Somewhere around the last episodes, particularly the last one, it fell back into infuriating and I started doing the death knell for anime: skipping all the predictable scenes where it's more annoying to hear the predictable speeches and plot points than it is entertaining...
And the main reason for all of that? The writing.
It's apocalyptically bad at first, then dwells in that comfort zone of not really original, nor really terrible, then falls back into it for the end of the season.
The dialogue writing comes from an age I had almost forgotten in anime, where you have the protag saving someone who's bleeding, and his choice way of saving him/her is by making an epic morality speech on good and evil while they're bleeding themselves out right next to them...
The world building is almost nil and if you asked me to describe Academy City in my own words, all I could say would be: it's clean, it's got skyscrapers, it's full of teenagers with super powers, and there's someone upside down in a giant jar somewhere in it.
The plot is so freaking generic it's pathetic: guy appears to catch moe McGuffin. MoeGuffin is guarded/is friend to Protagonist. Guy catches/threatens MoeGuffin. Protag finds and beats Guy.
There are undertones of other things I suppose, but if I am going to watch 24 episodes of something, you have damn well enough time to transform these undertones into something.
The characters are generic and none of them are all that fun, the whole experience feels like a bullet point list of anime tropes to fill:
- Overpowered Protag that nobody acknowledges
- MoeGuffin girl
- Science things
- Magic things
- Edgy villains
- Tsundere love interest
- Budding Harem
- No parents (well I guess they appear for about 2 mns of dialogue at some point)
and I expect some point we'll get:
- Oh noes the Big Cheese Villain was secretly our boss all along
Besides the writing being so freaking worthless you could literally draw random names from a dictionary and still end up most times with more interesting ideas, I'm also a little shocked at the general lack of quality.
It's true that I've recently watched almost only recent anime, so 2018-2019. And going back 10 years ago is a shock in art style and animation quality, yes. But did the voice actors have to be so out of sync with the characters they're portraying? What's with sounding snark while the drawing indicates furious anger? What's with the faces often not meeting the voices, except when the character is a giant gimmick that pretty much always has one mood?
The OPs and EDs are veeeeeery boring and neither music nor animation will stick with me.
The characters could be ok with good writing, but...well, they're at best acceptable.
All in all, I wasted my day watching this. I don't regret wasting it since I have been curious about Toaru and its worlds (so Index + Railgun) for awhile, and it was worth one day to get educated.
But no, I would not recommend something this trite to anyone. If you want to grab a pizza, a beer, and you don't want to watch anything funny, anything scary, or anything too deep, then this is the generic show that'll keep you mildly entertained on those days where you don't even want your brain to think about anything. That's the best I can give it.
