Welcome to One Joke: The Anime. From the paragraph-length light novel title of this series, you can probably already tell what the one joke is. Hiro, our main character, is pathetic and cringeworthy beyond belief in real life and the game he tries to play as an escape only piles on the misery. Usually in a story like this, there would be a little bit of the protagonist being pathetic before growing into a heroic figure the audience can actually find respectable. Well, aside from a brief training sequence at the very end of the season, Hiro displays no growth whatsoever. It's pure abuse for Hiro from start to finish. He loses every fight, he gets mocked and humiliated at every possible opportunity, the girls in his "harem" all either hate him or view him as a mark they can squeeze some money out of, and he never comes close to doing anything heroic (or if he does, it's misinterpreted as him being a pervert or criminal and he's attacked for doing it). It's a little funny at first just how committed the series is to never portraying Hiro in a positive light or allowing anything good to happen to him, but a few episodes into the season, the gimmick starts to wear thin and it's just pure secondhand embarrassment at watching him piss himself or get his lunch money taken by in-game bullies over and over and over.
If the series had good side characters, this would maybe be a salvageable concept, but they're completely flat and uninteresting. Reona gets the most screentime but she does little besides provide exposition and a few jokes about how greedy and self-centered she is. Alicia is the closest to having an actual character, the Childhood Friend that is now psychopathically obsessed with killing Hiro after he accidentally kills her brother in the pilot episode, but that doesn't really go anywhere and she spends most of her time offscreen because any time she's on screen, she's trying to kill Hiro. The other two, Mizarisa the loli torturer/dominatrix and Kaede the tsundere little sister, have such little presence that they may as well not exist, and barely have any personalities beyond those few words I used to describe them.
The voice acting is fine for the most part, but the artwork is noticeably substandard for its contemporaries. The character designs are ugly, with odd-looking multi-colored eyes and vacant, blank looks on the characters' faces most of the time. There aren't that many action scenes, and they're sluggish and not especially well-animated or entertaining.
It's funny sometimes, there were definitely some gags that made me chuckle, but mostly it just spins its wheels and repeats the same jokes over and over while making the MC as embarrassing and unlikable as possible. Really the best way to summarize this series is that it's a sort-of funny concept that wears out its welcome immediately and has nothing behind it to sustain the premise or make it entertaining once the main gimmick stops being funny.
