Yesterday, on Christmas Day, my wife and I downloaded the Crunchyroll app for Wii U. We then watched Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls in its entirety.

A day later, I still can’t get over how much I loved it.

The basic premise of Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls is that three Sega consoles: Mega Drive, Dreamcast, and Saturn (who are personified as moe girls) are trying to finish high school. In order to graduate, they need to earn 100 credits, which they receive by completing tasks within Sega game worlds.

While the art style may be initially off-putting to those who have an aversion to moe (like myself), it quickly grew on me and makes sense for the setting and premise. Much of the art and character designs are done by Kei Garo, the artist who developed the image of Hatsune Miku, which is really cool.

At this point, I would love to start describing all the various Sega references in the show, but it would be a shame to have all that spoiled. Part of the fun of watching Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls is finding the references yourself. It really is a game in itself, as the references come quickly and are occasionally pretty deep cuts. There were multiple times when I went back in an episode and watched a segment frame-by-frame to catch everything.

On the surface, the show seems to be nothing more than fanservice, which would be totally OK, because the service is great! But Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls is more than that. There are legitimately hilarious comedy bits mixed with some pretty relevant commentary on the state of the Japanese anime and game industries.

But what kind of surprised me was the emotional resonance of it all. I’m not at all ashamed to admit that some tears were definitely shed in the final moments of the last episode. Yes, part of that came from my history with these consoles, but also that the show was just extremely well-executed.

It’s pretty incredible that Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls exists, and even more so that it’s available, officially, in English. The show is an absolute must-see for anyone with even a remote interest in Sega or anime (which I would assume is you, if you’ve read this far).

Check it out on Crunchyroll here!