I'll start with the art, which was absolutely dreadful. A complete mess with cheap looking backgrounds and characters, weird designs and overall being generic as fuck when it's not being outright terrible. The colour pallette is horrendous, the characters look weird with their long chins, and the background is bland at best. The expressions the characters make tend to be awful and distracting during the horror scenes and the reveals, with me just outright bursting into laughter at Isabella's face when she hears Ray hum a song back in episode 12. The demons or monsters thingies are nothing new in terms of character designs and come off quite cringe to look at. It's horrific.
The premise? Nothing unique. A bunch of kids attempting to escape a farm lest they be consumed, way far into the future, a cheap dystopian drama garbage I'm sure I'll find countless of examples from by merely scrolling through Goodreads. It's survival and dystopia mashed up together with elements remniscient to Animal Farm and Shinseki no Yori, something I'm sure we've all have heard before. The premise is generic and bland, filled with cliche elements which could have been saved with a graceful execution. The premise of a mind-game, a cat and mouse hunt between the characters and the mother, is something I admittedly do find unique, and I'm sure others do as well, so I'll give them that.
Regarding the mind-game themselves, the plots and the plans, the pseudo intellectucal garbage spewed out in an attempt to make the characters seem smart? Maybe I'm being pretentious, maybe others are stupider, maybe they really aren't the focus of the story, but all in all it's pretentious writing with no substance pretending to be smart, creating contrived mediocrity that canonically drives on for MONTHS only to end with the house being set on fire (typical distraction) and the characters using ziplines to escape a cliff. This is the climax, folks. This is what it all boiled down to. So many plot-twists and executions that make you cringe at the obvious prospect of the author utilizing anything in his power to add a little substance to his story. The eleventh episode for instance, starts with the plotwist "Oh god they haven't given up!", jumps to plot-twist "We've established they'll try to escape and Ray has been creating stuff to help him escape, but here Ray is going to kill himself!", jumps to "We've established that they've given up but actually they were creating a plan" jumps too "Oh they'll start the house on fire" and then jumps to "And by the way, we've established that they'll use the bridge but meh they'll use a ziplines instead" which all in all is cheap and utter filler to create tension. The story is filled with more filler and less cat-and-mouse games because it lacks substance. The double, triple, quadratriple Agents spiel they tried to go for was filler that dragged for one or two episodes, and it fell flat because Ray's plan was to kill himself despite him claiming he used his mother's gifts to create means to escape in exchange of spying. The Sister Krone filler was blatantly offensive because the woman did nothing and contributed nothing to the story beyond joining up with the team, figuring some of their plans out and immediately dying afterwards, and she took much screen time with her inane, irrelevant ramblings and her cringe "creepy" expressions. There was some other garbage regarding secret doors with Don and Gilda, but I won't cover that because I kinda forgot it. Emma breaking her leg did nothing but drag their plan for an additional two months, where they supposedly did training, and I admit that part confused me because Emma and Ray would be pretending to give up to throw off Isabella yet these fuckers would be training right in front of her.
And skipping all that, I have one line to show you all. "I have memories since when I was a fetus." I'm done.
Even excluding that, the experience was dreadfully stale and boring due to continuous expositions and the camera zoom ups to their faces and expressions. The laughter and the smirks and the smiles when someone did something threw me off. Krone wanted to make me kill myself, and Ray and Norman's interactions with each other came to a close second. I remember wanting to ditch the anime around episode 4. Completely say fuck it. Because I didn't want to continue.
Speaking of the expositions, the characters were all too pretentious trying to be smart and all. The anime completely broke the "Show don't tell" rule by sticking to "telling" everything. It was extremely pretentious. The gestures of the characters, their smirks and their smiles, did nothing but contribute to my boredom and made me hate them even more. There's literally nothing of substance to the characters besides Norman playing 2000D chess, Emma being happy and wanting to save everyone, and Ray being edgy, so I can't comment on any of that besides pointing out to the complete blandness of it all. There was some interesting backstory to Ray, but his development at the end essentially entailed him wanting to kill himself and escaping completely shocked that they were planning something behind his back and Emma was not actually retarded. Emma is your typical happy-go-lucky lucky girl. Norman is just... There. He loves Emma, he made some plans, showed he had an IQ of 500 and then he fucking dies. What can I say? Isabella's and Krone's flashbacks were cliche but interesting though, I'll give them that.
The music was good. I mean I actually don't really remember it but I recall getting emotional at some points. I don't really know.
That's just it folks.
