Webseries
4 out of 5 stars*
I want to be clear. I really really liked Video Game High School. Please keep that in mind when I tear up the season finale in a few paragraphs.
Because the series was so damn good, it deserved a much better finale.
Video Game High School is a Kickstarter funded webseries from Freddie Wong. It is available for free (with 15 or 30 second ads ahead of each episode.) at http://www.rocketjump.com.**
The premise is, shall we say, implausible. In the not too distant future, video games are our nation's national passtime, and there exists a Hogwarts-like boarding school for very talented young video gamers as a farm league for the pros. You can only go to VGHS by special invitation, and if you're ranking falls too low you are expelled.*** (Kind of like a video game, get it?)
The thing is, the show wears it's improbability well. Nothing is taken too seriously, and yet everything is played with a straight face. As a result, even the most ridiculous set pieces (like the mario-esque jump for a lost id) come off as charming and funny, rather that uncomfortable and sad.
The real highlight of the show is the casting. Pitch-fucking-perfect. Josh Blaylock (playing our hero Brian D) is believable both as an out of his depth underclassman, and as a competent, tough as nails first person shooter player. Plus the fact that he's tiny and adorable makes his attempts at swagger downright hilarious. Speaking of hilarious, Brian Firenzi's villain, "The Law" is doubly so. Over the top evil is rarely done so well, and that's entirely due to his polished acting. Finally, Ellary Porterfield perfectly captures the technically-hyper-competent, socially-utterly-inept every-nerd. Plus she's gorgeous.
This leads to another thing that VGHS does really well. Throughout most of the series, there's a more or less equal mixing of genders in all of the video games, and by and large the women are portrayed as just as competent as the men.
Until the last episode. (Spoiler alert, by the way.) In the last episode, Jenny Matrix, the love interest, gets the jump on the bad guy not once, but twice! And does nothing about it! The first time, she just walks away--the second time she sacrifices herself (and her chance to play on the "varsity" team.) to give the main character her gun and let him take everyone out. First off, it's a video game: no one dies for real, so there is never a good reason to not take a fucking shot if you have it, and secondly, it would have been just as easy to write a finale where the hero gets the girl, and saves and the day AND the girl doesn't have to be a dumbass.**** Seriously the ending would have been ten times better if, when The Law and his ENTIRE TEAM have Brian D surrounded, Jenny Matrix just captured the flag and won the game. The end! Good guys win. Monologues will get you nowhere. Instead we get the season's least sensible action sequence*****, and a feeling like we've been cheated out of the real ending.
So yeah, I really really liked video game high school. I think you should go out and watch it. And the ending really bothered me. But, you know what? Here's hoping for a season two!
* Was on pace for 5 except the finale sucked.
** Yes, that's right, I'm complaining because the free webseries I really liked wasn't quite good enough. Deal with it.
*** One minor pet peeve, the ranking system and how it fluctuates is never fully explained? Is it a point system? Is is a ranking from 1 to the number of students? How do you gain and lose points? Inquiring minds demand to know.
**** And, you know, if you'd explained how the selection for the teams worked, you could have worked in how their teamwork was somehow good for both of them.
***** In a show about a video game high school, no less.
