What - the - actual - hell - was - that.
As one of the most promising original animes to ever be released, wonder egg priority debuted in the winter 2021 and it stole the hearts of millions, with breathtaking bombastic visuals tied together with an interestingly fun yet gut wrenching plot line that had me hooked from the first few episodes. It started to become riddled with problems near the end, namely the frill arc and production schedules, but I brushed aside these transgressions because I just enjoyed it that much and I thought the message of the anime was much more profound; helping four broken girls come to terms with losing someone close to them. But what kind of hullabaloo did I just witness? I even had to bring in a stupid word like hullaballoo to describe the mess to stop me from swearing, it’s that flipping bad. I have a fruits basket the good the bad and the ugly ready to be edited, but I changed my entire day to rant about this mess.
For the story itself, it was a cluster mess. I felt like osananajimi no zettai makenai love comedy had a more cohesive plot that this, and it’s one of the most stupid things I’ve watched - video coming soon so stay tuned for that. So, after the 25 and a half minute recap, taking more than half the runtime of this ‘special’ more like ‘specially made to make you sit in a corner and cry’ , we learn that the girls were indeed successful in bringing their friends back. Personally I would have thought they’d go with the you’ve all experienced hardships but now you understand what happened and made some new friends along the way route, but they couldnt after the mess that was the episode 10 11 and 12 of the season. Neiru drops off adam and disappears but we dont know where. The victims seem to be saved but their parallel world version of the girls we knew, and these victims refuse to associate themselves with their corresponding friends, like koito literally tells ai to not talk to her as if they’re familiar with one another. We learn from sawaki that koito literally caused problems with a male teacher in her last school, causing that teacher to jump, and that she harassed sawaki saying that she’ll tell the school he did stuff to her and made him come up to the roof to threaten him further, but slipped off and causing her to take fall damage. Why.
Neiru tells the girls to get lost and goes her own way, and when ai tries to talk to neiru, the neriu she knew isnt the same one and doesnt seem likes the neiru we knew and loved. Momoe seems to for some reason still hang out with the girls ecven though she said she never wanted to back in episode 12? We learn that the neiru we met was neiru’s sister, and tanabe takes the girls to visit kotobuki who reveals that neiru was an ai like frill, but kotobuki created her, and the reason why airu, the human, yeeted herself is revealed to be jealousy. We further learn that neiru is stuck with frill in the wonder world. Interestingly the story still stands to get worse. Neiru calls ai but ai throws her phone away, and a timeskip occurs where ai transfers schools?, so Ai basically was like neiru is ai , there can only be one ai , so let me go away? And then seeing a gacha game homegirl decides to come back to save neiru by going to the acca’s and we get this ending, maybe signifying a season 2 but I hope not because at this point, I want to erase my memories.
To start off with what the actual heck did I wait 3 months for. We were teased for an extended episode right, spanning over 40 minutes and technically we did receive it. But what we got was 25 and a half minutes of blooming recap. It’s bloody ridiculous for a 13 episode anime to have a recap before the story ends, but I found episode 8 to be okay, since they had to outsource some of the work to meet time constraints for the actual episode eight but another recap? This anime got done dirty by whatever the hell happened in the background which I’ll get into shortly, but why in the flying jesus did they say they’re going to make an extended episode then? It was a waste of my time since I thought they’d actually add something in those 25 and a half minutes, and watched through it even though I remembered the plot so far, and I felt like I just sat staring at a wall.
For the mess of production, lets look at the details that’s available online. Key animation for this specially messed up ending was outsourced, and whilst this is not bad as we saw from jjk how great outsourcing can be, the mother of jesus script was finished around the start of this month. Wakabayashi had months to write an episode that was already supposed to exist - since episode 8 wasn’t supposed to be a recap- but it took him 2 months to make a storyboard? The layouts were finished June the 22nd, 7 days before airing and the key animation clean up was finished a day before it got released? It was only completed 15 hours before it was supposed to air. I have to give props were props are due, the animators especially the chines ones and kerorira in particular had to work their butts off to get this cluster out, enough to earn cited credits, but what the actual hell was the animation itself. Apparently wakabayashi had to be in hospital as well, but they could have pushed this back or done something else since a month to storyboard is ridiculous.
Wonder egg priority was visually stunning. Was. In the mess of the specially messed up episode , there were often moments where the spoken dialogue and the characters talking felt off-sync, like their lips moved after the sound, and there were a lot of scenes with very little animation at all reminding me of another certain anime finale which cloverworks was in charge of in winter 2021 that they made into a slideshow. Ai’s running scene was a massive headache to watch, compare this scene to this and see how much dynamism is in episode 1 compared to what looks like ai running on a treadmill in this. The 20 odd minutes were still plagued with MORE FLASHBACKS EVEN THOUGH WE JUST SPENT 25 AND A HALF MINUTES DOING JUST THAT. The sakuga was made like my dad and ran away. I spent the entire episode combing through it to try and see a bit of animation that reminded me of the previous 12 episodes, but I saw nothing. Hori san and miyamura kun had better animation than this mess, and it was basically drawn in someone's bedroom.
Lets end this with narrative plot holes before I lose more of my hair from pulling them out. As I mentioned in the summary. The entire special seems like it was made in a universe just to anger all the wonder egg priority fans. Remember episode 12 when rika was going crazy trying to get revenge for mannen? Lol she doesn’t care anymore, revenge is petty, who would want that? And then rika decies to disappear for the rest of the special. Momoe is apparently fine enough to be friendly toward the others and go hang out at karaoke despite saying in episode 12 that she wishes that she hadn't gotten involved with the girls. Neiru being an AI is slapped on our heads and then brushed over, like the girls don’t even discuss saving their friend, nor do they discuss how neiru was more human than AI. But Ai then decides to blank neiru when she calls, going as far as yeeting her phone off into the bushes when she could have blocked the number or gotten a new number? Then there’s the parallel world stuff, okay sure bring science into something that didnt exactly need it but we move, but what in science says that you can jump between dimensions, going as far as bring parallel world girls back but previous memories being erased? What is this the bootleg steins gate, steins goat coming to cinemas near you. Ai moves schools because she wants to, and a time skip occurs because why exactly? It crams in a flashback and her suddenly deciding to see Neiru again after an unnecessary timeskip because she saw a gacha game? And then there’s koito. Please for the love of god what the actual hell was that. Koito was built up to be a misunderstood angel, but turns out shes a lil psycho who loves torturing teachers for her pleasure and her offline event was more hippity hoppity my foot slipped off of this property causing her to take mad fall damage. They hyped her character up the entire season, and they made her a narrative focus of the story building her up and the problem doesnt lie with her being evil, it lies with how they just lobbed it at us and expected us to be like yeah that makes sense. No foreshadowing, no anything, just she slipped. Like who in their right minds would enjoy that. Don’t forget sawaki, the seemingly maleficent teacher who we thought was preying on koito when it was the other way around yet why did he behave like that? This anime doesn't really have an unreliable narrator, like sure you can't trust a hikikomori fully, but sawaki LITERALLY DREW AI BEING OLDER AS A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN THAT WAS BROKEN, but that’s okay right since he did nothing wrong and was being manipulated? Finally, let's not forget that frill was basically afk, like we saw nothing of her this episode, and acca and ura acca were like side pieces even though the entire egg theory was created by them? I thought this episode would be a conclusion of astronomical proportions, with teh girls fighting together to defeat frill using the knowledge they gained but instead they were like who’s frill and what’s and acca? They even went as far to make frill seem like a decent person, as she did nothing bad - and that bringing back neiru was teh end goal, not defeating frill as the thanatos warriors or whatever. Disappointment is the only word I can truly say.
My concluding thoughts can only truly be one word. Why? As honestly one of the most profound and breathtaking original animes that was overflowing with life, heart and creative freedom, this anime failed to deliver anything that could be recognised as a semblance of its former self. I can honestly say this is the most disappointing ending I’ve ever seen and I watched promise neverland season 2 from clover doesnt know how to works. All the characters felt alien, the messages were skewed to be something that reminded me of my younger days when I’d write it was all a dream, the conversations felts stifling and threw me off and it felt like watching something my nephew wrote and he’s 1. This did not decide to follow up from episode 12, instead we got an exposition dump of an episode combined with god awful animation, rivalling ex-arm (of course not but you get the point). A good story is similar to hunting, the patient tracking gathering the clues to the conclusion and the final episode should feel like that shot you’re about to take. Imagine you’re playing cs go, and you’re 1 v 1 when the rounds are 15 14 to you and you need to clutch the game, that adrenaline rush feeling is what a good conclusion should feel like. But instead of hitting that headshot and ending the game, you shot yourself instead, causing the game to end in a draw or in the hunter scenario you’re starving. It felt like my brain was starving. I’m not mad, I’m disappointed would be how I feel, but I’m mad as well so it doesn’t fit. I regret watching this and I would advise you not to ruin WEP by doing so as my rating dropped from 9 to 7 for the main series and I gave the special a special 4, one of the rating I use the least on MAL. If the rating on both MAL, Anilist and Reddit are anything to go by, most people felt the same way as me, as it flopped more than koito when she ‘slipped’.
