3S Review No. 44 (short, simple and salty/sweet/spicy)
So, I took a big break from anime, hadn’t watch anything (at least anything contemporary) since Spring 2021, now I’m hooked again and I was looking back at the stuff that I missed, starting from Summer 2021, and damn was I looking for some spare pickings, like what an awful season, so I decided to give this one a try, cause I am drawn to these themes even though I was pretty sure it was gonna be shit, and what do you know, I was right, it’s pretty shit.
While the idea is unoriginal obviously, it is still fine and a good show could have been made out of it, but the story is very whatever, it’s full of holes that no one even bothered to patch up, they don’t even bother with any kind of explanation, never mind a proper one. Things workout just to workout, everything is played out conveniently in order for a couple of things to happen. What are those things you ask? Well, firstly is the success of our fuckboi MC, and secondly so that they can fit as much unnecessary, uninteresting, unintuitive fan service in there. Clearly this show is not a labor of love, no one took himself seriously in the process of making so you the viewer can never at any point take it seriously as well, despite the vane efforts to make this a really high stakes and mind games series. That being said, as fishy as those games and stakes are, there is some entertainment to be find in here, not of the good quality though and not of quantity that could save the show.
Characters are are well oiled plot machines, covered in plot armor or plot stupidity in order to not scratch the MC’s plot armor. The case of the MC is the way too typical and common case nowdays that he is supposedly very bright when in fact he is simply more bright than the rest of the characters that are slightly brighter than the pitch black darkness of the universe. So the whole dynamic of the great power that the protagonist has that could have been the center piece of a great shows simply falls out of the window since the events occur in a very lazy, predictable and convenient way. Something positive one can find is that not every character’s power is unique, there are duplicates so you can see who makes the best out of what he has, it’s more like of who uses the knife better, instead of who has a knife, that being said, we’ d have to accept that the power that a filler guy at the first episodes has, which allows him to turn a button into a rope (!) is in fact a knife, and maybe somewhere in the future a character will appear that has the same power and somehow makes it a powerful weapon, or you know, it may be the most probable explanation that that guy was simply a product of the lazy, subpar writing of the show.
Animation is mediocre at its best and really shit at times with some very fishy cgi models used. The overall artistic and character design is very uninspired and every character looks like you’ve seen him in another show and just dropped in for a cameo.
Sound while is not insulting, it is not great, I just finished the show and can’t even recall a single tune, nor the opening or ending. Voice acting was pretty alright though and probably the best aspect of the show and that can’t be a good thing…
So, is it worth a watch? Nope, most certainly not, it is not a good show and I would not recommend it to anyone as such. Although if you are a junkie like me and you can never do only a single thing at once, you can watch it on the second monitor while you do something else. The fast pace of the show and its themes – even though not greatly presented – do make it mildly entertaining.