The story already starts weakly when Subaru goes to another world for no apparent reason, nothing of this world is explained and Subaru doesn't seem to care much about it, acting mildly surprised at first, but then proceeding to acting naturally despite the absurd of it. And also, we don't get any information on Subaru's character prior to him going to another world, so the fact he is from the real world seems pointless. It could be just a fantasy anime, without the isekai aspect. Compare it with No Game No Life for example, in which the protagonists are sent to another world by another character who proceeds to give an explanation about the world they are entering into and its rules. Not only that, but the characters get proper characterization before going to the other world, and they act accordingly to that, adapting to the new world's rules. Moving on, Subaru is in this new world just being an average guy without any abilities, except that he always goes back in time every time he dies. This power is another thing that made it hard to care about anything that was happening in the anime, since nothing matters when he can always go back, every scene of him dying after the first one is pointless, you already know he will just go back, there's no tension, and it's the same for the other characters. The story tries to keep the tension by inferring that Subaru doesn't really know how this power works, so every time can be the last, but it didn't work for me, it's hard to care about the drama when the main character is dying over and over again and everything goes back to normal later. The epitome of it is the famous episode 15, when there's a scene at the end that is supposed to be dramatic and impactful, but why is that so, when you know he will just go back in the next episode and everything that happened didn't matter? Another thing about this time travel power is that you never know what time he will go back to. There's a checkpoint that he always returns to after he dies, and then at some point, when the author decides so, the checkpoint changes to another one and so on, it's just an excuse for bad writing. We could compare the time travelling in Re:Zero with Steins;Gate, except that Steins;Gate actually have good characters. The characters either have known each other for a long time or have had a proper development, so it's easy for the viewer to care about the drama. Another thing is that in Steins;Gate, the characters control when they will make the travel and to what time, so it requires good writing from the author to make the story concise and attention from the viewer to understand everything, while in Re:Zero the author just writes whatever he wants without further explanation. Regarding the subplots, since I don't think there's more to the main plot than the fact Subaru wants to go out with Emilia, most of them are boring and don't add much to the story. For example, the Crusch arc, was anyone actually interested in the fight with the whale? Everything in there felt out of place and nothing really interesting was going on. Take the Wilhelm and Thearesia's flashback, it's not that the characters were particularly bad, they were not, and it was actually good to take the story away a little bit from the annoying protagonist, but they don't have much connection with the main characters, so their relationship felt very contrived. One thing I forgot to mention is that Re:Zero is actually a harem, despite not being labelled as one, even the serious and straightforward Crusch started to like Subaru in this arc, for no reason, as per usual.
The art was good, nothing too impressive but above average, no complaints in this regard, and some characters have really good design, like Emilia who is very attractive. The sound was nice, the opening and ending songs are pretty good, especially Stay Alive, which is such a soulful song. There are some memorable OST like Rondo of Love and Darkness, which was the most remarkable for me. The voice acting was great, of course, since they got Inorin and Rieri for Rem and Emilia's voices. It was annoying sometimes hearing the characters' screams that felt out of place and overdone, but it's mostly the plot fault and not the voice actors, their voices are amazing.
In conclusion, I can't say this anime was very enjoyable for me, the story and especially the characters were really bad, so I couldn't enjoy it even though it has some good things going for it like the art and music. There were some parts of the plot that were enjoyable, like the Rem and Ram's flashback, which was my favourite moment in the anime. The beginning with Emilia was interesting as well, especially considering the deal with her real name, but unfortunately, it was not explained in this season and was just forgotten. I recommend it for people who like isekai and don't mind bad writing and appalling and stupid characters. A lot of people seem to like it after all, it just wasn't for me.
