Instead of tense battles between contenders using their newfound powers, we have instead, slow, plodding, agonizing backtracking and exploration of the MC's past and affiliation with the game and it's system. The clues lead to an absurdly stupid mystery and the finale just cements the stupidity. The writers are obsessed with labeling all youths in Japan as NEETs and making the anime into a lousy social commentary on overthrowing the old establishment and empowering change so that the disenfranchised NEETs can save this corrupt country of Japan. And how does it support the claim that the country is corrupted to the core? By showing the female protagonist, who doesn't even fit the description of a NEET, having her skirt drenched in beef noodle soup by an unruly employer. The world is surely rotten to the bone! Meat bone! They also label everyone in her group of friends, who are part of a promising startup company and seem like perfectly functional human beings, as NEETs. They've built together a Google Lens style app that's crowd-sourced from a social network, an amazing feat of engineering, named the eponymous Eden of the East, and it is absolutely inconsequential to the larger story and only used to manufacture two-bit drama between the characters. Hey look this generic looking black haired Japanese guy looks like a LOT of other people in Japan, according to the app! He must be some shady con-man with multiple aliases!
On top of NEETing everyone under the age of 30 and gathering an army of NEETs to masquerade as public servants to evacuate large disaster areas or having 20,000 NEETs chase you around in the nude by pretending to be a villain for the lulz, you can also use NEETs to aim at and destroy incoming ballistic missiles with the flick of the wrist through the immense power known as bullshit. And some bright individual in the writing room, having unearthed the discovery of a century, that "johnny" exists, one of hundreds of slang words no one ever uses for that wiggly thing between a man's legs, proceeds to shower the script with johnnys. Here's a johnny. There's a johnny. Let me see your johnny. (That's exactly how an American would say it!) All the NEETs are named johnny. Johnny has officially overtaken half the word count, with NEET a close second.
And what about all those promised battles and devious villains? They don't exist. You meet only a handful of the other players, they basically don't do anything, and their motivations are as threadbare as their screen time. The MC barely has a relationship with the rest of the cast other than showing his typical Gary Stu charm and the female protagonist might as well be a cardboard prop he drags around to pose with. Speaking of props, the anime mixes the blandness of Studio Ghibli faces, complete with no nose, with the deadness of bad CG animation, creating it's own unique horror show of talking doll heads. The music, what little that appears, is lazily sampled from Seirei no Moribito's soundtrack, from the same composer, and is too dramatic for the zero real action shown on screen.
