Firstly, I’d like to state that I in general do like Minazuki Suu works and downright loved Sora no Otoshimono, so I have no problem with there being a perverted protagonist or random and major shifts from serious to comedic. Now, I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt and just assume that the anime adapted the manga terribly, but to put it simply this anime is nothing like his other works and does a pretty bad job at pretty much everything.
The anime starts off kind of feeling mostly like his other works. There are definitely some hints about there being some pretty dark things going on and that a serious story is going to pop up eventually, but it’s for the time being it’s just pretty light hearted with a very strong emphasis on comedy above all, with a heavy portion of that being related to the protagonist’s pervy antics. It introduces a lot of the main characters and begins some world building, though with most of the world building leading to more questions than answers. It feels somewhat slow at times, but it’s a pretty fun ride.
This stage lasts for the first third or so of the anime, after which it changes dramatically, and its all downhill from there. It suddenly gets extremely dark in what felt like a major shift. As mentioned, other works by the original author also have major shifts like this, but they’re usually more reversible, having long lasting impacts on character development and such, but otherwise returning to the standard light hearted tone with the overall status quo only improving. This story is completely different. Once it starts going down that path, it changes completely, and though it does try to return to the light hearted tone at times, it just doesn’t work because it’s impossible to just ignore the dark elements of the plot that persist.
Unlike the original author’s other works which seems to focus on characters over plot, this seems to have a much larger emphasis on the plot itself. Unfortunately, the plot just isn’t strong enough to support the anime. There are a lot of long term plot threads, lots of things left mysterious only to be revealed later, and lots of elements that end up seeming unimportant but become much more important later on. However, it feels like all of these are being made up on the spot. The explanation behind most plot elements feel incredibly forced, in that it has to try to write around a bunch of other stuff that contradicts it, and even then it still feels like there’s an abundance of gaping plot holes. Especially when it comes to anything involving the out of nowhere but incredibly important time travel arc which ended up having a large amount of straight up infodumping. It’s a complete and utter mess that feels like it’s changing direction constantly, and thus even if you’re willing to look past the inconsistencies, it’s hard to get into the plot enough to properly get invested in it and really want to know what happens next, which considering this is a plot focused anime is simply a critical flaw. I would also normally talk about the pacing here, but everything just seems so messy that I have no idea how to even begin to judge it. I will say that the pacing on action in the second half became pretty bad with some battles being over instantly, and others like the final battle feel like they were dragging on forever.
The random plot also seems to screw things up with characters. It doesn’t feel like there’s any definitive vision of what the characters are supposed to be. Characters grow and change over stories of course, but here it just feels like the story didn’t really know what it wanted to do with characters and just gave them random roles, but then that didn’t work with where the story eventually needed to go, so the characters were turned into something completely different, but because the plot kept changing a lot the characters in turn end up changing a lot to. There’s no real sense of progression. Just character’s behaving really randomly and often what feels like absurdly. The end result is really inconsistent characterization, which combined with the fact that it feels like the plot itself treats most of the cast like garbage, makes it really difficult to get all that invested in any of the cast. This is especially prominent in the romance. Romance is actually a focus in this anime, and things actually make major progress over the course of the anime. But it isn’t satisfying at all because it doesn’t feel well built up to at all. I feel like this was originally going to be a harem series, but the plot changed halfway through, and instead became a normal romance where relationship drama is actually important and there are a bunch of different intertangled relationships developing which really did not flow well at all, and on top of that the anime is terrible at pretty much all relationship drama with essentially all of it being cringeworthily bad, and that’s coming from someone that has a really low bar when it comes to stuff like that.
The art and animation were disappointing. The character designs and general art style are decent enough, but the art and animation were incredibly subdued and general not very nice to look at, and at times it felt like they were intentionally going out of there way to be so which makes no sense. The action also looked pretty bad at times. The soundtrack wasn’t particularly memorable but I suppose was decent enough. The first OP was somewhat interesting in how it changed in terms of visuals, but otherwise was only decent in terms of song and visuals. The second OP and both EDs were similarly decent in terms of both audio and visuals, but not particularly memorable.
