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On my hunt to find the worst anime imaginable I stumbled across this show.

I said, "this could be it". So I lit up a bowl and watched. After that... I truly questioned my life choices as I stared in disbelief on what is on my screen.

Each episode is like a spur of the moment idea someone poorly animated onto my screen. It's like "hey what if three girls had allergies.... kept sneezing breaking everything around them and we find out it was just someone pouring pollen and then it's over" and a studio is like "oh god keep going I think we have a show ... idea here."

I don't think that baffles me as much as someone rating this show a 5. How someone could sit and stare at this sober and objectively go, "wow that was definitely average".

The creators of this were higher than me and anyone rating this higher than a 1... good luck with that.

My Hero Academia's biggest weakness is how painfully slow the plot moves forward. We're 6 episodes into the season, and nothing has happened that couldn't have been condensed into 1 episode.

That's not to say there aren't other glaring issues like a dialogue that could be written by a 12 year old. To the point you could skip an entire scene and know what happened. But we aren't here to be blown away by dialogue, it's a shounen. We're here to see good animation, fun characters, and an intriguing plot. So do we get any of that?

Animation: 4/10

The animation quality is the same as it's been ... in season 1 with no progression. It seems they're content with "mediocre" to "bad". Fight scenes are very rare, and when they do occur there's a whole lot of stills with camera panning. It feels like a cop-out and the rest of the show are stills with moving mouths... where's the budget for an insanely popular show?

Characters: 1/10

So are the characters fun at least? Not really. They've been the same person re-learning "I need to be the best" in varying ways. They're all identical to who they were in Season 1. There is nothing interesting about Midoriya since he's a parrot that can only say "I need to get stronger" for 70 episodes. His arc for every season is the same because it's solely that. Everyone else is just as bad or simply forgotten about unless they want to spend 10 minutes naming them all. The humor in this show is so repetitive and childish. All of the characters suck is all I really have to say.

Plot: 2/10

But the plot must be good! Alas, it isn't. The villains screen time is so limited it's basically them doing "villain" things and what that means is... they show up on screen as stills for 5 seconds and some announcer tells you what they did and then we get to hear the heroes talk about it for 10 minutes. That or they get an actual scene and it's some of the best the show has to offer, but it ends on a "mysterious" note never to be touched up on again. Each episode ends on a "wow, this is about to get real" but it's just a cliffhanger that ends anti-climactically every time. There's no pay off, it's just forced tension. Now it's just another plot line where they get to talk about what they're going to do for 2-3 episodes to save on budget and get you "hyped" for a fight incoming. Which will most likely be underwhelming as well.

Summary: 2/10

So is it worth watching? Not really, you could skip past all the dialogue and know what they talked about(and even if you didn't) they'll bring it up in flashbacks every episode anyway. Painfully boring dialogues and humor that's mixed in serious scenes to make it so you aren't "as bored" always miss and just make it worse... I guess you could skim through episodes and wait for the pay-off episode at the end where they actually fight and the animation is either mediocre or good in places. That's about where all the budget for this show goes considering it sure as hell isn't in writing or talking mouth stills.

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***

Steins;Gate 0 is a story following "Open the Missing Link" - episode 23B of Steins;Gate.

Characters:

My biggest gripe with the show is that no character delivers anything worth hearing in 20 episodes of the series. Okabe is a one-dimensional depressed person whose only way of exuding emotion is through shocked expressions. Mayuri is nothing but a plot device who clings to Okabe for reasons unknown since she has no character development at all. Her entire reasoning for existence is to love Okabe and that's it.

Kagari is there to exist solely to look like Kurisu and make you feel bad. Nothing else... but she's ... a cliffhanger for 4 episodes only to be overshadowed shortly after. She did not have enough character development prior to showing the sob story for you to even care.

I could break down each character, but this is what each of them are. They're all hollow characters that have no justification for their actions. There's no backstory and if there is it's as basic as it could get, it's just "This is them, and this is how they will always act." and they never deviate from that.

Plot:

World War 3 is imminent and they need to shift world lines to find "Steins;Gate" but Okabe says "nope". After too many episodes, he says "maybe". After more episodes, he's just thrown into the future and he says "oh wow, maybe I should have done something". From there his entire perspective changes because he "didn't think it'd be like this even though he knew it'd be like this but didn't think about it". He actually says that. That's it. Every other sub-plot that tried to fit itself in is now over-shadowed by this. Why did they exist? Mommy/daughter scenes? And did I mention this was 21 EPISODES of a 23 EPISODE series? So now he's in a race to get back to the past to revert all the crap we had to painfully sit through.

Animation:

Without a doubt one of the worst animations I've seen from an Anime that has done well world-wide. They pick it up in the final 4 episodes, but even than it barely passes. They kept the same art style which was great and a plus, but the proportions were insanely ridiculous in certain scenes. The action scenes were abysmal and sadly they came towards the end of the series. The series suffered a lot of realism with how poorly done every action shot was. Overall, it was pretty lackluster and the amount of close-ups of people's faces started to become uncomfortable. Each episode seemed to have a different "budget" - some episodes looked bad, others looked a lot better, etc. Steins;Gate looked better, and that was 7 years ago.

Conclusion:

There are no twists or turns along the way. Everything you thought would happen, did happen. And the worst part is, the show made you think you're stupid and left EACH one of these things on a "cliffhanger". We knew how this ended before it began, so why did you put cliffhangers of character deaths in it? That's lazy writing.

The plot moved at a snail pace and the story didn't flow together at all. It felt as if 5 people wrote it without talking with one another. They don't delve into the plot until episode 20. Instead you sat through watching Okabe be sad and people trying to cheer him up with slight plot nuances here and there that you saw coming a mile away. There is no sci-fi/mystery in this, there are no philosophical quotes/ideas. It's just, "hey get the time machine let's go back in time". The conclusions are just chopped up to "convergence" with no consistency or even showing it since it'd look so idiotic.

The new characters are all shadows of past characters(Kurisu vs Maho)... or Kagari being a duplicate of Suzuha that looks like Kurisu. We still don't even know why she does. That's the type of originality this show has to offer. It banked on nostalgia of Steins;Gate and it shows - this wouldn't hold its own if it didn't exist. The fan service episodes, the non-existent character development... and most of all, how little everything made sense when you look into it.

Amadeus is reduced to a plot device for people who wanted to see her and they needed to add some melodrama to it that made NO SENSE. The story makes you fixate on one thing, and hopes you forget about everything prior and what's to come countless times. I'll give one example. Why do we need a full episode of Amadeus right before the finale when Okabe knows the AI has to seize existing to have the REAL Kurisu next episode? Why did it exist? It's like they forgot the entire plot for one episode in hopes of recreating what the original had that wasn't forced. Any other cliche made sense there, "I'm coming to save you Kurisu. I love you." - I'd go as far as to say THAT was better than what they did. It fit into the theme of what Okabe was at the time, unlike what they did.

If you're looking for a sci-fi/thriller with a great plot, watch the original again. If you want to see the same ideas rehashed with bad writing, bad characters, and pointless plots with a good amount of fan service... look no further. Steins;Gate 0 awaits you.