But thank goodness for me that I watched this anime with my friends. Since I got to hear their reactions, this anime wasn't a total waste of my time.
However, I will say that despite laughing a fair bit at the absurdity of some of the events in the anime, very little ended up sticking out as good.
Let's start with their tactic.
Their tactic was simple in that they were trying to desensitize the audience to the fanservice so that they would get fanservice fatigue and start to take the series more seriously toward the end. Sounds reasonable. The problem is that it doesn't actually work and anyone who spends even a second dwelling on it will see it for the gimmick that it is.
They just wanted to appeal to people who already have a propensity for drawing underage girls in revealing outfits because if you break it down, the moral of the series ends up coming down to this: the only way to win is by letting the vampire cloth molest you and drink your blood.
Yeah, really.
This anime positions itself as a spoof, poking affectionate fun of what makes anime terrible and tries to subvert it by using it as their chosen tool of storytelling. The issue is that the things that make other anime terrible (misplaced comic relief, interrupted fight scenes, the introduction of serious storytelling out of nowhere, over the top fanservice, etc) also end up doing the exact same thing to this anime and it ends up being just another dumpster fire that excuses itself because "it's a joke."
Sorry, Kill La Kill, but the joke's on you.
I would also like to add that the camera spends so much time following people's ass and underboob around that it's actively distracting because of the stark difference in movement. The animators want movement when there is sex appeal, but then when you get to a character talking, they're basically just a still frame with moving lips.
The only one who actually manages to keep a consistent use of body language and movement when she's not in battle is Mako.
Story (3/10): I give the story a 3 because while it's nothing special, it isn't actively horrible either. There were some unique ideas brought to the table, but the plot twist vibes very much with what we've come to expect from "I am your father" type media.
Character (1/10): I have a hard time rating the characters so poorly because there is one thing that I can say - with confidence - about them that seems to be lacking in other anime I've seen lately. Ryuuko and Satsuki are extremely motivated and their motivations are made explicitly clear.
Where Ryuuko is concerned, there's no beating around the bush. She is straight up from the first episode and though it takes longer to learn about Satsuki, at no point in the series does she ever feel like she's just doing things for no reason. With that in mind, both Ryuuko and Satsuki are a breath of fresh air.
And the despicable characters aren't romanticized, though I still wish that there was less eye candy built up around a situation that basically amounted to sexual abuse.
Those are the only good things I have to say and you'd think that that would amount to a lot more than it actually does.
Unfortunately, outside of Ryuuko and Satsuki having strong motivations, no one really has a personality outside of that including Ryuuko and Satsuki.
Every character in the series is a means to an end and I really wish they would've had less fanservice and more uninterrupted character development instead of short-handing them into over-the-top-stereotypes.
As noted earlier in the review, the things that frequently plague other anime became their storytelling tool here to great detriment.
Art (6/10): I know that people have been complaining about the style, but I don't actually have a problem with it. I actually wish more anime would think outside the box where their character designs are concerned. They don't all need to be "pretty."
Sound (6/10): While I'm not handing out any awards for sound design, I didn't actually find any issues where it was concerned. There were a lot of inappropriate tone shifts, but that was already built into the writing. No amount of good sound design could've salvaged that.
I would recommend skipping this one.
