Akudama Drive has every hallmark of a bad action anime. Boring one-dimensional characters without any development. Characters who act utterly illogically and downright stupidly for the sake of the plot. Copious amounts of killing and gore to give the false impression of "maturity" or being "cool". A world in and of itself that feels very not fleshed out and is just contrived to fit whatever the plot needs. Deus ex machina out the wazoo in basically every episode. Etc. Sprinkle the comically overused trope of all/most main characters dying in an undeserved attempt to make us care about them for good measure. I could keep listing ad nauseam the things wrong with this show but frankly it's not even worth my time to do that, others have already done it and far more in-depth as well.
What I will talk about is how stupid the main plot twist is. I'm not even diametrically opposed to the idea of Kanto all being a super-computer, but the fact that our main protagonist, who is supposedly an empathetic good-girl who wants to save the lives of two innocent children, does so by committing a mass murder (again) of potentially hundreds of millions of people utterly destroys what shambles resembling a plot were left. It's such a dumb, stereotypical bad anime thing to do it actually boggles my mind that this script put forth by the writers was accepted. A show ultimately about a girl saving two innocent children, does so by indirectly slaughtering thousands in the real world, and hundreds of millions of people in cyberspace. I'm going to let the sheer stupidity of that stand on it's own.
All in all the Akudama Drive completely failed at making me care about it's characters, (bad) plot, or themes, if there even were any. The fact that people are calling this utterly pointless, generic, frustratingly mediocre excuse of a show "anime of the year" I think says more about the standard intelligence of the typical 'anime fan' more than anything.
