I pulled this anime in the Anime Lottery Fall 2016. I wish I hadn't. There are many reasons why, and I'll go into detail below. Cliffnotes version is that between the strange art direction and the blatant scene stealing from Fate/Stay Night, the anime nosedived during the first episodes and never recovered. The anime was also hampered by poor dialogue and lackluster characters. But let's get into the full review.
Story: From the synopsis, you already know a couple things. There are Romance of the Three Kingdoms generals in this, and battles are fought using cards. The main character, Sonshin, goes into a "mysterious realm" and receives the card of Shuuyu, a female general. He and Shuuyu then have to fight against a man with enormous shoulderpads and are joined by a classmate and her Three Kingdoms general... and this is kind of sounding familiar.... Oh right, this is almost verbatim the opening plot of Fate/ Stay Night. In fact, there are multiple instances where Soul Buster appears to rip direct scenes from FSN. While the plots thankfully diverge about midway through the season, it was a crippling blow out of the gate to see pretty blatant scene stealing. The rest of the plot is also pretty convoluted. Apparently, there's an ancient king and some super strong war generals in cardinal-direction palaces. But the anime ends on a non-ending and leaves itself open for sequels.
Animation: Here is where the anime lost most of it's points. If I could give a negative score to the art direction team, i would. For one, the entire anime is rather darkly shaded. There are a couple instances where scenes have a lighter filter, but much of the scenes are animated against a very dark background. If that weren't bad enough, the art director seems to think that a black line filter needed to be added to the entire anime. It makes everything even darker, and doesn't hide the fact that the animations are slightly jarring in places. The final straw on how misdirected the art department was is the power-usage paint-splotches. Whenever one of the generals draws a weapon or someone uses a spell card, the screen is awash in paint drops of various colors. Why? I don't know, but it looks tacky.
Seriously, this wasn't even necessary!
Sound: Here is where the anime gets the 2 points I gave it. It's entirely for the opening song. It's upbeat, it's got a great score. It's not something I'm going to listen to over and over again, but it is stuck in my head right now. The rest of the sound quality wasn't so great though. The oice acting often felt like the VA's knew they were in a shit anime and couldn't be bothered with effort. That lack of enthusiasm, plus an overzealous sound department for action scenes made much of the meat of the anime impossible to enjoy. As for the ending song, I wanted each episode to end so badly that I never paid attention to it.
Characters: The thing about fantasy anime, especially ones based in the real world, is that the characters are often essential to making the anime qatchable. Whether because of character development or relatable personalities. Soul Buster, with the lackluster voice acting, bizarre art direction, and poor plot development needed strong characters. It didn't get them. At best, we get Sonshin, who develops marginally from scared shitless to decent card-holder. I actually felt more for the generals and their struggles than the human cast. And the anime is entirely expectiong you to know the generals by name, as they get very little backstory. Also, half the human cast just has permanent bitch face and the personalities to match.
Overall, is this anime worth watching? No. Stay way. Save yourself.
