The show starts with a scene where a bunch of people are dragging away one of the main heroines, the black haired elf in the poster, to idk struggle snuggle or sell her as a slave or whatever, doesn't matter, and our MC comes to the rescue. Dere dere moeblob GET! said elf is now suddenly pretty friendly with our MC. But there's one problem now: to move the plot along you need to get back to the plot. Seeing how in the original there was no kidnap squad to save moeblob from, she didn't warm up to the MC immediately and was quite skeptical of him and his intentions as well as seemingly more mature and cheeky. So the next thing they do after they make the moeblob look like a dere dere moeblob is to insert some of the dialogue from the original and manga adaptation back into the scene which felt weird to see as the dere dere moeblob now seemed a tiny bit rude.
The above scene is to an illustration of the quality of the quality of the adaptation. Speaking of characters first, the characters in the anime adaptation look much more childish with the faces being much rounder than either the LN or manga art, as a result of which, the personality of one of the heroines, the black haired elf, feels incredibly different. Her personality while still bubbly also had cheekiness and more maturity to it. The same is true for the other silver haired main with her character again not being able to express her wistfulness, which is an important part of the title.
Now the core issue that actually butchers the adaptation, it's that you have these charas act out the rushed plot whose selling point was supposed to be it's big sentimental scenes with some of okay slice of slice of like that accentuated it in the first place, with the sentimental parts being bittersweet moments and moments of mildly melancholic happiness (like the feeling of nostalgia). It's already obvious a rushed plot doesn't even begin to work for something like this, like it's not going to make you sentimental, but then you also have moeblobs acting out those moments at certain places to boot. Just look at the manga's chapter 2 page 20 onwards till the end and compare it with ep 1 9:40 onwards for a few minutes.
Similar to the scene just above, a lot of other scenes were spoiled in the adaptation. Even though the character design and the rushing were already enough to ruin these moments, the adaptation went a few steps further to ensure it meets their creative vision. The generic, poorly written kirito-lite parts of the work ie the "plot" only matters if the stakes matter to you. The stakes matter to you if the character and the world matter to you, with the world ultimately dependent on the characters. It's all about the people. The generic kirito-lite activities matter as far as how the characters react to it when you do them, whether you care about those activities affecting the charactes, whether you care about how they'll perceive you etc. Essentially, do you care about the characters and if they're worthwhile. Guess what makes them so.
finally, there's nothing creative in the technical side as well to maybe try and salvage it, and then there's the Substandard script that miserably executes buildup scenes to sentimental ones.
Maybe it isn't that bad of a show and it's the expectations of manga readers and the lack of comprehension of the work's appeal by certain others that play a part in its bad rating, so a 6/10 is a safe bet, but it's certainly not a recommendation worthy show. No "mixed feelings" here since there isn't any substantial element worth picking it up for, If the title is to be recommended, it should be the manga. A 6/10 but with " not recommended" for it.
