A dystopian tale about a group of friends slowly but surely untangling mysteries of their society. More than interesting concept full of deep themes with moral and ethical questions that will leave you thinking for a long time. So why the bad impression?
Well mainly because even though the concepts and setting are top not the plot itself is at first really boring. And not in the good way but in the “oh my god when does this end” way. There are straight up plot conveniences and troll moments in this anime. I am not sure why this is (perhaps the source material is better) because to me it seems like there are two anime going at the same time. The incredibly rich philosophical series and the filler fluff series. What’s worse is that the directing in this anime is bad. Really bad. At first I thought it’s something like Akiyuki Shinbou’s. But sadly soon enough I understood that it’s not intentionally artistic but it’s unintentionally bad. Transitions between scenes are absolutely abysmal. There is a scene earlier in the anime which left me scratching my head (chase scene in episode 5) and once again sadly scenes of this kind are not rare in this anime.
Another bad impression is the characters. They are very bland for the most part of the series, sometimes acting completely illogical or straight up bizarre (looking at you episode 8). Thankfully later in the series they become more interesting and the main character becomes complex.
Last bad impression (I promise) is the production. The music is great and the first ending is fantastic (and surprisingly good when it comes to visual structure). What however is not great is the animation. It is smooth but the colour pallet is just straight up bland for most part of the series. I am not entirely sure if this was intentional to invoke further feeling of dystopia but considering the fact that there are colourful and interesting scenes in the series (not many) I do not think this would be the case. The character designs are boring outside of the leaders of committees and few other characters. Some of the clothes looks cool especially the outfits MCs wear later into the series while they aren’t in their school uniforms.
As I said at the beginning of the review, I don’t remember experiencing something like this. Very boring parts followed by grippingly amazing moments. If the characters were more interesting, the story didn’t suffer from so much dumb moments, and the overall plot would be smoother this anime would definitely deserve all the praise it’s getting and I would personally recommend it to anybody. However bad directing and inconsistent plot followed by not good visual production significantly lowers the score for me. If you don’t care about production or conveniences add 1 to my score.
