Right, so, story time. Once upon a time, My Anime List had a rating called "unwatchable" that coincided with a numerical value of '1'. I had vowed never to assign a '1' to any anime that I'd watched to completion, because, simply by virtue of watching it, I had proven that it was not unwatchable. But this anime is so pernicious in its execution, so unforgivable in its conception, that it has granted to me an epiphany: something can also be considered unwatchable if you wish you could go back in time and unwatch the entire thing.
Where, where, where do I begin? The fact that literally eighty percent of the characters in this anime are not drawn ninety percent of the time? That backgrounds are routinely reused, and sometimes even entire clips deployed, sometimes when they don't even make sense? That there is absolutely no distinction, or care to make any kind of distinction obvious, between what is actually happening and what's just going on in some character's head? That this anime defies all classification? That one second it's Tokyo Ghoul, and the next it's Lucky Star, and other times it's Mekakucity, except in those moments when it's suddenly a fetish film, only those are actually decent expressions of their respective genres? It's as if there were fifteen writers in a room, and they had a dart throwing tournament every day to decide who would write which scene, and another dart throwing session to actually pick what would happen in each scene.
I can only presume that once this rabbit from a hat writing sequence was completed that it was passed on to the art team, who proceeded to literally just write 'go fuck yourself' over and over and over again in paint shop pro before handing it off to the animators who desperately tried to at least draw two of the relevant characters in each episode before sheepishly handing it to the dubbing team, who were also, it happens, the editing, aftereffects, and quality control team. That's how I imagine this process went, except that actually, no, all of the teams are literally just one person using multiple voices to make themself feel like they weren't being paid $10/hr over a twelve hour period to do literally everything.
No, but, in all seriousness, I would liken this to that group project you got in high school where maybe one person really tried, but everyone else half-assed their portion, and one guy didn't show up at all, before you were forced to nervously present your project without the powerpoint because someone saved it as a word file. Oops.
The characters are shallow. The motives make no sense. Plots are picked up and abandoned at a rate that can only be described as emotionally abusive. Nothing connects to anything. People know things they shouldn't, and are good at things just because the writers decided it would squeeze the story along. For instance, changing variables in an abstract mathematical equation allows you to, no joke, have god-like control over reality -- no, seriosuly, I'm not joking, and no, it's not a spoiler. For it to be a spoiler there would have to be some kind of coherent storyline to spoil -- there isn't. I watched this entire anime, maybe because I was so engrossed in the outrageousness of it all, maybe I was in shock, maybe I was hoping it would be comedic. But I watched it. And I have /zero/ clue what the first nine episodes were about. It seems like we /finally/ got to the story in episode 10, only to have it assassinated in the most unbelievably unceremonious way in episode 11.
And that's actually the most amazing thing about this anime. It does nothing, and I mean /nothing/ by the book. So please explain to me how this is somehow one of the most cliched, regurgitated, anovel conceptual traffic accident that has ever inserted itself into the confused pile of garbage that is B-rated, effortless anime? Oh, wait -- I know how. It's because this anime is actually an incredibly lazy hodge podge of anime tropes from other /successful/ anime series all smashed together in the hopes of making the most money for the least amount of effort (money.) For chrissakes, they literally leave over three-quarters of the characters depicted in the anime as silhouettes. Or mannequins! When it's trying to be art.
I mean, it could not be more obvious how little of a shit these producers gave about the viewer. They sat there, folded their hands over their knee, looked you straight in the eye and said "this is a pile of garbage, and you're going to eat it." Not one ounce of love or, my god, compassion -- mercy even -- was spared for this anime's creation. And here's something else that's bizarre -- because this anime is apparently part of a franchise, the characters all share their names with another series that is coming out right now called Trickster. But the characters have nothing to do with each other. They don't share personality traits, they don't share backstories, they don't share physical features -- nothing. Zilch. Nada. The main characters in the two stories (if I dare even try to parse out who might be a 'main character' in this mess) aren't even the same. There is literally no connection. No similar motifs. No suggestion that it even takes place in the same universe. Someone just decided that they would be connected. For no reason!
And if that wasn't bizarre enough, you might recall me mentioning that at times this anime is a fetish film. Yeah. I didn't say that to be flippant. Literally we are treated to not one, not two, but three different scenes where a chained up woman is inexplicably turned on past her tipping point by another character unironically and unemphatically telling her that he doesn't give a shit about her. In what tasteful flavor was this handled? She pissed herself in what can only be described as a hasty, poor, who actually gives a shit, euphemism for a spontaneous orgasm. Am I even allowed to bring up that that actually happened? Because it did. And I'm not sitting here knocking anyone's kink, but it did. not. work. It was out of no where. It had no build up. It had no point. It was as if one of the writers decided that he's into that, and, fuck it, no one gives a shit about this project anyhow, I'm writing it in. Or maybe it was put in out of pure contempt. I can not reconcile the disastrous state of this anime with the idea that any effort was actually, at any point, put into it.
And, I know this is nitpicking. I know it is. But they gave one of the main characters lime green highlights in his eyes. It's such a small thing, but it so poignantly demonstrates my point: there is not a pixel in this anime that wasn't in the wrong place. The mood of the scenes was confusing. Colors never worked. Every frame was busy, cluttered and utterly without any sense of balance or framing. CGI was just overlayed over computer animated backgrounds. Backgrounds literally disappeared when we were supposed to be in the character's heads (except that sometimes the things in their head turned out to be what actually happened [?!?]). And, God forgive me for even mentioning the name of this anime in a review for a piece of shit like this, but sometimes it just had that Madoka Magica animation style out of no where. Like, it looks like they literally ripped it out of one of the witch scenes If you're not familiar with the series, and don't mind spoilers, just watch any scene in Madoka Magica where there is a witch and you'll understand exactly what I mean.
Look. I'm not an art guy. I can tolerate some pretty egregious art mistakes. But the art and animation, like everything else screamed "we could not care less about how this turns out. It's anime; people will watch it no matter what we do." And that's what all of this really boils down to. It's lazy. It's insulting. It has no idea what it wants to do, and it has no problem wasting hours of your time figuring it out, only to realize it used up its entire season getting there and the only solution is to immediately kill the plot before you can muster the energy to care.
If you like bad anime, this has to be one of the greats. If you are entertained by such things as watching asteroids wipe out humanity, stars imploding at the end of their life cycles, and the inevitable heat death of the universe, and you're having yourself a bit of a chuckle just imagining any one of those things, you'll probably love this anime. I'd say it's analogous, in many senses, to the other belovedly horrific phantasms of our time, like The Room, Birdemic, Titanic: The Legend Goes On and all of its sequels, and Food Fight, except that at least those had enough cohesion to convey a comprehensible plot. This does not. There are quantum expressions fourteen pages long that I could probably explain better to you -- and at least those mean something.
