This show is an absolute clusterfuck. Kanojo ga Flag wo Oraretara or If Her Flag Breaks is a 2014 anime about a boy named Souta Hatate who can see flags. It is properly abbreviated as gaworare but Im going to call it KanoFlag because I never bothered learning the proper abbreviation when it aired so Im sure as hell not going to bother using it now. KanoFlag belongs to an increasingly common subgenre of the harem that I like to call gimmick harem. Like other harems it has a notable cast of girls most of whom have at least some sort of vaguely romantic interest in the generic male protagonist but instead of being based around wacky fanservice hijinks the show focuses on some novel outthere idea. Noucomehttp://anilist.co/anime/19221 for example where the protagonist deals with being forced to make difficult decisions. Invaders of the Rokujouma http://anilist.co/anime/20638/InvadersoftheRokujomais another this one centered around all the characters fighting for room in the apartment. Most of these are adaptations of light novels and presumably because the writers wanted to write harems but didnt know how to do fanservice in text form they are almost entirely devoid of actual ecchi materialwhich as Im sure you all know is a large part of the reason youd want to watch a harem in the first place. Its a terrible genre and KanoFlag is one of the worst examples of it that Ive seen. KanoFlags gimmick is that Souta can see flags presumably referring to event flags and knows how to break or advance them. This ends up being a vague power that the writers seem to have no idea how to handle consistently. Sometimes flags are things like romance flags or death flags. I can get that. But when you include things like a flag denoting the direction a character is going to kick a ball or have flags he cant break or that respond differently to being broken things become a lot more convoluted. Its either the most OP thing ever or its completely useless. The plot seems to aim for complex but it only manages to hit other adjectives starting with C: complicated convoluted and confusing. Ive watched this show twice for some reason and I still havent quite managed to grasp the plot which seems to have something to do with an old king and a guy becoming a flag. It really doesnt help that the show paces the plot in a horrendous way alternating between episodes packed with nothing but generic harem fluff and episodes where all the exposition happens at once. And the plot it tries to focus on is pretty heavy too so the tone of the show ends up getting whipped around snapping back and forth like a flag fluttering in the violent wind. At the end of the show they go to an alternate reality everyone turns into a DD class and they fight a boat. Then of course there are the characters. This show has some of the blandest least interesting characters Ive seen in anime and it has a lot of them. The harem has over a dozen members by the end in fact. Keep in mind that this is only a 12episode show meaning that the show is absolutely bloated with these boring bland faces with unmemorable character designs. With so many characters and with a convoluted plot to cram into such a short space they receive almost no development and remain generic archetypes. In fact they fail to even live up to the standards of most generic archetypes instead feeling more like tokens. You have the token oneechan the token tsundere the token trap the token robot girl etc. No one develops past that. They just stay a sea of boring redundant faces. I honestly dont know why I stuck with this show to the end despite being able to tell it was so bad from early on. There were only two things I actually liked about this show and thats Megumu and when they went gao gawo at the end of every episode. Dont watch this show. I dont know how anyone could actually enjoy it especially when there are better alternatives. Its dumb. Just...dont do it. One star.