I'll begin by talking about what I enjoyed. For starters: the animation. It's no surprise that Wit has some phenomenal animators and designers. From the very first frames of the first episode, you could tell that they put more effort into each scene than most studios put into their entire series. Both the world design and character design were amazing, and they really drew me into the world of the show. Additionally, the choreography and camera movement for the action scenes was unmatched by anything else I was watching this season. Lastly, the soundtrack was just amazing. I'm a huge fan of Aketagawa Jin, and he really brought his A-game for this series. The opening theme, "Sing My Pleasure" is an absolute bop, and the other original songs also hold their weight. The scoring was also very good.
Now I'll get into what I didn't enjoy: everything else... The story is your run-of-the-mill, time-travel, change-the-past-to-save-the-future crap you see all the time... but now with AIs (woooow). It's very formulaic: Vivy learns about an event that apparently leads to the annihilation of mankind, she meets an AI that has to do with said event, she tries to stop the said event, the AI dies and the event happens anyway. One issue with this formula is that the show spends too much time trying to develop characters that they'll just end up killing off the next episode, leaving just the last episode or two for the show's main character--who they should be spending the most time on. Another issue with this formula is that the show gets very repetitive and predictable, and thus very boring. It felt like a chore to get through an episode each week.
A few more things that I disliked:
- The fact that they failed to explain the mechanics of the time travel in the time travel show.
- The weird, high-detail stills that they'd throw into certain scenes at random times that looked out of place and ugly.
- Matsumoto.
Overall, the show is okay. If the show wasn't this well animated, I doubt people would have been hyping it up as much as they were. I've seen way too many people claiming this show is a masterpiece or even anime of the year, when if they'd simply think about the show for a minute they'd see that it really isn't anything special.
Tl;dr: Watch if you want a pretty show. Don't watch if you want a good show.
