I checked this out after suggestions from friends in response to looking for a new death game anime to watch. I have not read the manga or novels.
Ultimately I have mixed feelings. I went into this without high hopes as I usually am pretty eh about the magical girl genre, however this anime deconstructed the genre pretty fast (similar to Madoka in a way but less trippy).
The good: The show managed to have some pretty unpredictable moments. The premise was pretty interesting, starting off as one kind of show before quickly transforming into something very dark and disturbing. There were quite a few interesting kills and some of the abilities of the girls and how they were utilized was very cool. There is a trans character (tho they were too cowardly to come right out and say she was, I personally think it's what they had in mind) among other LGBTQ+ representation in their characters. It wrapped up pretty neatly too. It also had a pretty decent dub.
The bad: Most of the characters were extremely one dimensional, this isn't uncommon in anime, especially Death game animes but for a very character focused show, some of the characters who stuck around for longer could have benefited from being fleshed out a bit more. The constant back and forth with flashbacks also made it a bit confusing at times and some of the kills were very predictable based on the show revealing their backstories in the previous episode, tho not always. There were also a fair amount of plot holes. Furthermore I disliked that the "winner" won by pretty much doing nothing the entire game.
The ugly: Snow White, who was the closest thing we had to a main character, was UNBEARABLE, and had literally no character development throughout the entire show. The kills were also heavily censored, this isn't surprising but it's always super annoying.
6 out of 10 stars. I'd recommend it if you're running low on things to watch and really enjoy the death game genre. For what it's worth I enjoyed more than I didn't.
