Big Order does not give a damn. It does not care about presenting a thoughtful and compelling story, it does not seek to enlighten the audience about some facet of human nature, and it does not make any effort to move anime forward as an artistic medium. Instead this is an anime about punching nuclear missiles and saving the world - or maybe just your sister, I don't even remember - by jumping through one absurd plot hoop after another.
Thank God. If this show had restrained itself by trying to conform to any expectation of sanity or traditionally defined 'quality' it would not have been as absurdly, ridiculously enjoyable as it was. It's difficult for me to explain this without using specific examples and I don't want to do that because knowing what happens beforehand takes some of the excitement away. Suffice to say that after a few episodes I was excited to see what would happen next because the show had taught me to expect anything. And I mean ANYTHING.
The level of blissful stupidity probably peaked somewhere around episode five, or slightly before it - one scene from relatively early on stands out above all the rest and the early episodes contain several other highlights - but it continued to deliver in crazy, over-the-top moments all the way through to the end. These moments are why the show is worth watching, and if this sounds to you like I'm just using positive terms to describe "plot holes" or some other form of "bad writing" then you probably won't enjoy Big Order.
Some elements from the Big Order may seem a little bit familiar - the Orders are basically Stands, and an important scene near the end was strangely similar to a scene from Code Geass. The use of the powers is also somewhat arbitrary and not always clearly explained. Such problems did not significantly detract from the show as they did not interrupt or take away from its' intensity, but they are definite weaknesses. Another weakness was the characters - though the things they did were often memorable, I didn't particularly care about any of them or think any of them stood out. Nonetheless, this is a type of show I enjoy watching, and I would love to see something like this with more appealing characters and a stupid plot that was a better form of the same stupidity, if that makes any sense.
More traditionally positive is the show's opening theme - I thought it was the best out of every show I watched in Spring 2016.
