The first thing that you'll notice about this series is the art. It has a strange color scheme, giving it a very fantasy-style vibe, but also gives it the air of a dream sequence. The colours are bright and smooth, and quite unique. You might be put off by this, by I felt that it was a nice attempt at something different.
The set pieces are quite nice, with huge chess pieces in the background and vast kingdoms and buildings. On a smaller scale, however, the designs for all the characters are quite bland and unoriginal. The art and animation is good quality, but they aren't really special, and Shiro's mouth shape just seems weird to me.
Another thing is how most of the women happen to have very large breasts (one character's breasts appear to grow after she removes her top). There are plenty of bath-scenes, and although the nudity isn't that graphic, I would not recommend watching this series in front of anybody who respects you.
I felt that the characters were a big pitfall in this series. The two MCs that are introduced at the start come off as arrogant, and unbelievable. They go on about how all games they participate in are 'won before they even begin.' They are then spruced up with Shiro being superhumanly intelligent (being able to perform ridiculous physics calculations in seconds, and learning a new language without instruction through reading a book that she picked up), and even Sora being insanely intelligent.
At the other end of the scale is Stephanie, another leading character, who seems to be unbelievably stupid. She is stated to be very intelligent, yet she falls for obvious tricks, even after deep analysis.
Throughout the entire series, there was only one character who I did not dislike/hate.
My one big gripe about the story is how everything has to be so convoluted. Its not very difficult to follow, its just so unnecessarily complex. Imagine Death Note, but without the back-and-forth plays between Light and L, instead just having one side going 'I'm a genius! Check out how I planned everything! I'm better than you!!' That's pretty much what happens in every conflict, with the MCs essentially giving out that speech every time. This problem is only made worse when you (very quickly) realise that all that deep thought and master-planning wasn't actually necessary, and could have been achieved far quicker, or that the losers lost because that were just too stupid to (fairly easily) not fall into the trap, or just too arrogant to win quickly and simply. Not only that, but a lot of the seemingly deep planning is actually really predictable an d obvious. Honestly, the show just tried too hard to seem smart.
In terms of sound, I thought the voice acting was okay, but I'm just not really a fan of that cheery pop-music (which happens to be in most anime). If you like that music, you won't have a problem with this.
Personally, the problems with the characters and the plot, and the resolution of every single conflict made this a drag for me to sit through.
Art: 7
Sound: 7
Story: 4
Characters: 5
Enjoyment: 4
Overall: 5
