I’ve read the manga for the past year or so and was pretty excited when this was announced. I knew the battles could be tricky to animate, but I at least had hope the erotica content would be handled well. I mean, that is the main selling point to the story after all.. but my hopes and dreams were quickly dashed within a couple episodes of this. Scenes were changed or omitted from manga chapters and the ones we did get, were just mediocre. There’s a handful of decent scenes, but it’s just not enough considering that’s what made this series famous.
The story has never been the strongest part of this series, but it is decent. Basically your usual bleach style set up of an MC unknowingly being recruited to join a secret evil fighting organisation. What carries the story is the characters and the character interactions. I do think the studio were able to nail the personalities of the girls and the seiyuus were excellent. You can really get a sense of the various quirks of each character. I just couldn’t help feeling that something felt “off” in this one. Whether it was the skipped chapters or cut scenes, I’m not sure, but it didn’t feel like the same story I anxiously waited to read chapters of and I think the current score differential underlines that being an issue for many fans.
The other big thing we have to talk about is the CGI. It’s bad, like really bad. Because of the nature of the battles in this series, I understand CGI was probably a necessity, but there’s such a huge contrast with how it’s used here vs say a Synduality Noir(also from this season). It looks really out of place and jarring here. The 2D action scenes aren’t exactly anything to write home about either.
Overall, to say I’m disappointed in this adaptation would be an understatement. While the manga isn’t the best thing in the world, it knows what it’s trying to be and succeeds in it. Great art, fights and characters. You’d think translating that to the anime medium wouldn’t be too difficult, but clearly it was an issue for this studio.
Mato Seihei gets 6, out of 10.
