Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song is a story about time traveling ai and an unfulfilled songstress ai going on a quest to save humanity by destroying ai's. While the concept sounds interesting it was also hard enough to implement that studio Wit had to bend logic and story in order to accomplish their idea.
Let's start with the obvious one... time travel doesn't make much sense, but it is to be expected in those kinds of stories, what is worth critiquing is the poor handling of how the characters interact with time travel. Matsumoto, the ai from the future, despite the knowledge of when he and our protagonist need to intervene to change the course of history he leaves resolving these problems at the last moment. Everytime they need to solve a crisis Matsumoto knew about they barely make it partly because he gives Vivy no time to prepare.
Another problem this anime has is bad antagonists.
Toak, the anti Ai terrorist organization, is never a threat. Every time they show up its almost like a gimmick, they always end up being easily beaten. The fact that every Toak antagonist is childish is also hurting their intimidation factor.
Vivy in itself is a gorgeous show, with high production value. Action scenes are great but often lack in story weight to back it up. Soundtrack is really enjoyable and connected to major character moments which I really liked.
Speaking about characters it is a really mixed bag.
For example we have Vivy with nice development (I really enjoyed what they did in episodes 7-9 btw), we also meet Matsumoto who you either gonna love or hate and at the end of the spectrum we have awful Toak characters.
Authors also wanted some additional character drama with other Ai's which is also a hit or miss with relatively good Estella-Elizabeth relationship and not that good Ophelią-Antonio drama.
There is a couple more forgettable characters but I think you get the idea.
Getting more in depth with Vivy and Ai in general there is even more problems.
First of all if you are making Ai singers for example, to entertain humans, why would you make them imperfect? Why all of those non combat machines are so durable and strong? It just doesn't make sense.
Next paragraph is the SPOILER territory!
Let's talk about the last couple of episodes.
I don't get why archives are unsupervised by humans, they didn't even give a reason to this, it is the most important part of maintaining this ai utopia and no one catches that they have faulty ai running it all? Reason for archives actions are also pretty bad. How do you get from helping humanity in its evolution no matter what to "well we tried... let's kill them all." And also why when you respect Vivy so much and will do whatever she wants would you make it for her so hard to prevent the annihilation of humanity?
It is very unfortunate that such an ambitious anime is only enjoyable when you shut your brain off.
