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This series is all over the map.

First, the good stuff. In of worldbuilding, this is like the anime equivalent of Subnautica. It really captures the aesthetic and feel of an alien world. The landscapes are varied and nice to look at, and there's plenty of things to discover. There's tons of exotic wildlife, with some of them being tasty food while others are much larger and more dangerous. Furthermore, there's overarching mysteries as to why this land is cursed, why it was like that in the first place, what's the nature of the white whistles, etc. that are well-done and were the primary reason ... I wanted to keep watching.

The characters are a mixed bag. Some of the ing cast are pretty good, like Bondrewd and Ozen, but they don't get nearly enough screentime. The problem is with the main characters. Riko is somewhat annoying, as she's really not taking this whole thing seriously enough and her stupidity is frequently getting herself and Reg into danger. Reg could be interesting if his backstory is explored more, but after two seasons and a movie it still hasn't happened for the most part. Without that, he's like a Robo-Mikasa (from Attack on Titan), i.e. a bland bodyguard for the protagonist. Nanachi is alright -- she reacts to situations in a reasonable way and has some backstory -- but otherwise isn't special. Faputa in S2 acts like a rage-filled 6-year-old that's hyped up on pixie sticks. None of these are terrible to the level of Subaru from Re:Zero, but I would have still enjoyed the show more if the main cast was more fun to watch.

A lot of people are upset over the "sexualization of children". I think that's a bit of an overreaction since it's not really a focus, and many of the scenes involving it are probably how confused children would actually act IRL. But then again, the show creators could have simply cut those scenes, and I can understand why people might be a bit skeeved to think that what they're watching is 1 or 2 steps away from CSAM. The characters really didn't need to be children in the first place.

My biggest issue is with the torture-porn. The series starts out with episodes that are pretty childish, but it rapidly becomes clear that this is a very dark world. The last episodes of both season 1 and 2 have too much gore, too much suffering, and too much crying. A little bit of that stuff can add some realism, but this show lingers somewhat longer than necessary to accomplish that. And that stuff *really* gets taken too far in the third movie that takes place between S1 and S2. Kids are getting fed through the fantasy-equivalent of a woodchipper while screaming "it hurts so bad!!!" and their suffering even continues after they're dead. It just wallows in grimdark excess.

The movie has a lot of flaws beyond the torture-porn. Both Prushka and Bondrewd could both be interesting characters, but aren't given enough time to breathe. Prushka becomes attached to the main characters after like 15 minutes of interaction with them, and Bondrewd is an extreme version of "the ends justify the means" but without enough time to be fleshed out (no pun intended) he seems more like a goofy psycho who keeps saying "Marvelous!" before trying to randomly hack people to pieces. The end of the film also makes NO sense whatsoever. It's hard to go into details without spoiling, but it's just a mess.

Season 1 starts a bit slow, then is quite good in the middle as the story is unfolding and secrets of the world are revealed, then devolves into torture-porn for a bit. Season 2 is quite good for the first 9 or 10 episodes, although it doesn't reveal many of the questions that had been raised in season 1. Eventually it too devolves a bit too far into torture-porn and everybody crying all the time.

I might tentatively recommend this series to people, but it would come with a lot of caveats.

Was this supposed to be a satire of something? If it was, I didn't get it.

Japan seems to think poker is some hardcore crazy game. To me, poker is a game for people like Nate Silver, i.e. it's a hobby for geeks and nerds to check if they paid attention during stats class. Seeing overexaggerated anime monologues saying things like "PREPARE TO DIE, LOSER!!! I'LL SPLATTER YOUR BLOOD ALL OVER THIS TABLE" in regards to poker is just bizarrely goofy.

The games of chance aren't actually really the focus of the show though. The show is much more interested in showing weirdly overexaggerated expressions ... that are sometimes sexual. I could pause at nearly any point and I'd often be left with something that could be screenshotted and used as a silly anime reaction picture on 4chan, if I wanted. There's a big emphasis on girls creaming themselves over coinflips. What exactly is the point of all of this? I was left scratching my head.

The psycho-thriller part is that everyone is a cheater, and the protagonist girl has to try to figure out how. Seeing these revealed was somewhat entertaining. However, the games get less scrutable as the series progresses, and eventually several games are won by pure dumb luck. What focus this show does have shifts to many of the characters having big development arcs as they gambled in strange ways. Again, this all seemed like it was a satire of something that went way over my head.

I gave this a fair shake at the start, but sped it up to 1.5x a little under halfway through, and I was still very bored by the end of just 12 episodes.

It's decent. Not great, but decent.

This is like a cross between Frieren and Laid-back Camp. It has the former's fantasy setting and generally laid-back atmosphere, with the latter's focus on people creaming their pants over the food they just cooked. It's less interesting than either of those though, at least at the start. Frieren had a great story that's well-told, and while Laid-back Camp was kind of a pointless slice-of-life, at least it had cute anime girls. This show only has a frumpy elf that complains a lot, with all the other major characters having a Y chromosome.

This show is semi-serialized, and at ... the start it's almost entirely episodic. The formula is that the characters find a monster, kill it, cook it, eat it, and repeat. The action scenes are mundane, as it's clear they're not a huge focus. The cooking montages are kind of cute I guess, although they're all pretty similar and got stale after I saw them a few times. The eating parts are where the characters go "oh my gosh this is SOOOOOOOO GOOOOOD!!!!" in the typical exaggerated anime fashion. There's a recurring gag where the elf girl hates the idea of eating monsters and is sure they'll taste gross, but then she tries them loves it. This happens like 7 times and gets pretty silly after a while.

This was all... OK I guess? There were a handful of interesting ideas sprinkled in here and there, but it's not really enough to hold up an entire show, and after a half-dozen episodes I was getting bored. The characters were thinner than the slices of meat they cut, and they all seemed excessively laid back about the guy's sister being eaten by a dragon which was ostensibly the time limit pushing them forward.

Then around episode 10 or 11 they face the dragon and things become quite a bit less goofy, which I appreciated. It also becomes much more serial, with a single main plotline continuing from episode to episode, allowing it to be less cramped and adding a lot more nuance. Furthermore, the characters started being developed a lot more. All of this was great, and I started thinking this would be one of those shows that just had a slow beginning. There was still the snag of the cooking element though, which now stuck out like a sore thumb. In one sense it prevented the story from getting too bleak and serious, but on the other hand it's kind of like if Attack on Titan or Death Note had a 4 minute cooking scene spliced into every episode.

The serial plotline remains the focus overall, but there are several episodes that regress back to the less interesting episodic formula. Not all of these are bad -- I genuinely enjoyed the shapeshifter clones episode and the body shifting bit -- but there were several others that were just bland. The problem is that there's essentially two TV shows forced to share a time slot here: One is the goofy and childish episodic cooking part that's a 5 or 6 out of 10, while the other is the more serious and interesting overarching plot with well-developed characters that's an 8 or even 9 out of 10 at its best moments. I'd say the good parts are worthwhile enough to justify slogging through the boring bits, so I tentatively recommend this show.

Attack on Titan is the closest thing anime has to Game of Thrones, for better and worse.

In of overall quality, both shows start out a bit rough as they try to lore-dump the setting in a few short episodes. For AoT there was also bit too much torture porn at the beginning with plenty of crying (in the overdramatic anime wailing fashion) that got pretty annoying. Furthermore, it didn't help that the 3 main characters weren't much fun to watch. Mikasa is alright -- who wouldn't want an utterly dedicated ninja girl to watch over them -- but is otherwise one-note. Eren is ... an *excessively* angsty and outraged teenager whose only solution to problems is to try screaming at them. And Armin is the typical anime crybaby with crippling self-doubt issues that would usually be the main character in any other Japanese show.

Thankfully, the show rapidly improves. Other, less-annoying characters are introduced to even things out, and Eren and Armin develop a bit to be less awful. The show also moves quite briskly from one plot point to the next. The actions scenes are some of the best I've seen in anime. I'm grading on a fairly generous curve here -- they still have the issue that all animated action scenes have where everything feels somewhat plastic -- but they're much better here than they are in, say, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. This show is also not shy about killing characters off, which I appreciated. It doesn't have anything to the level of the Red Wedding, but it's more than enough to build tension. Minor characters I liked didn't feel like they had invincible plot armor.

The show still wasn't perfect, though. The fact that the smart titans very obviously didn't want to kill Eren when trying to kidnap him, and only wanted to capture him, made the overarching point of many of the fights feel fake. With so many mysteries, I figured that they just wanted to talk to him or even make him their king for as-of-yet unexplained reasons, so to me it never really felt like Eren was in any real danger. Other characters might not have had plot armor, but he certainly seemed to. After watching further into the series it's clear he actually *was* in danger, and this really ought to have been communicated in some way. I think this is one of the inherent downsides of trying to mix action shows with mystery-thrillers. Furthermore, there's a big shonen power creep problem especially early on where characters will just arbitrarily manifest new abilities to avoid death. This further deflates the tension for the most important characters like Armin and Eren. Even some other characters get it, like one character getting his head chopped off, but not dying by "transferring his consciousness" to his pinky toe.

Attack on Titan is at its absolute best in season 3. It's here where major mysteries are revealed and the scope of the plot expands significantly. I've never seen another film or tv series (including Western ones!) expand the scope of the world this much, and AoT handles it quite well for the most part. It's clear they were building to the major reveals, and the way they're pulled off makes this show truly unforgettable.

Unfortunately, good things can never last, and AoT suffers a decline in quality like GoT did in its final seasons. The downward spiral is nowhere near as sharp as Game of Thrones', but its definitely still noticeable. It starts slow at first, with the cast ossifying and minor characters no longer dying at nearly the same rate they did before. One of them dies on the airship, and it's treated as a major loss when previously these deaths were a dime-a-dozen. Then, towards the end, things start happening so quickly that they became almost inscrutable. In TV and film there's always a delicate balance between overexplaining and underexplaining. Anime typically veers towards overexplaining which can feel a bit patronizing, but Attack on Titan struck a good balance until the end, when much of the final plot points became a jumbled mess that was way too hard to follow. Fake betrayals, hidden motivations, pseudo time travel, the concept of "royal blood", the requirement (or not?) of holding hands with a monkey, glowing centipedes, etc etc. I still only have a vague understanding of why Eren did what he did. After searching what other people thought his goals were, it seems like others who watched the show just choose whichever of the half-dozen possible motivations they like the most and cherrypick evidence to their claim.

I was never bored while watching Attack on Titan. Even though it has a rough beginning and a confusing ending it was well worth my time to watch it.

Most animes simply aren't very funny. It's up for debate whether that's from Japanese wordplay not translating well into English, or if it's from Japanese creators just not being very good at comedy in general. Anime humor mostly consists of 1) characters overreacting to things and 2) lewd cringe comedy. That's... really it. Those are the only two arrows in their quiver. While I've laughed at those types of jokes plenty of times in Western shows, that's still a pretty limited repertoire.

Prison School cranks the dials on both of those elements up to 11. This is an unrepentantly horny show that depicts men as ... practically being slaves to their carnal impulses, with the prospect of seeing breasts making them react like Looney Tunes characters. At first I thought this was all a bit excessive, but eventually I came around to enjoying it to some degree. You can practically see the plotline snapping its spine in half to bend over backwards to justify its sequence of gags. One example was how the boys needed a fart sound effect for one of their harebrained schemes, and barely-explained coincidences conspired to conveniently make it so the only way they could get it was by recording their own fart in the middle of class. Then they treated this "social suicide" as akin to the heroic sacrifice a kamikaze pilot might make before their final flight, complete with sweeping speeches about the nature of self-sacrifice and whatnot. A show like this is never going to be amazing, but I respect how much it aggressively embraces the fact that it's all low-quality campy nonsense. I chuckled at the goofiness several times, and while no anime will ever really compare to Western comedies, this one reached the heady heights of "decent".

The first half of season one of this show might be the most absolutely disastrous trainwreck of storytelling I've ever seen in TV and film. If you want to speedrun a semester-long course in all the ways that storytelling can fail, I struggle to think of a better alternative than this show. It's so bizarrely disted. All creative works that require cooperation between multiple people can resemble a sausage factory to some extent, but this is like the sausage is being assembled by a fentanyl zombie that only manages to get half the pork into the meat-sock and smears the other half around on ... the table. Then he mumbles "here ya go!" before collapsing dead.

I got here from looking for anime similar to Solo Leveling, this was the most commonly cited rec on MAL. Those people are liars. This has only the most basic similarities to Solo Leveling, as in they both use video game tropes. This has vibes akin to Ready Player One, but is otherwise just generic anime in of plot.

Characters die in the first few episodes, but these characters have had a total of like 5 minutes of screentime, so the melancholic music just reinforces the "trying too hard, and falling flat on its face" notion. Then in E4 it randomly shifts and becomes a Blushy Crushy romance show and contrives every situation it can to get a girl to flash her panties at the protagonist. Then it becomes a character drama to some degree, and a mystery. Then it keeps on cycling through genres until it's checked almost every single one of them off its list. Is it an action/adventure? A love polygon? A harem anime? A comedy? A power fantasy? A mystery/thriller? A tentacle hentai? I was half expecting mechs to pop out to really cover ALL the bases.

Meandering through a lot of different genres is not in and of itself a bad thing. But it's usually best to have 1-3 consistent themes, and then make small excursions into other areas. In contrast, this show is wearing a completely different hat from episode to episode, which makes watching them in sequence extremely jarring. Furthermore, the protagonist's personality swings massively. Is he this confident, edgy, Shadow the Hedgehog type? Or is he a generic dorky anime protagonist? Or perhaps somewhere in between? The answer is: whatever the show creators want him to be at any given moment.

There's no real meta-narrative to drive the overarching plot along, other than "get to the top of the castle to free yourself from this digital prison". But that really doesn't seem to be that much of a pressing concern. There's dithering between whether being locked in the game world is terrible, or if it's actually not all that bad since they get to spend it in an interesting place and form friendships and relationships. This tossup is interesting, but the show doesn't know how to handle it, and instead of trying to do a nuanced take between the two, it wildly vacillates between the two extremes based on whatever's going on in the scene at that moment, e.g. if they're about to make progress towards escaping they have a flashback on all the bad things that happened implying they're about to be liberated from the worst prison to ever exist, completely ignoring the previous episode's conclusion that this game isn't all that bad.

The main conflict just gets... randomly resolved halfway through season 1. It just comes out of nowhere, for seemingly no reason. A dude essentially says "surprise, I'm the final boss", he dies, and the overarching narrative is just gone. Then the game's creator is asked why he created the MMO in the first place, and he essentially responds with "IDK LOL". Like.... what!?!

This show is so bafflingly badly paced that I investigated what happened. It seems like this was a big webnovel series that went on for quite a while. Apparently the anime adaptation had no idea what to do with all of this, so the show creators just kind of picked random bits and jammed them together without thinking much. The result is this absolute mess that I don't understand how anyone can take seriously.

The second arc of season one is much less chaotic and actually tries to tell a coherent story. Instead of "abysmal", it's merely "bad". In its best moments it never rises beyond generic anime pablum, and it still has a decent amount of structural flaws. The most glaring flaw is that the stakes don't make sense -- the characters are no longer in a "if you die in the game, you die in real life" situation, yet they still act excessively cautious. Furthermore, the main tension is how the protagonist's girlfriend is due to be married in a week to a total creep, so that presumably sets a deadline. But... it's not like marriage is a death sentence. The girl would still be alive, and they'd probably give leeway to a quick annulment given the circumstances.

The first arc was so bad that it made me want to watch it to see what nonsense would happen next. The second arc was better from a qualitative standpoint, but was just kind of goofy and bland.

This was a fantastic show that absolutely crapped the bed in the second season. I'd give S1 an 8/10, while S2 deserves no higher than a 4/10.

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So season 1 is very good. The core of the show is a suspense-thriller and it executes this vision very well. There are lots of twists that genuinely got me, e.g. they would be attempting to sniff out a traitor with one obvious candidate and one improbable-seeming candidate. I would guess it would be the improbable candidate, since if the show is leaning so heavily towards the obvious one then I'd expect it to be a red herring. ... Turns out they were *both* wrong, and it was actually a dark-horse third candidate, explained in a way that made a lot of sense after the fact. There's several moments of this type of brilliant misdirection playing on expected tropes. Towards the end of the first season I genuinely couldn't predict where things would go, which is always a good sign in this genre.

There's also quite a bit of nuance which I appreciated. It starts out seeming like it's going to be a 1-dimensional struggle between the adults vs the kids, but it's soon revealed that everyone is playing their own game. The adults are nominally allied to each other, but are really out for themselves, and make alliances with some of the kids. The kids are mostly allied to each other but have their own side deals. It adds a lot of welcome dimensions to the struggle and makes the characters seem like real people rather than simple plot devices. There's also a fair degree of pragmatism in their plans, which I wouldn't normally expect from an anime, where they decide they can't save the youngest kids just yet.

I have a few minor quibbles. First, it's rather ludicrous that 11-year-old children are capable of doing all this, including tons of scheming and even chopping off body parts without much hesitation. I wouldn't have had to hold my suspension of disbelief so rigorously if they just made the characters the standard anime protagonist age of 16-20 years old, and nothing would have had to change that much. For the most part the characters act like this anyways, but in a few scenes the writers use their age to pretend that they're toddlers, which is quite jarring. There's also some pointless fakeout cliffhangers from episode to episode that didn't need to exist, e.g. implying characters are about to get caught where they shouldn't be, but it gets proven to be a false alarm in the first 10 seconds of the subsequent episode. These are silly and I wish they didn't exist.

Overall though, S1 gets a definite thumbs up from me.

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Then season 2 comes and bleeds out unceremoniously on the floor. Almost all of the negative reviews I've seen are mostly upset about the show not covering certain manga arcs. As an anime-only viewer, I'm fine if things need to be cut, but the end product still needs to work well, and this one just doesn't even come close.

Practically every good thing the show did in season 1 crumbles into dust in season 2. The show genre-shifts from a suspense-thriller to a generic action-adventure that's not well executed. The unfamiliar world of this show was tightly bound by the confines of the farm in season 1, which helped establish some parameters for what could reasonably happen, but once they're out in the wild it becomes clear that they're in very strange territory. At that point the suspense-thriller loses its luster because anything weird can plausibly be explained by "it's alien", and moments of tension are defused by "aliens doing alien things" that the writers could just be pulling out of their butts. After this happened a few times my interest rapidly waned.

The show has way too much lore to cram into 11 paltry episodes, and it’s clear that the creators cut far too close to the bone in which stories to keep vs exclude. The helpful aliens, Mujika and Sonju, end up being terrible characters because of this. Their backstory is left almost totally unexplained. Sonju is implied to have quite sinister motives for helping humans, but the show forgets about this and they both agree to help the humans again for no real reason. Then the commonfolk aliens decide to help the humans broadly for reasons that are barely explained, which is particularly ridiculous since it happens right after the humans commit war crimes on them. Alien society and Mujika in particular desperately needed more time to explain things. I don't think that stories need to explain every weird idiosyncracy if they're going to include aliens or demons or whatever, but there needs to be a balance since these ones ended up as little more than walking macguffins.

The nuance is stripped from the show as it becomes a basic story of good-vs-evil. At one point it starts to seem like there will be some internal dissent among the humans about the best course of action, but this is resolved in like 5 minutes. The main villain collapses after barely any resistance, and in his final monologue he implies that he was actually keeping the peace and that if the system was overthrown then bad things would be sure to happen. This is another potentially interesting plotpoint that ends up being sabotaged by time constraints, as it's shown shortly afterwards that nothing bad happened at all, therefore he was just cartoonishly evil and a stupid nihilist.

Finally, I can't really blame the show for this, but one of the major twists in season 2 (that I was already heavily suspecting) was inadvertently spoiled for me by Crunchyroll's thumbnails, so that wasn't great.

A spy, an assassin, and a girl who can read peoples' minds walk into a bar. The result is a somewhat decent sitcom that's fairly funny, as long as you're comparing it to other anime which is grading on an extremely generous curve. There were a few gags that could consistently make me smirk, e.g. the telepath girl's horrified reactions when someone thinks something bad, or her smug face when she comes up with a galaxy-brained plan. But there was certainly still nothing laugh-out-loud funny, and I swear this isn't just me with a stick up my butt. Japanese humor just really doesn't translate well ... at all.

The bigger downside is how corny this show is. It's an anime, so some level of cheesiness is to be expected, and it's a sitcom on top of that, so even more would be expected, but this still takes it up to 11. There's hardly any attempt at all to conceal the plotlines bending over backwards so the show can contort itself into whatever sitcom scenario it wants in any given episode. This corniness nearly pushed me to the breaking point in episode 5, although I eventually decided to stick with the series for at least 12 episodes. I'm not sure I made the right call, because although the rest of what I watched didn't reach that level, it was still a constant feature nevertheless.

It wasn't a total waste of time, but I didn't really want to continue watching after 12 episodes or so.

This is a very solid show that gives me strong vibes similar to Frieren, especially at the start of season 1. The story occurs in a realistic world where bad things happen all the time, but none of the characters seem that perturbed by it. The protagonist is captured and sold off as a slave in the first episode, and her reaction is more of an "ugh what a bother" rather than falling into a huge depression. The show is relatively upbeat, although it does become a bit darker towards the end of S1 as the mysteries unfold.

The mysteries themselves are quite well handled. ... There's several OK-to-good single-episode mysteries that have decent foreshadowing without giving away too much. Then there's the good-to-great meta mysteries that stretch out over the course of several episodes or even entire seasons. These are particularly well done and put the smaller mysteries into context of large plot points.

Like Frieren, this show has a lot of goofy moments, e.g. when the protagonist becomes manic at the sight of potion ingredients or eating poison or whatever. These are pretty cheesy, although they're brief enough that they never overstayed their welcome in ways that many other anime fall into. I generally don't really enjoy these types of things that much, but I didn't mind them in this show since they're well-handled.

One aspect that I didn't enjoy is the romance between the protagonist and the lead ing character, the purple haired eunuch. This is very much something tailored towards women, and I can viscerally feel that I'm not the target audience here. It's very reminiscent of Twilight or 50 Shades of Gray, where the buff, rich, successful man who is widely beloved by women is only interested in the plain-looking female protagonist. She's not even that interested in him that much, and this just drives him to be even *more* obsessive over her. This preteen romance drama is weird and silly and I just wish it would go away. I imagine this is symmetrical to how women feel when anime has fanservice that's targeted towards heterosexual men.

This show is roughly equal parts 1) mystery, 2) characters acting goofy, and 3) romance. These comprise the majority of the runtime, and then 4) the broader character drama, gets added on top towards the end. I really enjoyed 1 and 4, I was fine with 2, and I didn't like 3. Overall, it's a very decent show.

This is a fairly generic fantasy isekai that has a few interesting ideas in its first season that it doesn't really capitalize on. The start is intriguing enough with the show almost become a revenge story, prompted on by a false rape accusation and the protagonist stooping to magically-enforced slavery. That's fairly edgy stuff for an anime and it piqued my interest at first, but unfortunately it peters out anticlimactically over the course of S1. The slave-girl obviously chooses to side with the protagonists of her own free will after a time, and the false rape accusation is shown to be a sham. There's the ... usual anime problem of the bad guys not really receiving significant punishment for their deeds, although at least this show is funny with one of the antagonists being referred to as "bitch" and "whore" as her penalty.

The action scenes, like in most anime, aren't particularly special. It's goofy to hear characters announce their attacks. Something like RISING MUNGO SLASH -- SUPREME SWORD STRIKE is just silly and makes it hard for me to take any of this seriously.

Raphtalia's character design is fairly boring. It's kind of weird that whoever designed her dropped the ball, as anime is usually good at this type of thing if nothing else. She's pretty plain which makes me care a bit less about the interpersonal dynamics.

There are probably too many characters in this series overall. They're frequently introduced, given a bit of personality, and then mostly forgotten after a few episodes.

The power fantasy isn't done nearly as well here as it is in, say, Solo Levelling.

After season 1, the show doesn't really bother trying to be anything other than a generic isekai, and it's not a particularly well-executed one either. I wasn't utterly bored in the moment-to-moment beats of the story, but it's certainly not memorable. Perhaps its building to something with its overarching conflict, but after 3 seasons I haven't seen much that would persuade me to stick around.