The plot follows duo of brother and sister who are sucked into a world where everything is decided by games. Both wars and killing are banned. The only way to move up the social ledder and ETC is being good at games.
I have a lot of problems with this anime. While the concept is pretty good the execution is downright horrible. First of all the show lets us know that both protagonists are virtually unbeatable at ANY GAME, succesfully killing any kind of tension for the said games which are basicly the main attarction of the show. Both protagonist are not just good at games, they are parcticly good at almost EVERYTHING. They read emotions, great at manipulating people through dialoge, smart and by that I mean not just game smart, but borderline ridicilously overpowered smart. Forgive me but I have a hard time that an 18 year old virgin who has not friends and plays only games and a girl who does not even leave home posses such skills.
But that is just the start of the problems. The second main character is Stephie Dola, a girl who's sole purpous is to be dumb and make main character look good. I am not kidding when I say she is dumb. She is like on a level of an average 14 year old girl in smarts departament. Now a point of such characters is often to pass the exposition to a viewer through said character. In this show the protagonists spend a LOT of time expalining most basic things to her which brings down the pacing a lot.
The pacing itself is utterly broken. At the start it is faster than a speeding bullet with characters not even reacting to getting inside a whole new world. There is niether negative nor positive reaction. Then when the actuall games start the pacing drops to really slow and let me explain why.
The shows main attraction as I said before is the games and "Smart" tactics used by the characters and ETC. The things is the tactics and twists they use in the show are so obvious that it gets extra boring when they are explaining and implementing the twists when I saw them coming 5 minutes before they were used.
Some may say that the pacing issues are coming from the show being given only 12 episodes. Well I say the pacing would be a lot better if they did not spent more time on fanservice than on the ACTUALL GAMES!
The whole show came off as expremely pretentious. It thinks that it is really smart and thinks outside the box, when in reality it is obvious and very rarely does something surprising. The whole show spents way too much time trying to convince you that the protaginsts are the greatest, smartest, most awesome creatures ever, while in reality they are just overpowered wishfullfilment badly written characters.
The comedy in the show is downright awful. I never once smiled. Though I have to give credit to voice actors who do their best to make the script sound funny.
I have a few positive things to say too overall. The visuals are good even if they filters they use get in the way a little. Still very nice to look at. The soundtrack is really really good and captures the video game feel very well.
Overall I could barely get through 5 episodes and it felt like an eternity of fanservice, wishfullfilment and bad writing. I know that a lot of people like this show but I was not one of them.
Also a bath scene with 11 year old girl...
