I’ll start with the art, since it will be the obvious dealbreaker for many readers. WT is drawn in characteristic cartoonish shounen style. It’s not terribly expressive, facial features are simplistic, female faces are especially bad, because of the angular mouths. That’s a conscious choice – designs of the uniforms and of the monsters are seriously good, nonetheless it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and may take time to adjust to.
Then there’re characters. I’ll give you some hints of what to expect from the characters shown on all the promo materials. The main teen trio is more or less interesting. The most original of the cast is Osamu (the guy with the glasses), who is weak, both physically and in term of superpowers, but has a strong set of knight-like principles. Surprisingly, he doesn’t miraculously power-up and remains in his sad and complicated position. I am worried though, that if they will leave him like that, he will be too plot-armored, when the difficulty finally goes up, but who knows, maybe they’ll manage to make it work. Yuuma is the titular white-haired kid, an outsider to our world and, by all means, a child soldier. He is your typical overpowered good-natured shounen hero. As for now he is somewhat weak as a character, but thankfully he is often left at the background – more of a force to be used than someone who acts on his own. Yuuma can be annoying at times, because of his OPness. This situation won't last, but there have been enough chapters where he was like a cat among pigeons. The third one is Chika, - a shy girl with a big power potential and a terrible design. She provides great comedic relief and some motivation for rescuing, though you don’t feel the need to blame her for it. She is underdeveloped at the moment. The adult guy is Jin, OP as hell, self-consciously, but annoyingly flashy, at least for the first half of the available chapters. There’s a huge amount of named supporting characters, some of them even promising, though, maybe, there're even too many. The adult cast is so-so and a bit painful to watch after CCG from Tokyo Ghoul or Urakai from Kekkaishi.
The plot promises a lot. Most likely at some point in future the heroes will travel to another world or even worlds, and it may even happen soon, but until now the story has been pretty slow. Battle shounen doesn’t work without strong enemies and those appear around 50th chapter. Until then it had been mostly introduction and status struggle. A rank battle was even mentioned, but thankfully it won’t come or it is postponed. So I’d say that there is potential too, but the flow isn’t that good. My problem is that so far it has been pure shounen. The best works in the genre usually have something for more adult audience as well – some conflicts outside of the usual topics of saving friends and becoming stronger, but WT doesn’t develop these motives enough.
The setting is interesting and ripe with possibilities, most likely there’re a lot of hidden secrets. The monsters are good. The huge amount of parallel worlds perpetually at war allows for any number of interesting developments. The system of power is more or less detailed and logical. The not so good part is that they made things easy for the fighters. Despite all the talk about battlefields and everybody being battle-hungry 100% of time, until now it has been mostly a video game – nobody gets scarred physically or mentally during fights (townsfolk does sometimes, but offscreen). In battle mode the bodies are replaced with artificial constructs, so gruesome injuries do not matter. Combatants can bail out at any given moment. There’re even special virtual environments to train without care. I understand that it is a teen series, but some things are made way too convenient. These conveniences make battles look a bit less tense, than they should be in a series focused on exactly battling. It is changing slowly and the stakes and consequences are mentioned, but I can't help but get the feeling that they have it easy even compared to the other shounen series.
In short, in my opinion, WT is a solid and for the most part entertaining series, which, unfortunately, still doesn’t reach the upper tier of its genre, though it is very possible that it will develop in the future, so I wish it a long run.
