Puzzle & Dragons Cross

Starting off as an easy happy go lucky anime that follows most of those 'been there done that' troupes of the genre to a T with very little originality until you reach about episode 41 where this anime takes a suddenly yet refreshing dark turn into an oppressive race war which has got me hooked and kept me intrigue as to how it will be resolved.
There's plenty of Ho-yay bait for the fujo/fudan fans and a variety of fan service as one would expect from the puzzle & dragon title. Moderate to decently animated fights scenes with RPG pacing, cute adorable monsters and your ... standard magical transformation scenes which are thankfully spaced out and speedy enough to keep the action going.
The animation quality can be hit or miss at points, the fight scene in episode two with Lance vs Crimson Dragon is even cringe worthy at parts as they try to replicate the mobile game into a world environment, this steadily gets better as the series progresses.

I'd recommend giving it a go, a very under rated series imo

I started watching this because I play the phone game for it.
Then when I saw that Sonia was a "main" character I just had to watch it even more.
But here I am making this review after having watched 25 episodes of this show and I can't find much positive to say.

It has that happy-go-lucky flare that Pokemon uses with the main characters being naive and overly childish.
I expected this to be a bit more kid oriented to begin with, but still, at least Pokemon was actually fun to watch.

This show feels like a happy go lucky training montage where enough ... friendship power will most likely overcome all.

But after 25 episodes, Sonia has had about 10 minutes of accumulated screen time and never did more than act as mysterious observer.

Going to see this through to the end, but I no longer have high hopes.

What can I say about this besides .... boring.

I mean maybe it will pick up later but unless this is going to be a new long running series it's running out of time.

Nothing about this series is "bad" in the sense they did anything wrong. But it feels bland to the extreme and feels unpolished.

First off it's execution of "drops", which appear to the the primary game mechanic , is half assed. They litterally just have magic spheres that you do combos with. While translating game mechanics into an anime based on a game is okay it feels like the writers put no effort into ... making it feel natural and just expect you to accept it as common sense because the characters do.

The MC is your typical naive child with a heart of gold and boundless spirit. Then he meets the cool guy who doesn't like to talk much or smile as well as his plucky but generally useless side kick who is just there so the MC has someone to talk to regularly.

I will say the dragons were animated well and look nice but the rest just feels so bland it's hard to sit through just for the dragons.