My main gripes with this show is that it just feels like the fights and battles don't have any real emotional stake or weight to them. Battles just happen just to happen, and we only learn the emotional epicenter of the fights *in the middle of the fight* when one character suddenly wants to take time to think about their tragic backstory. Another gripe I have is that while the fights are beautifully animated and look amazing, the choreography for these fights are incredibly dull to look at. Everyone has very unique weapons, but they don't utilize them in unique ways. Everyone just has gimmicks to their powers, but don't use those gimmicks in ways you wouldn't expect. And fight choreo will make or break a fight scene. You could get the most talented studio to animate your fight scenes, and if it's just two guys hitting one another really smoothly, then it's a poor scene.
I also have an issue with the overall tone of the show. I feel like it doesn't know when to take itself serious, and that there are a lot of really cool moments that get ruined because someone wanted to crack a silly joke here or there. There's also the added issue of there just being way too many characters and not enough time for us to get invested in any of them. Because we have such little time (most of which is again taken up by really long battle scenes with mediocre fight choreo) the characters often have to have to unrelated epiphany about themselves in the middle of the fight. And normally I wouldn't have any issue with this, but it happens like way too often to the point where characters who weren't even related to one another were having these "You're not so different you and I ;')" moments with each other. Once is okay especially if you're going to follow up with that idea of these two characters being foils to one another, but 3 times and no follow up just feels like lazy writing.
All in all, I'm sure there are a lot of people who will really like this show. It does have really great animation, voice acting, and I have to admit that the characters powers and the magic system are pretty cool. But if you were going into this like me expecting to understand just WHY everyone seems to write so many think pieces about the narrative, you will be sorely mistaken as the story itself is actually pretty simple. The anime does have some interesting ideas, but in my opinion it doesn't really expand or talk about those ideas in an interesting or unique way.
