When I saw how Golden in comparison to the Original, its score was almost 1 mark lower than the former. I did not think it will be bad until I watched it and...yeah it was poorly done. Despite that fact, there were very few moments when I had fun one being the final episode, the second half. The rest is cliched disjointed and a clusterfuck of nonsense.
There was close to zero saving graces for this masterpiece of a series, and the only thing I found good was actually the sound. But that was also poorly used during the series. The op is ok but it grew on me. The ed is the only track I actually liked and the animation in the ending was good. Shoji Meguro is one of my favorite music composers and his passion is shown in the song. It just feels wasted on this Michaelbayan ingenuity of an adaptation.
Who knew that when you see the label A-1 Pictures in a show you should already know what to expect most oftenly: animation and art becomes gradually worse later on, the soundtrack is standard to good and story and characters are not given a shit.
My biggest complaint with this adaptation is that instead of making it a complete series, they just took the opening episode of the original and after that they just put the scenes from P4G. The end result is a mess of a story that has little to no continuity and A-1 shines again with its notorious use of timeskips *cough* SAO S1 *cough*. Characters are bland and a paper-thin imitation of the original. Marie who is the only new character is annoying and typical as hell and the fact that half the series is about her made me rage. She is your typical, annoying, tsundere, amnesiac girl who has a secret that will cause a plot-twist to occur. She is even more annoying than Teddie in this anime who is innately annoying.
This is exactly how not to do a game adaptation and how to do a Michaelbayan chef-d'oeuvre (more like poop-d'oeuvre). A-1 Pictures can do so much better if they handle the story and characters better like in Shinsekai Yori. But clearly, most of the time, their shows end up following the Cashgrab formula.
