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Excessive focus on Subaru, maids and Emilia, while leaving behind the supposedly more impact and bigger scale of background story behind, drags down this show, leading to a quite disappointing for experienced users. In short, too much characters focus than background story focus, leading to unbalance dimensions.

Story: 6 (doesn’t put effort of transforming generic story into more special and different story)
Art and motion pictures: 8
Sound: 7 (I’m anchoring to a more unique and interesting OST sounds like in Digimon Tamers, Death Parade, etc)
Characters: 9 (I’m not solely looking at Subaru. I’m looking at other interesting characters also to be more systematic)
Enjoyment: 7
Overall: 7

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... Story:

Let’s make analogy to make it imaginable…
Suppose the maximal distance or landscape area of this show that is reachable by a car is 100km area. With a car that has super engine parts, its capability and potential should be maximized until it fully reached and explored 100km area. Unfortunately, this show doesn’t do in that way. Specifically, although it does put a maximum effort, the show only puts an effort of running the engine until it reached 50km distance. The residual of 50km area ahead is unexplored. There should be more interesting and a great deal of story-telling on regarding the background story involving the fantasy and magical world (In order to be spoiler-free, I need to stop further story elaboration here). This implies that merely maximizing effort won’t allow you to get maximum result in narrow space area unless you utilize 100% of your potential and capability with bigger scale and wider space area. For experienced and unbiased users who have more exposure of watching thousands of anime shows, this gap is easily spotted.

Characters:

Their characters overexplain the conflict they deal with, in fact they often are consciously evoking their existential crisis verbally and excessively. Re:Zero treat the themes of broken MC in a totally dramatic situation with a mental commentary, thumbs up for voice actor, but in a similar fashion or repeatable way.

Aesthetic element:

So why then, despite negative story presented above, I scored 7 (Good anime) instead of lower? Aside from good art, lightning, and animation, this anime is intense. Intense in terms of characters and interaction among them. It’s full of emotions from MC. It’s packed with despair and gore scenes of having to suffer from death again and again. It burns your heart. It triggers your gut feelings to work intensely. So I’m slightly biased to this dimension as, I think, it’s quite rare to see anime with real intense expression of human emotions out there in the market.


In the end, as you can see from my review, although this show is not balance, focusing on dimension beyond story-driven alone can entertain you more than enough during your weekend days. Imagine what would happen if this dimension is bundled with exploring MORE of the darker whole of story of this fantasy and magical world and MORE of the intense actions?

Story: 3 (no impact. Mostly episodic, and while episode 08 is the only one that i like, the rest was boring for me)
Art: 8 (moe-moe cute girls)
Sound: 7
CHaracter: 2 (annoying and childish)
Enjoyment: 2
Overall: 2 (don't bother this at all)

Before proceeding to review sentence, allow me to apologize for my harsh overall ratings.

The Idol Master has potential to be the most entertaining idol anime because it was adopted by A-1 Picture that notably has abundant budget to create appealing animation, art, and music/OST. Unfortunately it falls apart from the expectation due to that it diverges its way from being realistic in idol topic...or not ... so serious if you like. The reason i prefer idol anime to be more serious nuance is because idol anime heavily involved in, not only in character development from childish to more mature idol-like person, but also frequent engagement in business commercial that may connect to political things.

Below is a quick bird view for screening purpose. If you don't want to see those things, please see the other two idol anime out there.

Things that are lack of:
- Very little internal conflict exists within group members and individual
- Very little competition, and thus conflict, between idol group
- No idols scandal at all
- Mediocre Lack of management, marketing, networking story of how to lift the idol group to the top
- Although there are some internal problems needed to be solved by idol group member, most of problems are trivial, which don't need to have manager for that. It is just as if the manager and director in idol master is represented just for the sake of completeness, without further development.
- No interesting characteristics or traits of idol members. Worse, most characters are annoying as hell

Idol Master could be said to be similar just like school club activity (slice-of-life), except it was flavored with idol taste. So it's just sad that, while art and choreography are sparkling, it's not be complemented with more mature and non-mediocre story, the things that i'm looking for, hence ripping off the balance of interesting dimensions of idol topic.

Story: 9 (this is not shallow. this is not lack of development. this is parsimonious model of story)
Art: 9 (i like the art, animation, and pale color...typical old anime style)
Sound: 5 (not so engaging, but that's okay)
Character: 7
Enjoyment: 9
Overall: 10

When coming to Mecha, often i see similar theme that was either wars between parties involved to get limited resources or protecting their home from evil darkness. This theme was okay for us at appropriate amount but human being cannot accept this amount when it exceed the inflection point where, after that point, the level of enjoyment becomes gradually decreasing. Unfortunately, back from the history of ... anime to the recent anime years, this theme has exceed our inflection point. It is just telling the same theme and pattern but at different way, merely repeated re-interpretation.

Roujin Z is the only anime that i've ever seen so far that disrupt the doomed cycle of similarity within mecha theme. It's about entirely different things that are unique, creative, original, all of which was meant to criticize the dark side of commercialism and Mediacare benefit for elderly but within Japanese context, while the other party (US research & development) gains in smart way. Typical respond for this political matter was arguably uninteresting for most 20s-age people but Roujin Z manages to cope this problem by involving typical fighting mecha with military, polished with its creativity and imagination to make the fighting to become unusual, and armed with great art and animation of course. This is the aspect that enough for me to give Roujin Z overall 10 ratings because that's the important thing when involving art.

Another reason for my 10 ratings is that, although the concern of this anime is the lack of story stretching (we want more story development beyond this. we want more!!), it is quite reasonable to be humble for this aspect and forgive it unless there is incremental development from other authors. Moreover the premise of the arguably simple story is strong enough to tell the whole picture, making it unnecessary to be explained more further. That's why this anime stand on its own in less crowded space.

Some might argue this anime was silly or dumb. And some might argue the story is too short and shallow. My counterargument for this: it is silly but not silly and watching anime shouldn't be so serious unless the anime itself forces us to be so serious. So that's why Roujin Z makes more fun to watch than deep political theme of mecha in Jin-Rou or Ghost in the SHell series.

Story: 3 (unfortunately, it doesn't attach to me)
Art: 7 (decent, but more toward soft art)
Sound: 8 (piano-based, which seems to match the series atmosphere)
Character: 5
Enjoyment: 3 (not enjoy at most of dimensions this series offered)
Overall: 4 (as i don't have any bias in dimensions offered in this series, equally- weighted calculation to obtain overall score will be used)

At first i was interested in ReLife because there is romance genre on it. Note that I'm still searching to search more anime genre of romance but spiced with intense slutty girls and conflict going on. Anime that match my preference well are Trinity Seven, School Days, and ... Toradora/Ano Natsu. So for those who want the same things...probably ReLife won't meet your expectation in this case.

ReLife romance is dull, and there is not much interesting aspect going on the interaction between two sexes. Moreover, the main theme, that is, the resetting life of main character, fails to entertain me enough to bring any kind of enjoyment.

The only defense this anime has is ishiro Chizuru whose unique traits can prevent me from dropping this series. Sadly, it seems that she, the only one with interesting aspect, doesn't get much much development.

Story: 5 (so-so only)
Art and animation: 9 (why? i'm anchoring my benchmark to Evangelion 2.0, Hellsing Ultimate, and Princes Mononoke, leading to score this anime to be near perfect, otherwise 10)
Sound: 6
Character: 6
Enjoyment: 9
Overall: 9.

One Punch Man is an anime dedicated for those, including myself, who value more on superb action animation-based quality while putting story-wise and characters on the least priority. Because they focus so much on its animation and art wise, it can lead to double-edge sword for some people. On one hand, great animation and art can rise more enjoyment while putting less effort on story and characters can dampen ... the level of enjoyment.

So in order not to be slightly betrayed by this, I recommend people to shift their mode of thinking from being too serious to become "why so serious". That is, you should not having put too much thinking on characters and story as it may erode your enjoyment, but the erosion rate on characters and story might be slower than erosion rate based on action animation variables because its animation is so good to be re-watched and there are no annoying characters traits.

FOr the story, it is just there for the sake of completeness or as a complementary element for its near-perfect animation quality.

Those people who score One Punch Man as below 8 might weight more on story as their anchoring on Death Note's story quality standard while people, including myself, who score 8 and above is biased by the animation alone, but more than enough to satisfy their fundamental needs when watching anime.