fairly quickly as Rifle is Beautiful is not a sleeper hit, its just boring, and it has lower production quality than the average JC Staff series which is a new low for studio 3hz.Let’s talk a bit about the characters, the main cast consists of possibly the dumbest girl in anime with a goofy smile and possibly the most oversized head ribbon in existence, another basic redhead tsundere, another blue haired quiet girl, and the brown hair straightman normal girl. As you can tell the character designs and how the characters were written, and their roles executed throughout the story was quite uninspired. Hibike might be the single most annoying and comically stupid protagonist I have had the displeasure of coming across in anime, normally I find stupid girls with big ribbons to be incredibly moe, but typecasting has gone way to far this time. Everything Hibike does screams that this girl is a three year old in the body of a 15-year-old who happens to some how be able to speak yet at the same time say nothing meaningful. All she wants to do is shoot rifles, eat snacks, and be totally oblivious to literally anything going on around her, her character singlehandedly ruins the show, although the rest of the cast do nothing to redeem the show either. The tsundere is rip off from other popular anime tsunderes and this specific character archetype is considerably less amusing outside of a romcom or action setting, the quiet girl is not deep, she’s just boring and the brown hair girl is so irrelevant that I can’t name a single quality about her that separates her from a background character.Now the story itself is practically a parody of more popular underdog sports stories, they happen to be part of a club full of first years and they are trying to win nationals, sounds familiar? There is no tension when a person can reasonably guess everything that is going to happen in the story, and rifle shooting really is a boring sport which the show constantly reminds us with little textboxes mentioning how boring it is, probably the least effective way to deflect the tediousness of watching this already incredibly boring show. Maybe this story could have been written in a way that could have made beam rifle competitions interesting, anything is possible, but rifle shooting is definitely not a sport that translates well to the anime medium given that accurately depicting it involves a bunch of girls firing invisible projectiles getting scores that we are aren’t sure are hit or miss until the sensor picks it up.As for production values, as written earlier the production values are an incredibly low showing for a studio that put out series like Princess Principal and Flip Flappers, this show could have been redeemed if it was at least as flashy or as wild as those series or if there were a lot of effective beam effects such as in Gun Gale Online. However, instead of the usual flashy animation seen by studio 3hz we got animation that made middle school power points look dynamic in comparison, the character designs were all uninspired garbage as well, and the scenery was probably some of the most cookie cutter stuff I have seen in any anime.Given this that this show was already a borderline parody in comparison to good sports anime, on top of being poorly written, lacking meaningful characters, and having low quality production values one may wonder why I even bothered watching this. Well it comes down to 2 things, there wasn’t really all that many shows airing on the day this show airs, and because I have a thing for ribbon haired loli characters. That is essentially it, if you don’t have a thing for ribbon hair loli characters and you are not watching this a seasonal show on a day with almost no other anime airing, then please spare yourself from watching this atrocity that is the second worst show I seen this season besides assassins pride, which is the only reason I gave this show a 5 instead of a 4, because a show worse than it exists this season.