What I expected to be a good thriller or anything exciting, ended up being a fanservice show for horny teens with a failed attempt to create something smart. This series has such a huge ammount of plot holes that I would have preferred to see a documentary about Emmental cheese or something about Cenotes instead.
Minor spoilers ahead. I'm just judging what I saw from the anime, I'm yet to read the novel (as of 09/2021).
If you are going to adapt a novel like this, it would have been WAY better to not have done this anime from the beginning. This anime was something so bad that couldn't even stand by itself. It feels like they grabbed the novel, then passed it though a shredder and grabbed random bits to adapt the anime, and one could tell that without even having read the novel.
This series is an utterly disasterous attempt to create some kind of psychological anime that ended up not knowing where to go or what even the series was at first, let me explain: It's like the series forgot what it was about in just 6 chapters, what an achievement for a 12 episode series! I hoped the series would get better through the latest chapters but, it didn't.
Yet another tragic case of a very good premise with a terrible execution. They tried to do a series that would cover several seasons like many other series do, thinking that they could fill anything lacking in the next seasons, but the case is that this anime ended up being so full of plot holes, inconsistencies and an annoying ammount of deus-ex-machina that made me despise this anime.
I'd like to another thing: WHY adding a filler in a 12 episode series that doesn't adapt the full story? They could have used that time for making a story done slightly better.
Let's talk about the art, nothing outstanding, but for such this series, the ammount of leg shots and bust shots made me think this was rather to raise the audience to fill out the... plot they forgot they were doing. This anime could be easily categorized as ecchi if you asked me.
The soundtrack is mostly forgettable (except for the opening, which sounded cool), and voice acting is pretty generic. Except for some characters that sound pretty good, but still there's a voice I CANNOT stand: Ayanokouji. He sounds like he was forced to voice act, like he was dead inside. PONELE VOLUNTAD LA CONCHA DE TU MADRE, AYANOKOUJI.
The characters... I think this could be the reason this ended up being so bad, they are all so empty, one-sided and they fail to make watchers (at least me) to feel any kind of empathy for them, they all seem to be taken from a wikihow guide on how to make an anime. Except for Ayanokouji, I know I said I hated your voice, but you're the least hateable of the cast and the only one that is actually interesting, if all of them were as good as you... (not in the benevolent sense though).
As a conclussion, you'd be wasting your time if you want to see something about a meritocratic school, because it seems like this won't be for you. The novel seems to be actually good tho, I might give it a try later. Back to the anime: If you're a teenager in the verge of an hormone breakdown, you might maybe like this anime, but as for me, this wasn't definitely for my taste.