Rewrite

Since Rewrite is a visual novel by Key, a lot of people will compare it to the likes of Clannad, Angel Beats, Air Cannons, etc. But, I propose some new comparisons.

1. Shitcom, because both are pretty shit comedies.
2. The sensation of hitting your head against a brick wall for six hours.

If you enjoy either of these, then Rewrite might be the perfect show for you. Otherwise, I consider it one of the worst anime of 2016: a fucky jambalaya of overdesigned characters, dumb memes, and a plot that was probably written by someone putting a bunch of sticky notes on a dartboard and writing in ... whatever they threw at.

Before I go on, let me just say that I don’t give a flying fuck about how good the visual novel is or isn’t. I don’t care what purpose this anime serves to it, whether to be some sort of adaptation, if you can even call it that, or just a teaser meant to advertise it, whatever. I’m just reviewing the anime the same way I review any other anime: like a little dickbag who isn’t good at anything els--I mean, independent of any other source material. I did not at all write a Shokugeki review comparing it to the manga to contradict myself and then delete it out of embarrassment.

So if you’re not very familiar with Key’s works, here’s how they generally go: The MC is an everyday normal guy with just enough wit to keep him from being 100% beta, but not enough substance to put him above the level of a general self-insert. He goes to a weird school filled with even weirder people (mostly overly-designed cutesy girls) with some maddeningly strange characteristics. Various shenanigans occur for a few episodes until the plot finally comes in, or maybe there’s one to begin with but doesn’t have much of a focus yet.

If you can’t tell, I’m not a fan of these Key guys who think it’s funny to put their logo on every coffee can in every episode of every show. The way they tell their stories is very jarring because of their spontaneous, bombastic sense of humor. Half the time, I can’t tell if they’re trying to make a teenage melodrama, or if they’re trying to make a dinnertime cartoon sitcom for dummies. It's an uncomfortable mixture of both, like ketchup and mac and cheese. Since they like to dick around with their storytelling, things can get rushed and/or confusing in the end.

These things are increased thousandfold in Rewrite.

There is no plot in Rewrite. None. It pretends to have one in the second half, but the “twist” being that something is actually happening comes out so half-heartedly that the writers seem disappointed in themselves that they can’t write in as many dank maymays into their show. Instead… eh. There are monsters, eh. People are fighting, eh. The world is gonna die, eh. FEECOF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Whoops, there goes Rewrite being funny again xDDDD!

Don’t believe me? Here’s part of MAL’s synopsis, albeit fanmade by MAL Rewrite (that joke is funnier than anything else in this show):
"Equipped with the superhuman ability to permanently rewrite any part of his body to multiply his strength or speed, Kotarou is naturally drawn to the supernatural."

You know when this Rewrite ability is shown for the first time? Episode fucking four. Not one. Four. And, as usual, the story just reveals it as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. No prior hints for him having this power, no explanation as to how or why he has it, nothing. And that synopsis isn’t even accurate, because it's not just about increasing strength. At one point, he “rewrites” his body to resist poison. What else can he do? Resist age? Resist death? Become invisible? Triple the size of his dick? You know, that would be a good power to have in a massive waifu war such as Rewrite. I think there was a hugely missed opportunity here.

Other people have powers too. Just because. And there are shitty CG monsters sometimes. Just because. Eh. It’s all part of the hilariously goofy fun that is the Whatever Club at Whatever High School!

The real plot towards the end turns out to be some environmental awareness campaign. People are assholes and don’t take care of the planet, so other people need to out-asshole them and activate a thing that will kill everyone so that the planet can live. I don’t know how this is supposed to tie into the main character having the ability to theoretically give himself the neck of Alolan Exeggutor. Maybe there’s a reason somewhere that I missed, but it’s a little hard to follow along when the show tries to adapt every possible waifu route in the game while playing catch-up with the plot because that took forever to come in and now it needs to do 3,000 things at once if it wants to wrap up in time. Except the plot took so long to come in that I lost interest before it even happened. Maybe this show should’ve had a rewrite, eh? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh???

And at the end of the day, what did this amount to? A dead end. Literally. The ending is not satisfying, as it’s apparently just one route of many, leading me to wonder what the point of all of this even was. Was it to introduce the characters? Anything could’ve done that within a couple episodes; to say an entire thirteen-episode season can be dedicated to that would be an outright lie. Is it to introduce the setting? Kazamatsuri has basically no focus at all. I know that it’s a big place and kinda environmental-friendly. My fucking bedroom could've been a more interesting setting, because at least I have Big Order posters. Is it to explain the conflict of the show? Well, it only took them until at least six episodes for them to reveal that there was any conflict in the first place, so… no. It’s all a bunch of mush, and I’m not quoting whatever that pink sheep dog thing was. It tries to please both visual novel readers and newcomers by adapting the visual novel with an anime-original route that tells a complete story while also introducing a story. I don't even know what the fuck that means, but it failed at all of it.

Key should just make their own Nichijou. A show where nothing happens, everything is stupid, and it’s funny as hell. Make something like that to satisfy their own sense of humor, so that maybe they can tell a compelling story and find a way for someone to get attached to its characters beyond humorous interactions. Ha ha, Kagari likes coffee and calls it "feecof"!! What a deep character!!!
As everyone will write in every review for every comedy anime in the world: comedy is subjective. Not everyone is going to love it or get it, so making the characters more like a bunch of running jokes in the midst of a deep melodrama might not be the best idea. When they fed me a character's sob story, my reaction wasn't "Oh no, how sad! I'm emotionally invested now!", it was "Wait, I was supposed to take this seriously?" The usual nonsense that follows a sad moment leads me to believe that I had the right idea.

I can admit that the show was a little funny at times. It was. There was about… one gag per episode that got a laugh out of me. For about four episodes. Because within those first few episodes, I was still somewhat invested in the show. I thought everything would make sense in the end, that something was gonna happen at any moment that would tie everything together and make me believe the show was actually a work of genius. But then it never happened, and even still I was trapped, because I was at a point where I was in too far to pull out and cut my losses. I needed to see it to the end, so I could at least splash more salt than Arataka Reigen. Perhaps that was the point, just to lure everyone in and keep them thinking that, someday, it’ll all come together and make sense, only for them to post a note at the end saying “lol fuk u idiot”. If so, congrats Rewrite, Key, Studio 8bit, you totally PRANK’D me bro!! XDDDDDdddeDdDdrefzdfxff

Ah, it’s like someone probably once said, a good piece of entertainment is one that leaves the viewer thinking. Rewrite leaves me thinking that I should’ve died in that car wreck I had last year.

I don’t know who the fuck this 8bit studio is, and given the art of this show and that their most popular work is Infinite Stratos, it seems I haven’t missed out on anything. Rewrite looks terrible. Not even because of the mediocre studio, but even designs imported from the visual novel. Who in the name of Lady Gaga designed the school uniforms in this show? What kind of cruel monster would subjugate these poor girls to this kind of torture? They all have to wear these extremely overdesigned, uncomfortable-looking dresses with skirts and sleeves that you could drive a truck into despite the torso clinging to their tits like a wet washcloth. Isn’t that nice? No, they don’t look cute in the slightest, they look like they take a half-hour to actually put on. And I’m sorry to disappoint everyone, but I’m not really into fucking the wrappers of strawberry-and-creme hard candies. But, whatever fetish you relish.

The animation is mediocre, which for the most part isn’t a problem, but for some reason the anime becomes an action series with a bunch of fights, and then it’s a problem. Even worse is that there are a bunch of weird supernatural beasts in the second half of the show, and while they have an interestingly jaded color scheme, they’re done in really poor CG. At other times, it’s inconsistent, such as the way they animate Kagari. Do her ribbons move around with a mind of their own, or don’t they? I dunno, I guess whatever key animator 8bit hired for that episode gets to decide that. No particular positives about the art can make up for the big negatives; the only things possibly worth mentioning are that the OP’s and ED’s look surprisingly good, and that maybe the character designs are okay, but as you can expect from a visual novel full of girls, some of them are gonna look strange, like Shizuru and Kotori.

I guess I should also mention some of the voice acting, because Hana Kanasamanawamallama voiced the main loli girl. Apparently that means it’s good. Not really, because her role didn’t have anything impressive about it, but at least her voice is nice to hear. Otherwise, the soundtrack was decent; it never felt spectacular and most of the time it was pretty average, but there were some good, emotional or light-hearted tracks here and there, especially when (and this is weird to say) Kotaro was about to grope Akane, they played the VN's OP. Nice. The OP’s and ED’s were all pretty decent as well, though not impressive either.

Do I need to say anything else? Don't watch this anime, no matter what sort of relationship you have with the source material. This anime sucks. The story sucks. The idea of it sucks. The way it’s told sucks. The people who are in it suck. Hell, the people that made it probably suck too. Maybe I’ll join Gaia. Not because I care about the planet, but because, sometimes, I just feel that a lot of people dying would fix things. Kefka did nothing wrong. Get well soon, Maeda-san.

Story - 1/10
Art - 3/10
Sound - 6/10
Character - 2/10
Enjoyment - 1/10
Memes - Aboutaslifelessasharambe/10
Overall - 1.25/10 (Range - 1-2)
Favorite episodes - 0
Favorite characters - Akane’s Boobs
Recommendation level - no

Rewrite, one of Key’s most prominent visual novels getting an anime adaptations? This almost feels surreal, right? I’ll get straight to the point. While the idea of Rewrite finally getting an anime has been a dream for Key fans for many years, it may also be somewhat a tarnished reality as we realize what we’re really getting. After finishing the show, it’s more than just tarnished. Much more.

On paper, Rewrite follows a lot of standard Key formulas you’ll recognize easily if you’re already familiar with their work. The slow paced story from the beginning, generic character personalities, and supernatural phenomenon are just a few to ... name. However, one thing this adaptation didn’t fully embrace is its ability to move the audience. What that literally means is its inability to make the viewers feel tearful unlike some other series. (ex. Clannad After Story) Some may question that it would be unfair to compare Rewrite to other Key’s works but in reality, the adaptation really has more humor than it should.

From the first few episodes, we meet Kotarou Tennouji, the male protagonist. He gets involved with his school’s Occult Club where we meet the other female characters. They range with different personalities and all more or less oddball characters at first. The real catch though is that they are also involved in some kind of darker plot that unfolds as the series progresses. But on paper, the first few episodes doesn’t reveal much of itself as it tries to get viewers to familiarize with the franchise. In essence, the main female characters will likely be a hit or miss to get attached to. Most of them are stereotypes like the school council representative type or the redheaded tsundere. Meanwhile, the series does also introduce a mysterious character from Tennouji’s dream, a young girl with ribbons that seemingly kills him. Perhaps this is where viewers will get intrigued by the show.

From a standard viewpoint, the storytelling of the series bounces between acceptable and awful. There are some episodes that nails the coffin when it comes to creativity while others makes you feel like it’s a forced chore to finish. As an anime original viewer, I confess that the show itself is underwhelming particular with characters such as Lucia. The way their own story is set up not only feels rushed but lacks concrete feelings. It’s hard to feel what they are going through with the pacing especially from the buildup and ultimately doesn’t really satisfy what its intentions were. On the other hand, some other background storytelling such as with Shizuru (the eye patch girl) feels it’s done right because of the more tragic mood. Still, with the show being just 1-cour, you really shouldn’t expect a full adaptation of each girl’s story. In fact, this particular anime actually develops into a more mysterious plot that unfolds with connecting events. Unfortunately, the insert episodes of the girls’ routes doesn’t do much justice and weighs down the show overall.

As Rewrite retains a lot of comedy, there’s also the mysteries that carries over the course of the show. I already mentioned about the strange ribbon girl from Tennouji’s dreams. However, we also get the main setting that itself is a mystery. The series takes place Kazamatsuri and has quite a lot of hidden secrets, some that ventures into the supernatural realm. Being the curious guy that he is, Tennouji is drawn to these mysteries as he has a supernatural ability of his own. A major turning point revolves about the utopia-like environment and where all sorts of strange occurrences takes place. When one of the students at Tennouji’s school goes missing, that’s where we realize Rewrite can be darker than it seems. We are also introduced to factions that have conflicts with each other and some of the girls from the Occult Club are involved. Tennouji himself also begins to display inhuman talent with his own Rewrite ability. And finally, we also learn a lot more about the mysterious ribbon girl that appears in Tennouji’s dream. It’ll take patience for viewers to eventually get to the main meat of the plot and if you’re the type that sees Key as an insufferable product, then this will be a hard show to follow.

Perhaps storytelling isn’t just what Rewrite emphasizes on though. There’s also relationships, connections that tries to be meaningful. Tennouji develops several important relationships with others including Lucia, Kotori, Kagari (the ribbon girl), among others. However, the show itself seems to focus on that mostly on the surface level. Because of time restraints, they aren’t concretely developed as you’ll anticipate. Oh and it’s easy to forget about characters like Haruhiko when his role in the show seems to be mainly comic relief. And romance? That part is mostly teased at and hard to really appreciate if it’s even there. At best, character relationships are subtly memorable but because of the mediocre buildup, they aren’t very memorable.

Adapted by studio 8-bit, the show itself is underwhelming when it comes to visual quality. The characters look blend while it does retain Key style features such as the moe-eyes, feminine parts, and surreal-like atmosphere. However, the action is more of a disappointment. Well to be honest, the action was never a main attraction in the show anyway and the brief segments where we see that isn’t so appealing either. There’s not much fan service in the show except with the blushing and that one episode where Lucia puts on a maid outfit. Oh yes, a maid outfit.

On the other hand, soundtrack for Rewrite is impressive. Well, not in the impressive that it’s a masterpiece but definitely hits the key points. The theme songs offers choreography that fits the show quite right while the OST is mysterious as it should be. Even during comedic moments, the music seems to fall in place naturally. Furthermore, character voice expressions are well delivered if you compare to their characters from the VN.

So in the end, what should you really take for granted from Rewrite? It’s pretty much a popcorn entertainment that’s perhaps only easy to watch if you come with an open mind. For those with high expectations, it’s probably a good idea to drop the show as it seems to appeal to a broader audience, beyond the visual novel fans. I think Rewrite tried to take a risk and although it partially succeeds, there’s more failure. In the end, it’s a nice show to pass time with for fun but not something to talk about for years to come. Oh and season 2 has been announced for the love of God, let’s pray for a better sequel.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder why certain things have to be animated in the first place.

Already back when it was first announced that Rewrite was going to be adapted, I was getting some very mixed feelings. On one hand I was happy that one of my all-time favorite visual novels was finally getting an anime against my expectations, but on the other hand I also knew that making a good adaptation out of it would be incredibly difficult. This is partially because the visual novel is extraordinarily long and partially because all of its routes directly contradict each other and therefore wouldn't make much ... sense in a linear medium like anime. So it's fair to say that I came into this with a fair amount of skepticism, especially considering that 8bit were the ones pulling the reigns: the same studio which had already completely destroyed another top rated visual novel two years earlier in Grisaia no Kajitsu.

And as it turns out, I was right to be skeptical, albeit not quite for the reasons I initially expected. See, the main reason Kajitsu was butchered so hard was because it was unbelievably rushed: they tried to squeeze in a full 80-ish hour visual novel into 13 episodes, and unsurprisingly failed miserably at it, so I was expecting Rewrite to get roughly the same treatment. But as it turns out that wasn't quite the case, because this time around they decided that instead of trying to adapt an enormous amount of content in an impossibly small time frame, they made an anime original story instead. They tried to circumvent the problem by doing an original arc instead of adapting any of the routes of the game itself, which felt like a bit of a cop-out move to me, but given the circumstances it was probably the best thing they could have done. On paper that is.

The main problem is, however, that this series doesn't actually function properly as an original anime. Why? Because if you're an anime-only viewer, the story makes absolutely no sense. For anyone that hasn't played the visual novel, you're most likely going to come out of this anime thinking "wtf just happened" more so than anything else. Basically what they've primarily done is taken certain snippets from Rewrite's various visual novel routes and put them all together into something new, but it just doesn't work out very well at all. It's like blindly taking out all the contents of your refrigerator and throwing them into a blender, and hoping that the resulting slurry turns out to be tasty (protip: it probably won't). There are so many characters that are just thrown into the show with barely any explanation whatsoever, so many plot twists that come across as pulled totally out of nowhere, so many underlying themes and deeper messages that will fly completely over anime-only viewers heads due to lacking proper exposition, and so many supposedly emotional scenes which wholly miss their mark partially because they feel spontaneous and unnatural, and partially because the show does almost nothing to make you empathize with its characters due to how little development they get. Also how they insist on using some of the amazingly beautiful soundtracks from the visual novel for a few such scenes feels almost insulting due to how low the actual emotional impact of the scene itself is compared to where those tracks were originally used in the game... it's like watching a death scene from Another set to the music of Continued Story: you just don't.

Anyway, despite supposedly being an anime original version, it's still part of the same complex universe that the visual novel routes play out in, and if you're an anime-only watcher it'll all be very confusing to watch not only because of how lightning fast the pacing is, but also because of how many scenes are omitted and how much information about the bigger picture of the world itself that you don't have. As I mentioned earlier, Rewrite is built upon having blatantly contradictory character routes which together create the overarching story as a whole. Everything is connected and part of a much greater picture. So when you're doing an anime original route instead, you can't really avoid having to leave a ton of loose ends open. As a result this is barely even watchable as an anime-only viewer, and even if you have played the visual novel it's still rather inexcusable. Yes, I might understand what is going on a lot more so than most viewers as a result, but it doesn't change the fact that the entire anime is a huge clusterfuck that doesn't even come remotely close to the level of the visual novel at any point. It just doesn't feel satisfying to watch at all, and constantly leaves you hanging with this feeling of "what could have been".

There are also certain plot points which are so obviously catered towards people familiar with the source material that they don't really function properly for those who aren't. For example, in the beginning of episode 8 there is a minute-long scene of a tiny rock floating through space at high velocity, eventually crashing through Earth's atmosphere and hitting Kagari right in the head. Evidentially it hit her head pretty badly because from that moment on, her personality makes a full 180, which has a rather drastic impact on the following turns of events. Now if you've played the visual novel you should be able to figure out how and why this happened as it's certainly not anything random, but for an anime-only viewer this plot point is completely absurd. A random tiny asteroid ending up hitting a girl's head as it crashes onto the planet, forever altering her personality? I mean it'll look like the most forced plot twist ever made if you don't know any better. Sure, after the upcoming second season (and yes that was announced at the end of episode 13) they should be able to piece it together as well, but the entire joke of the scene won't really work retroactively and it'll still come across as somewhat forced that way. I just can't help but feel like this is the wrong kind of execution to do when you make an anime original route, because again it pretty much assumes that the viewer has knowledge of latter events which at the current point in time only people who've read the visual novel will have. If this Kagari route had been part of the game, it'd probably have been pretty far down on the recommended route order chart; certainly not at the very top at least.

Now I've seen some people argue that 8bit have still done a decent job under the circumstances considering that they had a basically impossible task to begin with, and while I do see what they're getting at (because let's face it, making a proper adaptation of Rewrite with this few episodes is a laughable idea regardless of who's pulling the strings), I can't really agree on it. While it is true that this anime was more or less doomed before it even started, there were definitely things they could have done a lot better. For example, episodes 4 & 5 were in my opinion a complete waste of time. What I was promised was an anime original story focusing on one of the girls that didn't have a normal route in the visual novel, Kagari, and nothing more. I wasn't exactly satisfied with that prospect but I could live with it given the lack of realistic options. But despite that they still insist on spending entire episodes solely on going into the backstories of some of the other heroines in an incredibly rushed manner of fashion that not only felt extremely unsatisfying on their own due to the terrible pacing, but also it has almost nothing to do with the anime original route itself. So why even adapt it? Like you either adapt a route properly or not at all, don't just throw in abridged versions of them out of nowhere just because you can, geez. In the first place, what's the point of teasing so much about the other girls when you're not ever going to follow up on it and properly show the full picture of what the truth behind them is? To tease people into buying the game I guess? Perhaps even more importantly though, by doing this you're taking away precious screen time that could have actually been spent on developing this original arc you're so insistent on doing. Like if there's one thing which you should never end up having pacing issues with, it's an original anime. I mean the entire scenario script is supposed to be written from scratch specifically to fit the episode count damn it.

Another thing I found really disappointing is how incredibly casual the anime is about revealing the supernatural. In the visual novel you don't even find undeniable evidence that there even is anything supernatural until the end of the common route (adapted in episode 7 in a different version), which is almost 20 hours into it. Yes, you know Kotarou can rewrite himself, and yes, you encounter ominous-looking black dogs in the forest and the city at night as well as numerous suspicious people, but that's about it. Then when the actual reveal comes, it hits you like a hammer with how dramatic the tone shift is. The early part of Rewrite is supposed to be school/comedy/mystery, and then in the actual character routes it transforms into action/drama/supernatural. But in the anime, they've kind of just... jumbled everything together. Kotarou is like yeah I have a super power, Shizuru casually reveals hers without much explanation provided, and when Kotarou is given his "claws" then you're just going to have to accept what you're watching because the anime sure isn't planning on explaining where they came from anytime soon, etcetera. It all feels very mish-mashed without any clear direction, almost as if they did everything in the wrong order. I don't know, making a good anime out of Rewrite with such a tight schedule is probably impossible no matter what you do; even an original route like this doesn't really work because the world itself is far too complex for you to be able to make a satisfying standalone arc without it becoming entangled in the "real" story of Rewrite in some way, causing a ton of loose ends that will never be able to followed up upon. It only forces 8bit to include a bunch of scenes they seriously shouldn't, wasting even more of what little precious screen time they have at their disposal. It's no wonder the pacing is so all over the place. On top of that the anime also has some incredibly awkward usage of CGI for all the various types of familiars it contains, so the action scenes aren't exactly a pleasure to look at either. Hell, even the regular 2D art really dips in quality every so often, especially in the last few episodes of the show. It felt like they were having some serious budget issues here, and as a result there were a lot more derp faces than I would have liked.

As far as the characters goes, I'm also pretty disappointed. I actually consider the visual novel's character cast to be in my top 5 even to this day, due to its diversity, great character development on many different fronts, and for just being plain entertaining in general. But the anime does... basically nothing to showcase either of these things. First and foremost, there are simply way too many characters in Rewrite for such a short anime to support. It's a very complex universe including multiple factions, people with drastically different ideals and goals, driven by their own respective backstories, etcetera. There just isn't anywhere near enough time to explain who they all are and what their purposes in the story really are. Especially considering that (you guessed it) for many of them, said explanations are provided deeper into the various heroine routes of the game, and they're not just something you can throw out at a moment's notice. In other words they really never had a chance to be anything more than random supporting characters in the anime because the script doesn't permit their characters to ever be properly explained or developed. Maybe you should have thought about that before you decided to go full anime original? And this is just talking about the supporting cast; if we talk about the actual main characters here then it's obviously even worse because all the original main heroines (Kotori/Chihaya/Lucia/Shizuru/Akane) just come across as random harem members in the anime as none of them get any proper characterization to speak of at all. Why? Well... because their routes aren't adapted. It all keeps coming back to that, doesn't it? Even Kotarou suffers from this because he's supposed to grow in those arcs as well.

Sooo I don't know, I don't straight-up hate the show but I just can't help but feel that it's so pointless. If you've played the visual novel, the anime feels like a massive downgrade in comparison, and if you haven't played it then you'll be missing out on so much that it'll barely be comprehensible due to how confusing the story will be, how much content is cut out and how rushed it is. So what is the target demographic supposed to be? No one can say they're truly 100% happy with this anime. At least on that front it's certainly no different from Kajitsu.

I think the obvious yet unfortunate truth here is that the whole point of this anime is nothing more than to be an advertisement for the Rewrite+ release of the visual novel, which is a new version released on July 29th in Japan this year, I.E: shortly after the anime started airing. It contains new CGs, more voice acting, slight scenario revisions, etcetera. For a long time I was also under the impression that this release was going to contain the new Kagari route as well in visual novel format, but as it turns out that's actually not the case. It doesn't really seem to contain any noteworthy new story content at all. So my hypothesis is that the release of Rewrite+ in combination with this original anime is nothing more than a marketing ploy, where people who have no prior experience with the franchise will get a first-time introduction to it through the anime and get interested enough to at least be willing to purchase the game. Then of course since Rewrite+ has just been released recently, which sounds like a much cooler version than the original for people not knowing any better, those new fans will throw their money at the much more expensive "new" game instead of the cheaper "old" Rewrite from 2011. Again, this is just my theory but honestly it's the only idea I can come up with that can financially justify re-releasing a game 5 years later with hardly any noteworthy changes made, as well as simultaneously making an awful anime adaptation of the same game that is neither satisfying for old fans of the games nor anime-only watchers.

So with that said, in the end... I can't help but feel like this anime is meaningless, or at least it'll only function as a sales booster for the new game release, which is nice for the creators I guess but that doesn't actually make the anime itself any better for me personally, nor should it for any other viewers of it.

It has to be said though that if we ignore this show's origins for a second and just look at it as any other anime among the thousands of others out there, then it's not the worst thing I've ever seen, far from it, but it'd probably be something most people would forget about almost completely within a day or two of finishing it. However, we can't avert our eyes from the truth that much, and the fact of the matter is that this is supposed to be a representation of one of Key's three biggest visual novels, alongside Clannad and Little Busters. Personally I'd even say Rewrite is the best of them all; I played all three of them back-to-back way back in the beginning of 2013, and at least for a short time afterwards I actually considered Rewrite to be my favorite visual novel. It might not have maintained that spot for too long but either way the point is that... it just deserves better than this. Yes, I've known ever since the day I finished the game that making a proper adaptation of Rewrite was probably impossible no matter what, but I was still hoping for a lot better than what this anime gave us. At the very least it should have gotten more episodes than this; Clannad got 4-cours and Little Busters got 3, why is Rewrite stuck with merely 2? If anything this is the one which needed the most episodes out of the trio since it has a lot less content that can be omitted. Realistically speaking 4 cours would probably have been the optimal pacing-wise given the length of the game. But I guess that's just the world we live in nowadays: anime are mostly produced in order to promote their source materials and boost the sales of those, and as a result we very rarely see shows with more than 2 cours anymore. For a lot of series that's totally fine and all, but for ones with very long source materials like this, it's basically a killing blow, unfortunately.

Last but not least though, as mentioned previously we are at least getting a second season for Winter 2017 (so it's a split cour), and this is giving me a certain feeling of déjà vu. See, as badly as 8bit destroyed Grisaia no Kajitsu two years ago, they actually did a very respectable job with its sequels, Meikyuu and Rakuen, and the main reason for that was simply that the sequels are way shorter to begin with and thus much easier to adapt since they didn't have to rush them so badly, unlike with Kajitsu. And I feel like the same thing could very well happen with Rewrite. In case you don't know, the visual novel has one route for each of the main heroines (Kotori/Chihaya/Lucia/Shizuru/Akane) and then a two-part True route at the end, with the first part being called Moon and the second part being called Terra. Now in the anime they've basically replaced the five girls' routes with this original Kagari route, and the upcoming second season will adapt Moon and Terra. In other words the second season should actually not be anime original, unlike this one. There will probably be minor changes in order to accommodate for everything they've done in the first season, but for the most part I reckon it should be pretty much the same as in the game. And above all, just Moon and Terra on their own should actually be doable in 1 cour, so we might actually have acceptable pacing next time around as well. With all that being taken into account, it could actually turn out to be a pretty good anime. The downside is of course that we seriously lack proper buildup for it since none of the heroine routes were adapted first, so I'm not sure how everything will turn out in the end regardless. But I think it at least has decent potential to come out alright for those who are already familiar with those routes, I.E: those who have played the visual novel first. And for those who haven't... maybe, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

If nothing else, given how unsatisfying this first season has been on its own it can only go upwards from here. Let's hope the second time's the charm in this case. Then again I know better than to expect much from 8bit no matter what by now, so I won't get my hopes up too high just yet.

A lot of anime each season tends to adapt material from a different medium. Manga, light novels, videogames, and sometimes even visual novels. Of all of them, a visual novel is arguably the hardest to adapt. Why, you ask? Since visual visuals novels tend to have branching narratives with multiple possible storylines and alternate endings, it’s difficult to simply “choose” one to adapt or adapt the “right” one and pull out a good anime from.
Decisions made by the player during the game compound on top of one another and can eventually change which storypath the VN goes down and lead to an alternate ending. ... It’s not uncommon for VNs to have well over 5 alternate endings, so when it comes to adapting it to anime, how does it actually work out? How do you adapt multiple story lines into one 13 or 26 episode anime?

In the case of Steins;Gate, studio White Fox decided to adapt a “true ending” route, which is the route that tied up the most loose ends and had the most satisfying ending. In the case of Fate/stay night, studio ufotable and studio DEEN both adapted two out of the three distinct routes from the original VN, and next year studio ufotable will adapt the final route in a trilogy of films titled “Heaven’s Feel”. So when it comes to Rewrite, a commercially successful and critically acclaimed visual novel with around 5 distinctive routes, what does studio 8bit decide to do? Well of course, fuse half of them into one monumental mess!

Adapting a VN is hard enough, so why does 8bit try and make it harder for themselves by blending multiple stories into one? The original alternate story lines are alternate for a reason; they are purposefully set as different playable routes for the player because of their distinctive nature. The main character, Kotarou, forms different and unique relationships with each of the supporting characters in their respective routes, so what happens when you blend half of them into one? Disharmony is what happens. Unevenness. Asymmetry. A narrative that isn’t well-rounded nor that has a clear and defined goal is what is produced. I can say with sufficient surety that nobody watching Rewrite as it was airing (without prior knowledge from the visual novel) was able to understand what the main conflict or goal was that was present in the story. Studio 8bit’s unreasonably resolute determination to adapt a careless fusion of routes spawns a monstrosity of an anime that forces its viewers into a submission of perplexity.

Rewrite’s disjointed narrative overflows with a smorgasbord of elements that just don’t click with one another. Slice of life moments, pseudo-harem elements, convoluted supernatural magic powers and giant CGI monsters that will more often that not leave you bewildered and lost rather than intrigued. The stakes are raised to unfathomably unreachable heights, but it is difficult to grasp them tightly enough to take seriously, what with all the convoluted magic stuff and the irrepressible escalation of “what the fuck” moments.

The problems arisen from the show that materialize from its poor adaptation are mostly contained and limited to the first half, in which Kotarou forms and develops his relationships with the all-female supporting cast he’s constantly surrounded by (hence, “pseudo-harem elements”). Originally, Kotarou is supposed to develop separate and unique relationships with all the girls individually, but since 8bit decided that “just didn’t cut it”, Kotarou insteads fleshes out relationships with only half of the cast. This results in back-to-back episodes expanding on Lucia and Shizuru’s backstories (“sob stories” would technically be the more accurate term) that collectively feel episodic in nature and superficial in execution. It’s very obvious, almost as if explicitly implied, that the show just had to find a way to squeeze in these two character’s backstories because those were part of the routes 8bit decided to fuse together. No real respect is offered towards the rest of the cast, they all feel like plot devices used to escalate the narrative towards the back stories of the two. This lack of authenticity makes the show and characters mechanical and robotic, the only characters that you can empathize with are the two the show force their backstories into.

Now of course, the poor adaptation isn’t to blame alone. The original narrative of the Rewrite visual novel has its fair share of innate problems that deserve a respectable portion of the blame as well. The narrative of Rewrite shifts its focus from cute girls, high school club goals, supposedly heart wrenching sob stories and then finally sets it sights on world destruction and human extinction. How can it all connect? Where is the delicacy in execution? Earlier I said the show had an irrepressible escalation of “what the fuck” moments. This isn’t an escalation of say, running up a set of staircases dangerously fast like a frantic 10-year-old who’s been suppressing his bladder all day; it’s more like a clinically insane and frenetic individual rocket jumping from the CN tower to the moon, only because the moon “looked cool”. Shifting from cute girls doing cute things to a commentary on the nature of humanity and world destruction is already a pretty implausible change in tone, but actually not entirely impossible.
What Rewrite lacks is a sense of scale. It starts small, with a comfortable high school setting and fictional city within its reach, which disallows room for expansion of tackling immensely bigger topics and more impactful themes and premises; it started with a small scale, when it should have started with a large one and focused on a small part of it; It outlined and gave away little information, when it should have outlined a lot and gave only a small part of it. If it did those things it would transform its irrepressible escalation of “what the fuck” moments into an irrepressible escalation of “oh, that’s how it connects. Awesome!” moments.

So how could they have adapted it properly? While we’re asking that question, let’s go a little broader. How can an anime adapt its source material properly? Well, the answer is simple: with care. Just care. A little attention to detail here, a little improvisation there, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to translate a possibly great work into an equally great medium.

Overall: 3/10 || Enjoyment 4/10

Amongst many avid visual novel players unlike myself, Rewrite is beloved. Talked and praised about endlessly, news of its anime adaption left its near-obsessive fans with a bloated sense of ecstasy; just think, the joy of having something you truly love with all your heart being reshaped into the medium that you love just as much… It’s an unfathomable state of euphoria, albeit if funnily enough trivial, that just can’t be achieved by other things in life. Nothing else raises people’s moods quite like that. There is a “but” though, and it exists because of a studio’s lack of care; not to say studio 8bit didn’t necessarily care for the work, but more so the evident absence of care in execution that can be seen by anyone who’s experienced both the visual novel and the anime adaptation. This execution that lacks finesse and charm unfortunately forces Rewrite to join its brothers and sisters in the collection of anime grouped as “the source material was much, much better.”

I hope this review was informative and helpful.

Well well well, Romeo Tanaka. We meet again. It hasn't even been a year since I reviewed that last atrocity with your name on it, and now you're teaming up with a company that people only remember at this point because After Story still ranks high on MAL after all this time in order to get recognized by anime fans who will never play your supposed masterpiece Cross Channel, and thus will only remember you as the guy who made Humanity Has Declined and a load of shit that no one cares about. I sympathize with you. I really do. The anime industry is a ... fucked up place that holds back actual talent. We all know that by now.

But like the people who okayed that godawful Ratchet & Clank movie, you've got to ask yourself this: is having an anime adaptation of your work really the ultimate prize it's all cracked up to be? Don't you realize by now that you work in a video game industry, and thus are inherently incompatible with an entertainment medium that the viewer can't physically interact with? Don't you realize that for ever Steins;Gate and Madoka Magica that ends up making it big, there are fifty World Conquest Zvezda Plots, Robotics;Notes, and Classroom Crises. And assuming you do know this, don't you know that teaming up with fucking 8-bit is considered a mistake in every sense of the word? I mean who even remember what anime they made? Oh right, these are the guys who made Grisaia. And yet somehow, even when you're working with them, they end up creating a product several times worse to the point that I could have done better.

You'd think I'd have spent all my outrage regarding Rewrite after the last post I wrote about it and you'd be mostly right, but the thing about this show is that it's my favorite kind of bad to review on the grounds that it fucks up so royally that you could write more essays about what it does wrong than you can about the many interpretations of Utena. It's not bad in that "incredibly lackluster to the point that I can't even remember what it is I'm supposed to be complaining about" that characterized the last few shows I reviewed. This is straight up "I see how this could have been better if it was handled by people with actual talent, or at least a chimpanzee" bad. And even when I'm being calm about it, there's so many words dripping with unsubtle bile I can write about the product that I can actually cause some impact on the industry by making the producers lose even less money than they already have. Hell, I've already written quite a bit and I haven't even actually started describing Rewrite as of yet. Girls Beyond the Wasteland wishes it could have fucked up as much as this.

Rewrite is an anime about a young boy named Kotarou Tennouji, living all by himself (of course) in the incredibly environmental-friendly town of Kazamatsuri. A town which houses a bunch of mysterious secrets such as dodgy CG crabs and annoying fairy creatures that our git of a main lead just has to discover the truth about, so he ends up joining an occult club and recruits members to help him out that all happen to be female and only two of them at best exist for the sake of more than just fetish fuel. Of course, in this show's defense, there is some semblance of a reason for his decision to only invite girls to hang out with him on one of his nature walks whilst ignoring the one male dude who he antagonizes more than Bugs Bunny did to any of the other Looney Toons. It's because he's a grade-A pervert who thinks sexually harassing his friends and touching their boobs is a charm point. Hey, I didn't say the reason wasn't "pants-on-head"levels of retarded.

But as is usual for visual novel anime, this is all just a smoke-screen for some upcoming serious plot that the writers seem to think would be a good idea to wait until halfway through the show to introduce for some reason, and in Rewrite's case, it turns out that Kotarou's friends actually belong to secret government organizations that are in conflict with each other because one side wants to destroy the world in order for it to be birthed anew and the other side wants to protect humanity even though said world is a morbid state of affairs where humans can kill trees without any repercussions. Yes, the plot is basically X/1999 if you replaced all the pretentiously cool CLAMP characters with little girls who would rather drink tea and bathe in hot springs than actually do something interesting. And yes those are your eyes that just rolled on the floor right now, because your mind can't comprehend how fucking retardedly mismatched the two plotlines are. I mean what's next? Harem school club anime that suddenly turns into Breaking Bad?

Admittedly though, Rewrite does lean heavily on one of its mismatched sides to the point that the other one doesn't cause much interference. It's just too bad that said side is the banal school life side where nothing interesting ever happens and there's no drive to events other than curious retardation. Yeah, remember how I said before that I hate most visual novel anime (and most anime in general for that matter) because for some reason people can't get it into their heads that "comedic episodes and light conflicts that solely exist to build up the world and the characters so that when the true dramatic story hits, it's all the more effective" is an absolutely awful concept that no one with a brain would possibly enjoy, let alone prefer to just "starting the dramatic story at the very start"? Well generally, these sorts of shows stop with their inane prologues by the halfway point, but Romeo Tanaka adaptations just can't seem to grasp the definition of the word "stop". It takes more than three quarters of the runtime for both Girls Beyond the Wasteland and Rewrite to get something even approaching an ongoing plot, and even then the latter seems to think that it can take a break and let girls relax in hot springs as a sort of reward for all the action that occurred previously, even though said action is only a minor skirmish against a twat that looked awful and no lasting impact because apparently stab wounds are easier to recover from than paper cuts.

The show is just littered with every bad adaptation choice you could possibly make when adapting an interactive non-linear product to a non-interactive linear world to the point that it feels like we're living in that shitty visual novel adaptation phase of anime again. Do you remember how one of my big complaints about Charlotte was that it had a severe lack of drama when it was desperately needed? Well it seems Rewrite misinterpreted the complaints people have made about Key products being overly manipulative even harder and decided to only give service to the company's token melodrama in the worst way possible. There's only two episodes that try to tug at the viewer's heartstrings and of course, it'd be directed towards the two girls with no plot-importance whatsoever, as well as being fucking botched to boot.

Just as an example, one of the episodes in the first half of the show is centered on the purple-haired girl, Lucia, and plays out like a bad horror story with its poorly directed attempts to be creepy that end with Kotarou discovering it was her who was causing all the strange things to happen because she has the ability to poison anything she touches thank to experiments done on her. Said episode ends with her throwing a hissy fit, accidentally poisoning Kotarou, him fixing himself up, revealing that she works for a secret organization, and then happy school life continues again in the very next episode. Excuse me Rewrite for not having the tear ducts required to appreciate sadness caused by "magic" that has never been foreshadowed until now, has no impact on the story beyond a few plot points that you could have conveyed better by shooting someone, doesn't further anyone's characterization, and indeed is never brought up again after it's told!

I could go on listing all the bad adaptation decisions...so let's continue, shall we? The animation is uglier than Andrew Lloyd Webber, looking like one of those crappy flash animated shows from the early 2000s with the shining buffed up a bit. And that's not even getting into the 3D animation for the monsters in this show, which looks so retarded and clashes so badly with the backgrounds that Polygon Pictures themselves would have fired the people working on it. And even by visual novel standards, the characters are just completely unlikable. Kotarou basically bullies and sexually harasses his friends for no reason, constantly begging to touch their breasts even during serious moments to the point that you sympathize with Lucia in regards to wanting to murder the bastard. But for some reason, the girls still hang out with him like the moe tsundere sycophants they are. Even dressing into cat-eared maid costumes at his request because apparently we're living in an age where people still think it was funny when Higurashi did this. It's like someone took a bunch of dating sim stereotypes, tacked on an arbitrary twist to each of them, and then beat them over the head with a crowbar that was made out of concentrated STUPID.

Finally there's the ending, which is both the best part of the show in how laughably terrible it was in a "I can't believe you did that" kind of way, as well as the worst part of the show because you couldn't believe they actually did that. To those who played the visual novel, remember how every single girl's route would end with the world getting fucked? Well instead of using one of those endings to cap things off, the producers decided to go a bit more original...by ripping off Evangelion like every other anime under the sun. One of the girls performs a ritual that kills off every human being on the planet and turns them into glowing orbs so that our plant life sovereign can reign supreme in a manner that would make Poison Ivy blush. No, I am not kidding. That is actually what happens, and before you guys start thinking "hey, that actually sounds pretty awesome", note that a sequel adapting the true route that will no doubt retcon the ending harder than Aldnoah Zero did after its three-month break is coming out next season because the creators were so confident that die-hard fans would want it after sitting through this misery. Starting right at the end of this sentence, you have one second to name a single anime where keeping the prologue and the actual meat of the story divided into two distinct series was a good idea. Time's up. That's what I thought.

I am not exaggerating when I say there is literally no audience for this show at all. If you're a fan of the visual novel, you'll be turned off by the insipid adaptation choices that basically scream "fuck it, if they paid full price for that Little Busters anime, they'll pay full price for this". And if you're not a fan, you'd be clawing your eyes out at the complete lack of fun on screen assuming you can work up the interest necessary to acknowledge Rewrite's existence in the first place. I don't know how well the blu-rays sold, but the number can't be high. I mean we're living in an age where the fujoshi market makes up the numbers now and Rewrite definitely doesn't have much in the way of manservice for fangirls to slobber over. The only people I can possibly see enjoying this show are those with a lead pipe shoved in your brain's front lobe, and if that's the case, it'd be cheaper and more exciting to just shove poo down the pipe's hole.

This is one of the worst adaptations I have ever seen, and easily the worst Key anime to date. 8-bit, Tensho, and the entire staff should be ashamed of what was produced here. This Rewrite adaptation is in the similar vein as M Night Shyamalans "The Last Airbender" adaptation where you have characters with the same names and some of the story elements, but presented without soul and crushed down until it possesses none of its quality. The original source material wasn't perfect. In fact I would deem it inconsistent and flawed, but it was refreshingly different from other works from ... Key and was a very interesting read. However, to see it degraded to this ugly mess was utterly depressing.

Story: 1/10 (atrocious)

Seriously!? Who is this adaptation for? Studio 8-shit thought it was a great idea to horribly rush events directly from the VN for the first half, and then go anime original into a rushed incomprehensible second half. Like... if you don't have the time to adapt it and were going to make most of it original, you might as well have made it completely anime original. If you wanted to adapt the whole thing then trying to do it in merely 13 episodes was a terrible idea in the first place. The first half will immediately turn off people who haven't read the novel since it appears to be something generic with rapid tonal swings and horrible pacing. The second half only goes out of its way to give fans of the novel the finger by creating a train-wreck of several side routes combined into a weird anime original clusterfuck with only one frigging thing original outside of the source material. Finally if your a Key fan, you will be so emotionally distant from the generic underdeveloped characters that if you were hoping for the famous "feels" you won't even get that. There are many elements of the story that will probably seem incomprehensible to new viewers, and when you need the source material to understand what is going on, then it has failed utterly as an adaptation.

Characters: 2/10 (terrible)

Incredibly thin and underdeveloped. Like the other flawed Key anime Charlotte, most of them only have time to be defined by some single trait that is repeated for punchlines. "Pervert and lets be BFF generic" Kotarou, the ribbon girl loves coffee, Chihiya is a dumb jock, you have tsundere "don't touch me pervert" Lucia, you have "cute loli that defends protagonist no matter what" Shizuru. I don't even remember what they gave Kotori as a character in the anime. Two of the characters are given backstories with some scenes that feel like they were on fast forward... I am not even kidding, all of it is so rushed that even as someone who read the novel, I was BARELY able to follow, and felt disconnected pretty quickly. When you speed up events with no flow or breathing time, it ends up moving too fast for you to digest and process what is going on and what you should be feeling. The result is a rapid slideshow summarizing whats going on without giving you time or space to feel or care about the events on the screen.

There are only two characters in the show that could be somewhat entertaining. One of them is in it for like 10 minutes (Yoshino), and the other was the ribbon girl who ironically has the least personality in the original source material. The ribbon girl has an anime original circumstance that occurs, and there is a charm to her that sort of works for a single episode that I thought was passable.

However, it was when I saw the final episode that I realized how terrible the cast was treated in this horrid adaptation. You see characters being injured, dying, yelling and screaming in a chaotic battle with supposed high stakes in the air. Yet, despite having read about them for 50+ hours in the novel, I simply watched bored and emotionally disconnected from everything happening onscreen. I didn't care about any of these characters that I remembered liking so much from the visual novel. None of the charm, fun, or heart of these characters were there. They were became nothing but hallow shells carrying their names.

Art/Animation: 3/10 (terrible)

Rewrite looks ugly. The art and animation is somewhat passable for the first couple episodes, and then it takes a quality nosedive in the second half. 8-shit decided to make this show CGI heavy and the result is atrocious. It honestly gives Berserk 2016 a run for its money in awfulness. I hate the character designs, which look too small and way too "cutesy" for my liking. The character are very often off-model and look awful in motion at times. Tensho, the director, is also very weak at framing good actions sequences so even if your just there for decent spectacle it can't even manage that. Plus, a personal gripe, why is the lighting always so bright? Jesus!!

Sound: 8/10 (very good)

Like... the one saving grace? Maybe? Something good to say about this trash is the soundtrack that was taken straight from the visual novel...

Enjoyment: 1/10

I honestly wished this anime didn't exist. The fans of the visual novel and of Key deserve much better than this. I feel very bad for people who loved the original material and was expecting something good. Unfortunately this isn't the adaptation you were looking for. If you aren't a fan of either Key or the novel, I don't recommend this either since there are much better options out there. This entire adaptation needs a rewrite, and from a studio that doesn't rhyme with shit.

I had to write a review for this. Because Rewrite is my favorite Key work of all-time. Because it deserved better than this.

If you are wondering if this anime is worth your time, I say this: if the premise catches your eye, or the character designs, or anything at all, I absolutely implore you to check out the original visual novel. It's deep. It's beautiful inside and out. It's got a message that cannot be ignored. None of which can be said about this travesty of an adaptation. 8bit did not know what they were doing, and do not deserve five hours of your time ... spent here. Avoid this trainwreck at all costs.

The story jumps around like a pinball in a dryer. There is no semblance of cohesive storytelling to be found. It takes bits and chunks of the branching "routes" from the visual novel and attempts to tie them together in a haphazard, charmless sort of way. At first I wondered if this was on purpose, like the show was just meant to be a treat for people who have already read the source material it is based on, but no. No reader of the visual novel can find anything redeemable at how badly 8bit botched this.

Characters have been derailed extensively. Shizuru, Lucia, and especially Kagari act in ways that are unthinkable for their VN counterparts. Kagari is supposed to be an ominous, mysterious entity, a legitimate threat to Kotarou's peaceful life and instead becomes a caffeine-addicted, narcissistic victim of fart jokes.

The one thing that Rewrite gets right is the music. It's taken straight from the visual novel, some truly great pieces that practically tell a story all by themselves. The voice actors are all returned to reprise their roles for this adaptation, but Chiwa Saitou, whose turn as Kotori Kanbe made the character one of the most beloved in the novel, sounds almost chronically bored. It's a shame, but I think even she saw that this script and this adaptation would be lovingly omitted from any resumes she makes going forward. Kana Hanazawa, my favorite seiyuu of all-time, returns as Kagari, but I've already mentioned how badly they've botched her character, and it feels like KanaHana knew it too. She puts forth only just enough effort to keep the dysfunctional train on the tracks.

The art is dreadful. The characters, whose designs are lovingly detailed in the visual novel, are reduced to frilly moeblobs with very little detail. There are some decent panning shots of Kazamatsuri, but that's about it. And the CG monsters that crop up routinely during the show are just about at the point where they might have looked passable in a 1980s Gundam show. But it's now 2016, and these CG dinosaurs and leaf dragon look pitiful. Perpetually locked at somewhere south of 18 frames per second, it feels like you're watching a particularly unappealing PlayStation 2 game.

In short, this is something to be avoided. I thought I had learned my lesson when I watched their dreadful Absolute Duo adaptation, but at least that was a case where the source material was also uninspired and trite, so 8bit could be almost excused for going through the motions in adapting it. Rewrite is not only great, but a downright tome of greatness, with nearly 100 hours of content. There was no way they were going to be able to do it justice with just 13 episodes, but I would have at least respected an honest attempt to try. Instead, I got a fanservice-laden clusterfuck of scenes that go nowhere, schizophrenic pacing, dull action scenes, and an ending that teases the inevitable second cour. I'll be taking a pass on that, 8bit. Don't take it personal. I'll be too busy "Rewriting" my brain to cleanse it from this disaster.

Until next time, may the Song of Destruction be heard all across 8bit's headquarters.

Rewrite. The second highest rated Key Visual Novel on VNDB, only surpassed by Clannad. Something more than well worth reading, in my eyes.

That's not what this anime is, at all. Not only was it hardly an adaptation with its gratuitous anime original content, but they managed to ruin any small thing they did adapt.

Therefore, I'm going to review this while trying to put aside my thoughts of the original material.

Story: 1/10.
-What is the premise? What am I watching? Where is the plot?- All questions asked throughout Rewrite's duration. None of which were answered. The fact is, this series had no direction. ... We have "twists" that are in no way surprising, and generally poorly executed. We have info dump after info dump of information that in the end, really amounted to nothing, and yet we still were left with a plethora of questions. We also got an ending with a vague after credits scene to try and lure us into the next season. A complete, and utter mess. The only reason I rate this a 2, is due to the fact there was a beginning and end, something that I admittedly cannot say for some anime series.

Art: 6/10
-While obviously lacking, and rather flat, I can't say I have much to complain about on this front. It was derpy, but hey, with the schedule Aniplex gave 8-bit, who can blame them?

Sound: 2/10
-The Sound Director for this series... was not originally a sound director. Poorly placed BGMs that blended together awfully, despite being very pretty on their own. Cringe like screams and grunts that generally felt unnatural. Only thing redeeming was the OST itself, which is absolutely perfect.

Characters: 2/10
-A large cast of characters, of which really only two were given any real development, which even then was minimal. Felt nothing for them, and little to no attachment to them existed. Only rated 2/10 because none of them were bad characters, just very two dimensional and forgetful.

Enjoyment: 2/10
-When the pacing and overall themes are so much of a mess they don't make sense, things go south quickly.

Overall: 1.

Honestly, I would've dropped this at around Episode 3, if not for my fondness of the somewhat related original material. The show on its own didn't feel like a chore, but wasn't something I particularly looked forward to. I honestly wouldn't reccomend this anime to anyone, even to people who enjoy the genre. If it must be anime, I would have to reccomend something else.

I do hope that the second season, supposedly adapting the later parts of the original, will be done well. I assume the only people watching it will be fans, or people who actually enjoyed the first season. If that's the case, let's hope for the best. :)

The first two episodes are funny school life characterization stuff that was genuinely enjoyable to watch. Then the mystery, supernatural, and action elements begin to become more prevalent, and my interest dived.

This anime is plagued with issues. Some of them have to do with having too much source material to adapt and thus make the anime feel rushed or overall poorly paced. I will not be talking about those issues.

Even if an anime is poorly paced, there is a limit to how much an anime can jump from one scene to the next with wildly different tones without it being jarring. One scene can seem ... pretty tense and traumatic, and then the next scene goes to a short BS school drama thing and sours all of the emotion of the previous scene. The characters act as if they have NO MEMORY of past events unless the plot demands it, and it screams bad writing. This occurs from the very first episode and doesn't stop until the plot kicks into high gear around episode 8-ish (your mileage may vary).

The animation is serviceable in the slice-of-life-y portions, but in action scenes apart from maybe the last episode, the animation is cringe at times and almost laughably bad at others, especially with the anime's heavy use of CG. Even when the characters are standing still, I don't remember any points where they looked great. There is nothing visually interesting in this show, which really hurts it since some characters are supposed to be super powerful and action is supposed to play up the tension in some areas.

These two things alone make the anime painful to watch, but if you are willing to look past them, then you might find a surprisingly interesting story with a few twists. The problem is that the storytelling is bad enough that you might not see the story.

At the very least, I kind of liked the ending, for both ironic and non-ironic reasons. It sort of hints at the possibility of a continuation. Idk, it could go either way, but I can't say I'm excited to see another whole season with this kind of quality.

My advice: Maybe watch the first two episodes. If it looks something like you'd be interested in experiencing, stop watching and figure out some way to play the game. The anime has a different story from the routes in the game, but every route in the game is probably way better than the anime so don't look back.

Rewrite could have been great. I can smell the potential of the source material on it. However, it turned to be a big mess since the very beggining, and with second season "Rewrite Moon and Terra" coming, i feel the need of doing what I consider an accurate review of this show, specially about the main problem i have with.
Talking first about its skin, the art in Rewrite is pleasant. It is your typical Key art with moe characters and eyes bigger than your hand but it's very colorful and shining. Animation is also rather good, with fluid movements and fights. CGI was ok and ... overall a good animation for a studio with almost none specially previously good work.
Well, i'm pretty sure why this is not the exception.
This is my main problem with Rewrite: It is indeed very rushed. Well, you can think this is not a major problem, it is very common skip some things while adapting and things like those, but the reality is that is VERY rushed to the point of being a total disaster. Usually, Key's visual novel structure, with some exceptions like Charlotte or Angel Beats (not necessarily good because of that) is made by a plain guy as a protagonist with a bunch of girls surrounding him with their own arcs and development. In Rewrite, of course, you have the plain guy, and 5 or 6 girls. The problem is Rewrite only focuses in two of them very vaguely (and just one episode), while the other girls are doing random stuff with nosense at all because they have been never explained at least as characters. The show explains you the basics of the world and how it works but suddenly everything changes. The characters on the "bad side" are never explained even the minimum. But the problem, as i said, is not source material's, but adaptation's, because what i can feel on Rewrite is the lack of information, shown or said, that was cutted off for sure because it was probably an extremely long VN to adapt in 13 episodes.
I'll give an example of this (light spoilers): In episode 2 or 3, the main character say something like: "I'm so happy with the occult club, we are friends and we have spent a lot of things together,i don't want it to be over". He almost gathered all the girls in the club at that moment, so they skip a lot of probably episodic adventures to make it in time but that's just the beggining of the nonsensical character development of Rewrite. All the flaws i can think are related to be rushed as hell because the story has the potential to be good but the reason why most characters do what they do just fuck the entire story.
"Why is this character doing this? why is she saying this? who's that character and why is suddenly so important for the plot? why they only try to develop some characters and other remain untouched, even when they are faced with each other, and both sides are right in some way?" There are some important questions unanswered in Rewrite that turn it into just a shell of a good show. It has indeed no coherent soul. Maybe second season can repair this, but seeing how first one ended, i don't think so. Even if it could, the base material is already so bad that it's a snowball now.
Overall, even if you like Key and its adaptations, this Rewrite anime is completely forgetable and skipable. It just has many things missing from the original VN, and i can say this without playing it, because is obvious if you are not abduced by the moe style and beautiful animation.

Have you ever look forward to a new episode that you can’t stop thinking about all throughout the week? Well, that was the exact opposite with me and Rewrite. Trying to make a joke about wanting the show to be “rewritten”, but now I just wished it wasn’t written in the first place. Everything about it was a whole lot of wrong.

I’ll admit, I have not played the original visual novel. However, I won’t use that as an excuse to why I didn’t like it. There were other adaptations of works by Key that were fairly decent. Planetarian was one that was came out the ... same time and was much shorter, but at least that was more entertaining. Again, I know nothing of the original source, so I don’t know what is faithful or not. But, that doesn’t mean I can’t distinguish a good story from a bad one.

That brings me to the story. It’s so difficult to describe that I’m having trouble figuring out what to write in this section. The one thing that bothered me the most, when it comes to the story, is the lack of context. Rarely were things explained, and if so, it was in the vaguest way possible. What’s worse than a bad story is having horrible pacing added to it. I first noticed it in an early episode that focused on a certain character. We get their backstory, and it’s done so quickly that it gives us no time to appreciate (for a lack of better terms) this character’s history. The second half of the show goes so downhill and becomes mind-numbingly ludicrous that I didn’t even react. The overall mood was kind of a mix, as well. It seems serious at times, but isn’t afraid to put in a random fart joke (there’s only one, but it’s really off-putting).

While the story may be out there, I can’t say the same thing for the characters. Zero personalities, zero chemistry, zero everything. There is not a drop of redeeming quality to these people that we’re supposed to follow for twelve episodes. I have the strange suspicion that they were well written in the visual novel because we’ll have more time to know them better. For me, I wouldn’t care if the story was terrible, as long as the characters were interesting enough. That’s definitely not the case with this. I couldn’t care less what happens to anyone, and when things did happen to them, I didn’t bat an eye.

The only thing worse than a bad story and a bad set of characters is bad animation, and it really shows here. From episode one, right off the bat, the visuals were unpleasing, and it actually managed to get worse with each week. Not only do we get terrible-looking character designs and action sequences, we’re even presented with horrendously rendered CG creatures. When both of them are shown together, it is an eyesore. There was never a single moment where I was able to say that something “looked nice”.

For the most part, I can get behind the idea that not everyone has the same opinions on something. Yet, there are shows like Rewrite that makes me wonder why there are people who did enjoy it. Currently, it has close to a rating of 7 on the site, and that puzzles me. How can one look at a single episode of this and say “that was good”? I knew, from the beginning, this show’s fate was already chosen. I knew what I was getting myself into.

There is just one thing now I don’t understand: Why is it getting a second season?

Key's claim to fame has always been supernatural harem VNs with deeper meanings and plotlines that go past your typical romcom-style visual novel as themes involving them are usually thought-provoking to some extent and have more value to them with each route that the player accomplishes. Pairing up with animation studios like Kyoani and P.A. works, the newest Key adaptation comes from our friends at 8bit who can't create a bloody cohesive story, Rewrite. And I must beg the question. 8bit, you sure this series DIDN'T need a rewrite?

Story: Tennouji Koutarou is a classic harem protagonist going to a school that has ... rather ornate-looking female uniforms. Upon finding himself associating with the occult club, he is asked a question from its president asking whether or not if he had the choice, would he save the world?

Following what has been confirmed as one of the final routes of the Rewrite VN, the story of this adaptation is...messy. Yeah, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, it's confusing as f**k. The first problem that comes from Rewrite as a whole is the fact that the entire series follows one of the ENDGAME ROUTES of the entire visual novel, you know, the route that you're only supposed to play or have access to when you have completed everything else and get an understanding for everything? And so, because of this, the show comes as a confusing mess that attempts yet fails miserably at really creating a cohesive and concise story to explain the themes and overall plot of the series. Examples of this are when several characters talk about specific things or epiphanies which when you watch without any context, really doesn't make any or very little sense.

Context aside, the bigger problem that I see with Rewrite is the fact that the show has awful pacing. The show spends about half of its runtime with high school romcom/harem-esque setup that not only squanders the runtime, but takes away from the show's second half with a war between the two factions that this show exhibits, Gaia and Guardian. I personally find this to be a huge shame to this series because the actual content of this series actually seemed interesting and it was a real downer to see that the show really didn't deliver on its potential. Though granted, I'm not sitting through 20 cours of material to get the full scope of this series, so...yeah. Its rushed pacing broke the second half and added only more and more loose and poorly executed details that ended in an ending that unless you've actually played Rewrite, you will most likely not get.

Overview:
+ Actually interesting storyline
- Piss poor pacing
- Endgame route which without context, doesn't make much sense

Characters: Visual novel characters from Key always have a tragic or less than happy backstory to coincide with the overall nature of their works. Rewrite is no different, and therefore has problems because lol8bit.

With Koutarou, you get what you would expect from a Key protag, which is basically the kind of character who is the complete opposite of your generic harem protag who gets flustered around women and is denser than the earth's core. But really, that's all you get. The pacing of this series is done in a way that as a character, anything regarding Koutarou's character in the slightest doesn't really change. He's pretty stagnant all the way and things in the series just kinda...go along whether it's under his power or not. Any and all change that he does have feels unnatural and rushed and overall doesn't really make his character any more or less interesting. Granted he is a VN protagonist surrounded in girls, but hey, Key always somehow makes the player character interesting in some way, so it's not impossible to make them cool or at least interesting.

The last character I will talk about is 'Ribbon Girl'. I'm not spoiling her name for anyone who actually wants to watch this series (lol), but I will say that her name does actually get announced in the series, but it's so painfully late that I'm still calling her 'Ribbon Girl' for the rest of the series and as I'm writing this. Now, Ribbon Girl is what would arguably be this route's heroine. The problem is, you don't really get to know or understand much about her. The series treats her as the plot device object that everyone wants (which she...kinda is) but as a character, we don't get much about her. She doesn't feel developed beyond some comedic character traits and understanding of such a character feels and is really minimal.

As for the rest of the girls in the series who belong to their own respective routes that we'll never see...well, they're shafted. There're really no two ways to go about it since that's just how these VN adaptations go. For a few of them we do get a bit of an understanding of their tragic past and how they ended up the way they do, but they're just really unnecessary details that I feel really shouldn't even be bothered because the series doesn't focus on them since they're just treated as side characters in this specific adaptation. Other side characters have even less detail and I would argue to not really give much thought to any of them if at all.

Overview:
+ Interesting and entertaining characters
- All members of the cast have little to no actual depth to them

Art: As expected with 8bit, the artwork and overall style that they went with was pretty on-par with their standards and quality. They stuck true to Key's moe artstyle and the entire look of the series has this nice bright sheen to it that adds to the overall quality. There's little to no actual ecchi as you could expect in a series like this, so I suppose that's a sort of plus.

However, what does bother me personally is the usage of CGI in this series. The CGI that the show uses really clashes with the overall look of the handdrawn animation and is actually quite jarring to look at, especially since its usage is increased dramatically as the episodes go by.

Overview:
+ Good quality hand-drawn animation
- The CGI clashes with the look of the series

Sound: Apart from the second OP in the second half of the series known as "End of the World" (Hmm, I wonder what could be happening in this show?), the rest of the soundtrack really isn't all that exciting or memorable. Only this one OP is perhaps the only real notable track that I could find throughout the entire series.

Personal Enjoyment: Admittedly, I like Key. While their works don't always get the best reception or adaptations due to the way that their visual novels are structured, I was intrigued to see what kind of things 8bit, a company that I've had a pretty rough history with would do to completely and utterly destroy the kind of content that Key has made. Watching Rewrite...I don't really know what I expected to be completely honest. I went into this series thinking it was going to be subpar at best, and despite getting something that was admittedly worse than my original expectations, I didn't really expect anything less.

Did I like this series?

I like the characters. While they were lacking in the development or backstory department as Key always does, their base character traits, especially Koutarou were enough to keep a smidgen of interest for me to continue, although the lack of development probably pissed me off more than it should.

What didn't I like about this series?

Ok, I never played Rewrite. I went into this series pretty much completely blind. Things. Didn't. Make. Sense. In order to make sense of anything in this adaptation, I had to resort to wikis and other information sources on the plot of Rewrite to even get an bit of an understanding as to what I was watching here. And even with that, I still didn't get what was even happening. This, this I hate. I get that this was supposed to be an adaptation for the last route of the game, but at the very least, try and make the whole series somewhat cohesive.

Would I recommend this series?

Hmm...no. My suggestion is to just play the VN is you actually want to understand the Rewrite series. The actual content of this adaptation isn't terrible, it's just not that good and really doesn't have much merit to it because of the sheer number of plot holes and execution problems that this adaptation had. Content-wise, it had something to it. Execution-wise, terrible and should be ashamed of itself for its piss poor pacing.

Before I start, let me stress one thing - I love visual novel called Rewrite. It was my firts 10 out of 10 in its genre, not because it's perfect, but rather because when I was reading it, it felt like it was made perfectly for me. And I'm not deaf to criticism, I've since read opinions of many people who were far less content with that story. And most of the time they've made valid points, but just like I said - while Rewrite wasn't story for them, it still was one for me.

Now, why I'm writing this down? Because I think it's important ... to show you my mindset at the time when I was starting this anime. You've already seen my score: 5. Merely five for something that I should like, no, love. But sorry, I couldn't. I may be a fanboy, but I'm also not blind. This adpatation wasn't a good one, having constant problems with knowing what it wants to show. Is it fanservice for people who are already familiar with the source material? I'd think so, because there were just so many parts that only they would understand. But then, it wasn't particulary good fanservice (Oh, by fanservice I mean seeing characters you like getting animated, revisiting familiar places and hearing this masterpiece of a soundtrack again. Not those lousy attempts to flash tits). Then again, maybe it was meant for people new to Rewrite, with all heroines route cramed to the first 5-6 episodes? But it still can't be right, because not only they wouldn't really get some parts, it would also spoil for them many plot twists without encouraging to read visual novel.

Eh, damn it, that's exactly what's wrong with Rewrite anime - it's a convoluted mess that doesn't know to whom it want to appeal. But you know what? Screw that, let's take a look at anime original story of Kagari, which started in the second half of the season... Nope, still doesn't work. I don't want to spoil anything, so let me just say that the problems that were present earlier are still present here. Plus making tits flashing scenes with that budget and run time - really, 8bit? You just couldn't resist, could ya? And again, don't get me wrong. Oppai route/ending in visual novel made me cry laughing, instantly becoming my Sèvres's measure of fanservice done just right. So while seeing this new Kagari was interesting, that was all.

Anyway, if you gonna watch it, please keep in mind that the whole thing doesn't represent what Rewrite really is. If you enjoyed - good for you, if you didn't - I hear you, but in both cases I'd suggest trying visual novel one day.

This anime isn't good.

(This review has been adapted from my blog/reddit thread. Spoilers ahead!)

“Rewrite” is a word that I am intimately familiar with.

I cannot tell you how many times I have rewritten paragraphs within my reviews. Entire sentences. Even singular words. Each instance of rewriting getting me one step closer to a piece that I feel comfortable sharing. One that I can be proud of and say, “Yes. This looks good.”

It’s never perfect because there is always something that can be rewritten. But what matters is going through that process in the first place.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe Rewrite got the memo.

... STORY

Rewrite kicks off in dark fashion. Tennouji Kotarou, a high-school boy, dies in his dream at the hands of some ribbon-twirling girl. While he fears whatever curse has been laid upon him, he does his best to live a fun-filled, worthwhile life with his other friends of the Occult Club. But, when strange happenings and sinister plans surface, he finds that his curse is the least of his worries.

Discussing Rewrite now is difficult. Not due to the complexity of the material itself, for, arguably, what Rewrite presents is not. But instead due to where the story concluded. It technically gave a complete story but, perhaps obviously, not a full one.

As was seen, Rewrite’s season finishes with basically what visual novels deem a bad end. For everything pretty much went wrong: all the characters died, and vegetation engulfed the world. Kagari’s final scene, where she witnesses this timeline fizzle out alongside hundreds of other timelines that have existed or are existing, also backs this scenario up.

But, as can easily be looked up (and given that the second season is currently airing at the time of this writing), this series is a split-cour. And, presumably, the second half will contain the same cast, continue the plot, and uphold the overall major ideas.

To put it differently, Rewrite has much more to tell – and hopefully a more cheerful ending to get to.

This season, then, acts as a primer of sorts. It introduces the important cast members (so that it won’t have to later), it provides the overall dilemma (Kagari’s role as the key to salvation or destruction), and it gives some insight into its more important themes (like environmentalism and that life is better with friends).

Unfortunately, the anime fails on almost all accounts.

When introducing the cast and, indeed, whenever Kotarou interacted with any of them, it felt entirely too much like its visual-novel source. One after another, Kotarou talks with the girls in a singular manner to meet some hidden quota, removing the naturalness of the events themselves.

This awkward event handling goes away come the middle of the season. For, what replaces the school and the introductions is the meat of the plot. Guardian defeating the monsters that Gaia summons. The lingering doomsday prophecy. Separation of the Occult Club.

Transitioning from the predominantly slice-of-life fun to the drama-heavy plot was made possible by the show’s smaller hints about the characters’ powers and the gradual reveal of the not-so-imaginary occult instances.

What the anime transitions towards, though, is not the most engaging. Despite the title of the anime, Kotarou’s ability does not play too important of a role, diminishing his impact on the overall narrative to that of just the guy who jokes about wanting to grope Akane’s boobs and who hides away from the whole fray within a forested region for far too long. It also does not help that both Guardian and Gaia are hardly explored let alone clash to any major degree.

To its credit, Gaia’s evil plan at least makes some sense. Rather than wanting to eradicate all of humanity just because, they feel this route will keep the Earth from destruction at the hands of its most impactful enemy: humans.

Which leads into one of Rewrite’s themes: environmentalism. Although, using the word “theme” may be a bit too strong since, on a large scale, the anime does not fully explore this idea. The setting is that of a city where cleaner energy takes precedence, and, as was discussed, the anchor to the whole plot relies on protecting the Earth and its bounty. But the show doesn’t target climate change, the effects of abusing resource collections, or even the importance of vegetation in general. To put it differently, it’s more a small surface detail for the story rather than a prominent, nuanced motif.

It’s other major theme – life is better with friends – is one that Rewrite more actively pursues (when compared to the environmentalism). Kotarou finding solace in the Occult Club, their eventual breakup fragmenting his life, his reliving of those happier times with Kagari, and the eventual reunion they (almost all) have at Kotori’s hideaway.

This thread is well-meant, and it gives the anime’s narrative better footing. Sadly, it does not firmly plant its feet due to the weakness of its foundation While the Occult Club is a place where Kotarou and the girls hang out and enjoy life together, the anime has a tough time making said togetherness worthwhile.

That is, they do not feel like a tightknit group of friends because the events therein do not give them that chance. They chase after a critter, but the highlight is Kotarou grabbing Lucia’s butt and a secretary lady using a fishing pole. They scour a forest, but the odd discoveries and the eventual dive into the heavier drama take over. They conduct a series of investigations into the occult (with fruitless results), but these are gone through so quickly that they mean very little in the long run.

All this says nothing about a few awkward plot points (Chihaya not immediately giving Kotarou the super-important letter that Akane addressed to him), the weak action sequences (Midou and Lucia’s duel is about the only memorable one but, even then, just barely), and the anime’s avoidance of showing more of the final scenes (Lucia squaring off against and killing Touka, Chihaya fighting alongside the monstrous Sakuya).

The continuation may turn it around, but, for now, this season simply doesn’t work.

ANIMATION

Rewrite’s character designs are quite nice. The frilly, pink-and-red dresses that the ladies wear are both cute and detailed. Each girl has her own set of accessories: Shizuru’s eyepatch, Lucia’s white gloves, and so on. And the slightly older style for their faces – large eyes, squarer heads – don’t take anything away but rather adds to their overall charm.

Artistically, the anime does about as well as it can within its setting. The school isn’t too interesting, and same goes for some of its other more mundane spots like Kotarou’s house or the local town. It can have its moments, though, like in the clubroom with its furniture and bookcases.

However, given its focus on environmental impacts, the various nature shots are a welcome inclusion. The lush forests, the greenery encasing flowers, and the immense overgrowth that eventually consumes the world are where the anime is at its prettiest.

To be fair, the anime has a strong use of lighting regardless of the location. The school’s hallways casting shadows from the windows or Kotori’s hideaway basked in moonlight give Rewrite a lot in the way of nuance where it normally does not have much.

The CG works against the show, though. It’s used rather sparingly, but Gaia’s dinosaur monsters and Kotori’s woodland defenders stick out too much from the surrounding art to be much else besides distracting. Although, admittedly, those defenders do have an interesting green-energy effect from their designs.

Actual animation remains consistent throughout the season. Earlier episodes hold up rather well during its slice-of-life segments such as Lucia reacting to Touka (their teacher and her commander) blowing cool air on her ear or Kotarou running away from an evil demon dog. A lot of sitting and speaking goes on, but, even during these scenes, reactions to the situations and other comedic bits give the anime the chance to show off some movement.

Later episodes aren’t as strong animation-wise, but they do include a lot more action. Shizuru riding her motorcycle, Lucia dueling Midou, and Kotarou struggling against the flying plant-like beast are just a few of the many examples where the cast do more than just eat snacks in the clubroom.

Kagari’s ribbon manipulation (her makeshift crane, her slapping) are also worth noting. Her ribbons are almost always doing something, giving her character and the scenes in which she exists a nice amount of dynamism.

CHARACTERS

As it was with the story, Rewrite’s split-cour nature and, more importantly, this season’s outcome (the “bad end”) makes it tough to talk about Kotarou and the other girls. The anime still has more to tell, but it still provided character-focused content worth discussing.

Most notable are Shizuru and Lucia. Unlike everyone else, they get their own episode – which can be looked at in one of two ways.

The first is with appreciation. The anime understandably wants (and needs) to showcase a lot of its important plot points, but it does not have a whole lot of time in which to do so. So, when the anime squeezes their entire backstory, development, and importance into a single episode, it’s more about giving them the attention they deserve (and likewise need) rather than worrying about the execution. In other words, it’s nice that the audience got something.

The second is with question. Their dilemmas are poorly explained through large amounts of exposition. Pacing has no place. Some development occurs but lacks impact. Yes, the audience learns why Shizuru always wears an eyepatch or Lucia always wears gloves, but the events themselves are not handled with the best of care. The show gives them to the audience and that’s that.

Of the two approaches, the second is the more arguable since not a whole lot happens with Shizuru and Lucia after these episodes (especially Shizuru). Lucia goes to help Kotarou and the others, saying “What could possibly take priority over protecting my friends?!” An indication of how she has changed her lonely self from before. But that’s about it. As for Shizuru, she eventually abandons her spot within Guardian, but it comes as too little, too late after being sidelined for so long.

Rewrite handles Kotori’s character differently, but the conclusion is roughly the same. Arguably worse.

She likes sleep, money, and the great outdoors. Extra emphasis for the last one on the list since she eventually reveals her druidic nature. Unlike Shizuru and Lucia, she receives a miniscule amount of backstory. One scene about how she turned down Kotarou’s love confession (meaning the meta childhood-friend curse continues), and one scene about how her parents died in a car accident (which led to her druid powers). The latter unable to support the drama that their second deaths (through their reanimated bodies) bring.

Rumored to be a powerful witch, Akane “leads” their occult club – but mostly just plays her online FPS. She apparently skips class as much as she wants but still moves on to the next grade level, indicating some level of power or influence of a hierarchical nature (which is later proven true when her family connections are revealed).

Her breasts are a (joking) motivation for Kotarou to investigate the otherworldly happenings presented to them. But, normally, she’s indifferent to the whole occult thing, often lazing about whenever Kotarou brings them all on yet another failed outing.

Akane (with Chihaya) inevitably parts with the group once her Gaia affiliation comes to light. Although she does not seem too keen on following their ways, for the prospect of her mind melding with the other saints that preceded her and thereby losing herself, as well as the annihilation of the whole Earth, does not strike her as exactly favorable.

Unfortunately, she does lose, succumbing to her undue fate and ultimately leading everyone to their demise. To put it differently, this season establishes and shows what happens when she isn’t saved. Hopefully, come the next season, Kotarou and crew flip that fate, but, for now, her role as the puppet worked well enough.

Not much can be said about Chihaya, for Rewrite gives her next to nothing thrown her way besides her introduction and the occasional joke. It’s not a major problem right now since the anime chose to focus on Shizuru and Lucia and, to some extent, Kotori and Akane. Meaning, they must delve into Chihaya’s character more in the follow-up season – lest she end up as worthless when viewing the bigger picture.

This leaves Kotarou. As the main protagonist of this tale, he’s the one that brings the other girls together. He does so for their sake but mostly for himself; he wants a place where he can feel comfortable and have fun with what little youth they have left to spend. For he has always felt like an outsider of sorts just like Yoshino and the girls.

As such, he forms a friendly relationship with them thanks to his kindhearted personality. Lucia beats him up, Shizuru eats lunch with him, Kotori teases him, Chihaya gets familiarized with this new place through him, and Akane looks down on him. All playful and silly.

But, as is shown, intrigue is afoot. His rewrite ability (what the anime is supposedly named after) is something he keeps hidden and uses to permanently alter his person. Actual occult occurrences appear from time to time. And an odd ghost nightly nibbles on his arm.

The intrigue eventually forces the group to split, and, in doing so, leaves Kotarou by himself. Coincidentally, Kagari, the nibbling ghost, begins to follow him around like a regular person. His friendship with her reminds him of the fun he had in the club with the other girls, making him long for those peaceful times once again.

While helping Kagari discover herself, he meets up with Kotori for the first time since the group split. She reaffirms the end goal of the war between Guardian and Gaia (saving the world) and explains in further detail that Kagari is the “Key,” a physical manifestation of the Earth that is (appropriately enough) the key to said war.

Kotarou chooses to protect Kagari, doing what he can to train with his new Wolverine-energy claw so that he can avoid the problems he encountered in the past. While not much of it is shown beyond Sakuya tutoring him and him punching the air, he slowly improves his fighting prowess. All the while, Lucia and Chihaya reappear, giving Kotarou that feeling of comfort and fun that he felt at the beginning of the season.

Once everything starts to fall apart, he does his best to fight Midou but must run away instead. And, during his fight with Sougen, he loses even after overclocking with his rewrite power. That is, despite all the training he went through, it didn’t amount to much of anything. An odd writing decision but perhaps a necessary one, considering the bad end achieved.

To this end, twisted magic, from the ribbon planted within his arm and the echoing song that pierces the air, consume him, turning half of him into foliage. Yet he still gets to make the final choice: kill Kagari and save everyone from death, or save Kagari and doom everyone to nonexistence. It’s a callback to the philosophical question he answered on the questionnaire in the beginning of the season.

“You have power, and are discontent with this world. Tell me, do you wish to change this world? Or do you wish to change yourself?”

Kotarou originally answered, “I don’t know.” His choice to save Kagari seems as though he now would select changing the world, but it’s hard to know whether that’s the case since the continuation still looms. Because, given that his answer forms the crux of his character, answering it now would mean the end of his development.

Overall, Kotarou is not a horrible character. He does what he can for Kotori and the others, he trains himself over time, and he still has that lingering question to answer. He’s not a very strong character either, considering his minimal influence and the lack of focus on him as a person. Still, he’s better than the rest of the cast, and he has that second season to hopefully pick up the slack.

SOUND

Much of the music within Rewrite does not have the kick required to be meaningful.

Take its opening tracks. The first one has some solid guitar playing in the beginning as well as a semi-mysterious vibe during its middle section. But, by the halfway point, the piece picks up without saying much or feeling as though it matters. The second OP is the same. Besides the background vocalists and the ending, its pop-rock composition, like that of the first OP, does not hold up as anything special.

Same goes for the original soundtrack. The mysterious track that gets played at the very beginning of episode one and the relaxing flute piece are small standouts, but, in general, the OST sticks to more pop-rock and lots of piano. They simply do not do much beyond sounding right for the scene.

The main ending track at least comes off as more thoughtful. The drums slightly overpower it, but the bassline near the start, a more whimsical approach (violin, piano, chimes, water-droplet-like sound-effects), the dip in the middle, more background vocalists, and the trailing whispers craft a pretty, hopeful piece that fits Rewrite’s intentions.

The anime also has a handful of other EDs such as “Koibumi” and “Sunbright” which play only once (respectively in episode four which is Shizuru’s episode and episode five which is Lucia’s episode.) These have the same level of impact as the OPs and the OST. That is to say, almost none whatsoever.

Voice acting ends up all right. Masakazu Morita as Kotarou is playful when speaking with everyone around him (especially Yoshino). Saya Shinomiya as Chihaya takes part in her first major anime role. And same goes for Risa Akari as Lucia whose growl exudes her personality well.

But a negative shout-out does go to Kana Hanazawa as Kagari. Her occasional “screams” near the end of the season were odd and unfitting, taking away from the scenes rather than adding to the drama.

ENJOYMENT

I liked this one more so in the first half than the second half for two main reasons.

One, the slice-of-life direction. Kotarou “saving” Tomoko from the trash, Lucia’s tsundere tendencies, and Shizuru having a dream with jumbled dialogue were fun scenes. Nothing amazing, but I was smiling and chuckling.

Contrast that with the second half which prioritizes the drama and the action more. I didn’t care for Akane’s plight within Gaia, and Shizuru fighting against monsters with her dual knives didn’t interest me. In fact, my favorite moments from the second half were slice-of-life ones again. Kagari yelling “Adios!” as Kotarou runs away with her under his arm and Sakuya basically dying because Kagari belittles his exquisite coffee were much more entertaining to me than the main dish.

Two, the higher character density. Despite how strange the presentation of the events is due to the Kotarou-interacts-with-them-one-at-a-time format, it was still fun to see the show switch between them now and again. Kagari is a cute character that fills the void, but, without the others around as much, it just wasn’t as fun.

Now, I understand that the narrative needed to separate them almost completely. But, on a personal level, when they’re replaced by a lame Fogo-wielding villain and odd plots involving a wheelchair-bound, on-her-deathbed woman who listens to some creepy choir, I can’t say I agree with the decision.

Rewrite fails to begin in the right way. The story cannot nail its different elements. Many of the characters are not treated with care. And the music does not contribute much to the scenes in which it plays. Hopefully this season’s continuation was given the rewrite memo several times over.

SUMMARY

Story: Terrible, while the continuation will provide more details, VN-esque interactions, the unengaging plot, and the poor attempt at a friend-based theme make this first season too problematic

Animation: Fine, nice character designs, okay artistic direction, and okay actual animation

Characters: Fine, Shizuru and Lucia are rushed, and Kotori is mishandled, but Akane plays the role of puppet, and Kotarou at least has a few experiences along the way

Sound: Bad, bad OPs, bad EDs, bad OST, and okay VA performances

Enjoyment: Bad, slice-of-life moments were fun, but not much else was

Final Score: 3/10

Before Starting this I would like to say yes I know of all the aspects of what makes this anime not very good but no matter what I still like the anime. This sometimes has me second-guessing my sanity but this for me at least is an anime I will never forget. The story seems a little unique at least within all that I have watched and let me state I do know all the aspects that ruin this anime but for one reason or another the story actually makes me feel something. And is not that I think the story is relatable but it ... is that for some reason I get largely invested in the story and I can't turn away.

OH rewrite... What can I say except this show had so much potential. In the beginning it sort of had my attention and the only reason I even watched it through to completion is cause I am a competitionist.

On the surface this is nothing more than a sloppily delivered hit piece on the destructiveness of humans, and their overwhelming capacity for bringing nothing but tragedy. That alone is reason enough to ignore this anime.

Then you have the main villain, who is essentially your stereotypical individual who retains the memories of their previous lives and see humanity as a scourge upon this earth. They are poorly ... written and leave no real lasting impression other than that they hate humanity. This is one of the most horrific portrayals of an antagonist ever made.

Then you have the fact that essentially You have 2 protagonists who are in simple terms the yin to the other's yang. One is the "avatar of mother earth" and the other is the "hero who must prevent the end of the world". And as easy as it is to make a decent story-line out of this, they have managed to make it completely unwatchable.

On top of the cliched characters most of the story revolves around basically trying to achieve the same goal across many different parallel worlds. Which in itself is convoluted... At best it's repetitive and at worst its impossible to watch. I would recommend avoiding this anime at all costs...

This anime was HORRIBLE it wasn't funny we have NO BACKSTORY TO ANYTHING why kagari killed him, we don't even know how he got his ability where the fucking shiny blue blade came from and kagari was in the anime from the very start and for 8 EPISODES she didn't appear and then MAGICALLY she pulled up AND BECAME LIKE FUCKING BEST FRIENDS it makes 0 sense the intro was shit would not reccomend watching lazy artwork the only thing good i can say about this anime is the voice acting, there is not a dub yet but the sub voice acting was amazing ... but it was wasted on such a bad anime overall this anime sucked ass and i wouldn't reccomend

Out of all Key titles, Rewrite probably is the one that has the worst anime adaptation yet. Clannad was good, Kanon was decent, Little Buster has their flaws, but it ultimately still capture the essence of the VN. Rewrite on the other hand was rewritten to the point that it's barely recognizable which is a shame because the Source Material really is Amazing.

Story: 1/10. The Anime is a mess. It's slow when it didn't need to be and became really fast when it need to slow down. Worst yet, it added a bunch of fillers to the point that the entire season 1 is ... mostly pointless filler. They want to make a new story but still want to include references to the VN routes which resulted in a story where things just happen with no payoff. Then suddenly shit hit and they try to cram as much reference to all the heroine routes into one episode.

You have Sakuya suddenly turn to Kaiju mode, Midow controlling Earth Dragon (Even though it supposed to instantly kill the controller), Transcription, Salvation from Shizuru & Akane route (Which have different mechanic due to the different circumstance mind you) happen at the same time. All of them without any foreshadowing or build-up at all crammed into 1-2 Episodes. The conflict between the 2 organization was never brought up and didn't have the complexity it have in the VN.

Oh, and the mystery in the common route, they're all gone, all the supernatural stuff are on full display from the very beginning, there are no subtlety at all.

Character: 1/10, almost all was butchered. Kotarou was turned to generic perverted protagonist and didn't undergoes any meaningful development that he does in the VN. Chihaya was reduced to just dumb airhead, Lucia was just Tsundere tropes, Akane stays her common route self and goes full villain with no build up whatsoever, Shizuru and Kotori is actually quite fine but Shizuru's barely in the series (After the common route story she disappear and then appear again in the end) and Kotori just become a background character.

Kagari is probably the worst one though. She supposed to be this mysterious eldritch entity feared by everyone until her true nature is revealed in Moon. In this Season 1, she was butchered into a loli-bait who're addicted to coffee (yeah that's her entire character, a not even funny gag). I'm not even a fan of Kagari in the VN, and I'm quite offended by this change. The mystery aspect about her is all gone, replaced by that unfunny gag.

To give you a prespective of how bad it is, when shit hits at that final episode. I literally can't make myself care about any of the character, while in the VN I care about every single of the character. It's even worse considering I've played the VN before watching the anime, they're just too different to make me recognize that they're supposed to be the same character. It's a complete waste of Source Material.

Kotarou did got a better characterization in Season 2, but the other never got the chance (for spoiler reason).

Artstyle & Animation: 7/10, By when it was produced it's actually pretty decent. It did have some flaws and fight scenes aren't that good. But all of those things wouldn't be apparent if only it have a good story (which unfortunately this anime does not). I enjoy the artstyle more than Clannad but still less than Little Buster.

Sound: 9/10, the best aspect of the anime, not a surprise since most of them are taken from the VN. But there are some who are remade like Phylosophiz (OP1) which became really good. The placement also are quite good, unlike Little Busters who often recycle OST, the OST in this anime are quite diverse. Truly a shame as it show how bad writing can ruin a story.

Overall: 3/10. If you're interested in the premise, I recommend checking the Visual Novel. It really is Amazing, I unfortunately can't say the same about the anime. Oh, and watching the anime will spoil a lot of things in the VN, so it's not a good introduction either.