I really liked No Game No Life at the start of the season. The show introduced the characters with solid backgrounds, personalities, and skills that are very consistent throughout the show. No Game No Life's strongest point is easily the characters, how they act, and how they were presented.
With these strong characters in place, the beginning of the anime also did very a good job of balancing character development, advancing the plot, and general humor. I gave this show's story a 3/10, why? Because the idea of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", doesn't apply for this show. Without spoiling anything, all I can say is that this show's Plot:Fanservice:Humor:Character Development ratios stayed more or less the same throughout the entire show. Also, a minor gripe I had is that, even though it was very well explained, I feel as if nearly every time they win, they're very close to losing and use some kind of plot magic strategy to explain their win. It was just a minor complaint of mine since halfway through the show, I basically expected them to nearly lose and then have something they mentioned (and foreshadow/emphasize HEAVILY) in the previous episode cause them to win.
Focus on characters and creating a good mood for the viewer while setting up a basic end goal is necessary to keep the viewers attached to the show and gives them a reason to watch more than just the first couple of episodes. However, NGNL kept the exact same pacing for every episode, leading to A LOT of filler. While its true that all of the episodes advanced the plot in some way, I feel like only 5 minutes of each episode were needed to advance the plot, while the other ~15 mins were spent revisiting the already strong characters' attributes or just general nonsense that has no impact on the story at all.
I thought the animation of the show was pretty good, but for some reason, they decided to add, for lack of a better term, bloom to every scene. I dunno, maybe it was some kind of ironic design choice making fun of popular games like Battlefield or Mirror's Edge.
The soundtrack was pretty decent overall and fit the tone of the show, my main problem is they reused the same track over and over again, not a really big problem seeing as how its sort of like a MC victory theme, but for some reason, the repeated track(s) just didn't have as much of an impact as Kill La Kill's themes did.
See tl;dr for overall opinion
