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Cheap, uninspired and excruciatingly boring. It's just poorly animated off-model people sitting and having baby's first attempt at dialogue over and over and over again. I did exhale through my nose one or two times in the first few episodes while heroine was dealing with the divorce proceedings, but it all just kept going downhill from there.

Moving forward from the divorce it's more or less the same scenario repeating every few episodes. Someone says "I've got a problem", Dahliya replies "I've got the solution for it right here, give me a minute to craft it". She slaps together a prototype thing, it becomes immediately ... successful, everybody claps and takes the rest of the work off her hands to do it behind the scenes while she indulges her drinking problem with her not-yet-boyfriend.

It isn't (at least not in any meaningful sense) an anime about her career path as an artificer. The creative process behind the profession is basically "make an outline of a thing from our world and slap a matchy elemental stone/colored slime paste onto it". It also isn't about her business career — each time she needs to handle a business related issue, one of the supporting characters appears, gazes longingly into a window, says "you know, I owe a lot to your father, so I'm gonna deal with this for you, also here's a cookie, share it with your boyfriend", aaaand that's it, she's free to go develop an alcohol addiction.

Oh, so it's mainly a love story? A business lady meets an aristocrat guy, they eat local food, drink local alcohol, chat and learn more about the world? Go on dates to see local attractions? Well... Kind of. Like if you fed thirty bargain bin romance story books to ChatGPT and asked it to make you one of those set in an isekai.
It will spew out something moderately coherent, but since it can't actually understand what it writes, it will forget the prior episode's introduction of ice stones as an existing method of refrigeration and will have characters lose their minds about heroine's next unbelievable magical tool — "the fridge".

Everything about this anime is just a thoughtless amalgamation of fantasy-ish buzzwords slapped together to serve as a backdrop for 12 episodes of compliments heroine will receive from everyone around her about what a genius she is. If the genders were reversed I'd think this is just Elon Mask's isekai self-insert fanfiction.

The unfortunate thing about this VN production anime is that it isn't about VN production. If you want a variation of Shirobako — look elsewhere. This is an uninspired "teen girl does time travel" anime that uses old tech as a cheap nostalgia bait. The deepest it gets into the actual creative process involved in VN creation is within the first few episodes where the main character Konoha first teleports into the past and finds out that in the 90s you had to use your mouse to draw on PC (the horror!).

The problem is that creative team behind this production is as knowledgeable about ... VN/old tech/overall 90s topics as their main character. So they just throw a few old VN names (that they have rights to) in your face and maybe dangle a floppy or two over you... but some retro PC visuals and a running gag about a character who is just so in love with outdated NEC PC is all you're gonna get, because the anime doesn't actually care about all that stuff.
In retrospect after watching it in full, I'm not sure what it cares about at all?

It's not about Visual Novel creation.
We are told the main character Konoha hates her job in the industry in 2020s (because she's a newbie and noone will listen to her 1000 page long script about "half-angel half-whatever Mary Sue saving the postapocalyptic fantasy sci-fi time travel girls und panzer meets makoto shinkai world" that she's certain would be a mega hit unlike those pesky boring whatever-it-is-they-do-nowadays).
Okay, she's 19 and has an entry level job, she doesn't understand her beloved industry yet, maybe once she gets transported to the past we'll get to learn about VN creation together with her? (No, we will not).

In the past, even when she gets actively involved in the process of making VN (and not running completely unrelated errands like she does most of the time), the process itself is basically skipped over. Anime just says "and then the creative process ensued, and the artists artisted, and the scenarists said "it's scenariing time" and scenariod all over the place, and 5 seconds later our new game of the century was ready, yay!"

It's not about genuine love for old tech or any other 90s things.
Time travel scenarios implemented within the real world are great for showcasing old-timey stuff the author genuinely cares about and speculating about humanity's possible future. In theory... Thinking about this makes me remember the episode in Shirobako where they scheduled a field day to learn more about what's gonna be in their new anime. 16bit Sensation's "field day" was opening a Wikipedia page about the 90s in Japan and promptly forgetting half of what they just read.

Noone looks or talks like they belong in the 90s, the tech they use is anachronic (either already too old to be useful by the time events happen, or probably shouldn't exist for another decade), the business side of things is... Let's not even go there. Everything is either a blatant plot device, or only exists because it showed up on the first page of pictures when the production team googled "90s Japan". Same goes for the faceless future. Noone cared what it looks like because it only exists for the main character to undo it anyway.

Funnily enough, I don't feel like it's passionate about time travel either.
Sure, it's the premise of the whole thing, but the level of detail and thought put into the inner workings of it is negligible. It's a time travel show because Stein's Gate was a widely popular time travel show. And people nowadays love time travel, right? Fairly close to isekai too, and people are into isekai, right?
The time travel is the whole plot, and it's honestly such a mess. It jumps all over the place constantly. Half of the time it forgets where it started and why it went there in the first place, then there's also /checks notes/ aliens, I guess? Honestly, it reads as if their main character wrote this whole thing.

And, of course, it's not about the interpersonal relationships between main characters.
Or, even if it is, it does a terrible job at that as well. Everyone loves our quirky main character because she's so cute and quirky, (and because people in the past are just so much kinder and better than in our pesky reality). Sure, they grow in a literal sense, since the anime takes place in the span of ~30 years, but none of them really grow and change as people. But I guess there's not much place to grow from when you only exist to support the main character, fix her mistakes, pat her head and tell her how cool and special she is and how much you missed her.

As a fan of all things VN I desperately wanted to like this and find something good in it, but it was just a bland and uninspired waste of time. I've read self-insert Naruto fanfiction in the 00s that was more thought through and novel than this.

This anime had pacing issues from the get go, but the third episode killed any hope of it getting better going forward. Its genres are action/fantasy, but its structure is more that of a detective/mystery (in a very unfortunate BBC Sherlock way). There are, of course, some action scenes, but the animation quality is about what you'd expect from YAL, so there's no point in watching it for those either.

Guideau is completely one-dimensional (the dimension being thoughtless rage, which gets old very quickly). Ashaf's whole shtick is standing there, mysteriously smoking in a mysterious way because he's just such a mysterious guy... right until ... it's time to suddenly jump out and explain the latest McGuffin (that he, of course, knew about all along) to the viewer.

The third episode's twist of "yandere adoptees have hots for their mother" is really fun on paper! But to work the intended way it has to feel earned. Going back to the Sherlock analogy, in the original novels it was fun to follow Sherlock's misadventures because you as the reader were given the same information he had. He just knew better how to work with it. Thus, once you reached the story's conclusion, it felt satisfying to find out how everything you have already seen clicked together to form a full picture.

This anime, on the other hand, is unable to set up a satisfying mystery in its own right, and so it works in the same way BBC's Sherlock does. We have the main character duo walking around the crime scenes looking smart, while all information given to the audience is that "look, Ashaf is smart and knows something you don't" or "you couldn't have known because we didn't show it to you, but our characters actually knew all along that they're being followed/what the witch is planning/how to catch her".

The setup for third episode's main story is a few seconds long flashback of a policewoman screaming "oh no, my kids just died in a fire". Cue the main duo looking cool and mysterious in front of a few different backdrops. Midway through the episode we get a minute or two of her telling our protagonists that her lover is also dead. She's been going along with city's authorities and keeping quiet about the murders because she, uh, wants revenge on the witch??? But that's a whole other can of worms that we don't go further into, (we don't have time for that anyway, our duo still has a few backdrops to look cool in).

After a whole episode of them looking cool and mysterious (in case you still didn't get how cool they are), we get to the last few minutes, where suddenly everything goes according to Ashaf's keikaku (that he had all along) and they suddenly find a house where the witch is hiding. Except the witch is apparently two teenage boys we never saw before, who are apparently the policewoman's kids, who apparently didn't die in a fire, and were behind the murders all along. Oh no. What a plot twist. Wow. Would be a bit more surprising if they weren't the only possible culprits based on how the show previously went (like, there were literally no other active participants in this episode except this woman and her dead kids that she never saw the bodies of, but I digress).
"But they're not mages! How could they be behind those murders?", asks the distraught policewoman. Well, I don't know, woman, this is the first time I hear about it, you tell me. No worries though, this is the part where Ashaf will go into a monologue to explain to everyone that it's all because they had a dark McGuffin that works in such and such way (that he, of course, knew about all along)!

The kids go "yes we were alive and evil all along because you're too hot, stepmomma", get their heads bashed into concrete, and then she shoots them point blank without hesitation. Uh. Happy end? All in barely a few minutes, because we still need to have a final scene of our protagonists looking cool afterwards.

This is just bad writing. It's uninspired, the characters are nothing but obvious plot devices, and worst of all — its boring. It takes a special anti-talent to take a "yandere adoptees are horny in a gruesome way" premise and make it as bland and boring as it was here. So, kudos for that, I guess?