I'm usually drawn towards series with premises that I haven't heard of before and I've been looking for a new battle royale anime to watch. In this aspect it partially succeeded - it was a battle royale but it doesn't really seem to focus too much on that. Any given episode mostly focuses on interpersonal problems within the characters, which is interesting but I would prefer some more info on the battle itself considering the audience is just told "we hold a battle royale every year for some reason" and not much else is mentioned about it. This results in a confusing story that focuses too much on sob-stories instead of getting to the details the audience really wants to know.
Art 2/10
Noticeable drops in animation quality. VERY noticeable. The line thickness changes on a frame by frame basis, proportions are completely out the window, sometimes they use CGI (which seems to be the best quality so far) and other times characters just don't move during very important scenes. The backgrounds have been fine but the characters themselves are stiff, not proportioned right and honestly funny looking. I've seen 3 minute animations done by amateur students that are better than the entire "professional" studio working on a half hour show. Overall, very inconsistent.
Sound 5/10
The opening is really good, probably the best part about the series. It's FILLED with spoilers but only to those who can read symbolism very well. The voice acting is less than great but I imagine some of the sound effects would make more sense if the animation would catch up a bit. For example, if I character growls or scoffs at someone, the face doesn't move with them making that noise, so it seems very odd sounding/looking. I think most of the sound problems can be blamed on the animation because there are many examples like that where you watch it, hear it and think "why...did they make that noise? that sounded so weird..." but in reality, they're probably just reading the script they're given and they can't really do much about it.
Character 4/10
Some of the writing for the characters is really reaching for the audience to pity them. Some backstories went on for over two episodes and at some point I was like "who cares anymore!? Just move on!". Its unreasonable for the producers to write 12 sob-story character backgrounds and expect all of them to land. Each character should be different and in a weird way they're all the same. "I was sad as a child, I started training to be part of the juuni taisen, I started doing bad things, I'm sad (or happy) that I did so many bad things" and then they die. The design of the characters is also pretty rough. Monkey, Tiger and Rabbit in particular have outfits that don't make a lot of sense. Monkey has like 3 coats on, thigh high socks and combat boots and no pants, Tiger just has a bikini and a leather jacket, and Rabbit is supposed to be like...playboy bunny I guess?? All of the girls outfits are pretty skimpy except for Boar and everyone else is dressed pretty randomly, though not necessarily badly. It's just easy to get visually distracted when watching any given episode because of the colour clashing, seasonal wear differences, and outfits that just don't make sense for an anime about survival. If they're supposed to be fighting for their lives, maybe a bikini isn't the best protective gear? all in all, costume design and writing needed to be refined quite a bit.
Enjoyment 5/10
My enjoyment would be higher if not for how long the series can drag something out for. The series honestly wastes so much time on ONE thing that it frustrates the audience into thinking about how much they could've covered if they would've just let the sob-story die about 10 minutes in instead of using it for the full 30 minutes. For example, one episode was dedicated entirely to Sheep thinking of a plan on how to survive, except his plans involved characters that had already died and didn't really make sense. He repeats himself several times in the episode and at the very end decides to generally scrap the plan and move on to something else. Lots of wasted time that I didn't enjoy on things that could've been enjoyable.
Overall 5/10
Poor animation, poor design and poor writing. At this point I'm watching the series to find out how it ends. The concept is good and the opening is good but its hard to think of a character I like or anything in particular that stood out as "good". Its not particularly extraordinary but if it were maybe rebooted in the future with better animation I may be a little more generous.
