of an all-women’s high school. A freshman named Yura also has a more posh, upscale image in her head as she passes a fountain and up a large flight of stairs to enter into the mansion-like school building. Her roommate is away, so she unpacks and investigates only to find a bunch of military equipment on the other side of her room. Initially shocked, she ends up watching Rambo and getting engrossed in the nonstop violence and high tension. So when the C3 Club finds her and tries to convince her to play airsoft with them, she initially sticks by her instinct and refuses, citing them as unpolished and rough for a women’s school, but a couple games later she is already hooked.
There are many versions of airsoft, and C3 is quite good at showing them off. From a Rambo-style one-vs-all to an escort mission, to capture the flag and just plain elimination, there is something for everyone. The characters interact fairly naturally without feeling typecast for the sake of their preferred style of gameplay, but it is clear that there are many different roles to engage airsoft through. Their club is unpopular, a call to society by the author, but there is a hardcore but not overly exclusive group of fans who keep the game alive. When Yura is the last one left in one game, she surrenders out of fear, which leads her to be chastised by both the enemy team and her allies, a mentality that airsoft players seem to universally agree with. But she also becomes too serious at times, barking orders to her teammates, yelling at them whenever they make any mistakes, and ultimately forsaking the team for victory. Between playing purely for fun and playing purely for success is the fine line that all players walk, and C3 knows this line very well.
If only it knew how to execute this same balance in its style as well. The fourth episode has Yura practicing her marksmanship at an archery dojo, but soon it turns into a trippy scene from feudal Japan, where a fox spirit inhabiting her gun tells her to become one with her bullets, and when she awakes her next BB wedges directly in the hole of a five-yen coin on the other side of the range, an impossibility of physics. This episode is so far removed from the lighthearted but engaging style thus far, being both overly serious about practice and overly goofy in style. The trend continues, with a Capture the Bikini Top game on the beach followed by an escaped crayfish ruining the haunted house they made for the culture festival. By the time we return back to the real airsoft the show is halfway over with very little to show.
A sniper attacks Yura on the street with a modified airsoft rifle, which seems to be a bit too ridiculous to believe, but it is necessary to drive Yura off the deep end, where she ultimately quits the C3 Club to join their rivals and become the best. They also throw her out eventually, as she develops too much of a self-serving attitude, and while this showcases the other side of playing too seriously nicely, it is pretty out of character for the rivals, who were hell-bent on winning just two episodes prior. We meander around with Yura for another couple episodes as she falls into the depths of teenage angst and self-pity, but finally she comes out of it just in time for a wacky finale of wasting bullets and slapstick, complete with visualized delusions of grandeur and the head of the C3 Club being whisked away to America for very little reason.
Although there ends up being one episode to follow it all up, which is a sex appeal contest with airsoft tacked on at the end to make it relevant. If the second to last episode is bizarre and leaves us unsatisfied, then the last episode is completely unnecessary, contrived, and even more damning to the taste C3 left in my mouth. The fundamentals in the opening episodes were quick to go out the window, but even though they start to make a comeback near the end, it is these two episodes and the insufferable plague of Yura’s self-pity that ultimately leave the conclusion confused, indecisive, and just plain bad. My suggestion is to watch to episode three, skip to the middle of the show, and whenever you start to get tired of Yura just watch any of the first three episodes one more time and call it a wrap.