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Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road is bottom of the barrel light novel Isekai garbage that tries to hide the fact that's its not through a premise that seems to be interesting at first, but holds all of the hallmarks of an anime in this genre: awful writing, horrible animation, and women with large breasts.

The premise is actually fairly interesting on its own: in the world of Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road, isekai'd japanese highschoolers are gifted special powers that, instead of giving them a giant harem, threaten to run out of control and cause giant calamities if left unchecked, so it falls to members ... of the church (Faust) to kill them before this happens. Menou, the PoV character, is one of these members, and the plot details her journey in order to kill the isekai'd Akari, who has the power to reverse time. The plot that comes after this is sort of boring, both of the 'arcs' feel both too slow and resolve to quickly.

The actual world is... confusing. The dialogue is written like the author (and whoever wrote the script) didn't actually know how to properly introduce the world through the narrative, so characters will constantly just spit out exposition during dialogue. Every single character will randomly add expository summaries of the world even though the character they are talking to obviously knows what it is so they can tell the aduience. It's like some steampunk-magic-ether type bullshit that doesn't really make any sense under scrutiny and really feels like a combination of shit the LN author thought was cool. The actual line to dialogue is just banal too. The world has more to it then the average isekai show, but for me that makes it more disappointing when it fails to deliver.

Speaking of disappointment, the animation is godawful. The direction is extremely flat and boring. Like a lot of low budget shows of this ilk, most of the show is still/panning shots of characters standing around and talking. When the characters have to move, they do so sparingly, and when they move for more than five seconds it breaks down. The animators clearly had no time to storyboard the fight scenes, so the choreography is weird and fights are usually just a giant mess of janky animation, random events that don't flow together, and characters standing around and talking all with shitty cgi ether lighting effects over everything. And like every other anime in this genre, it does indeed feature a poorly done giant cgi monster.

For the good... The background art is half decent? The soundtrack is also above average for an anime; its not something I would go out of my way to listen to but it makes some scenes better, which is a rarity in this industry. The OP is also great, but thats because Mili is a good artist.

These types of shows really frustrate me because it's clear that the source material has some interesting ideas, but because its one of hundreds of LN adaptation isekai shows released yearly, its stuck with an awful production quality due to it's shoestring budget and extreme time constrictions.
Can people either stop making these shows or put actual money and talent into them?

Since this is 1 of 7+ movies I cant make any wide judgements about the characters or story but standalone this movie was pretty bad.

90% of the entire movie was either static shots of Shiki doing random shit/walking (eating icecream for a whole 2 ass minutes) or characters preaching line after line of vapid anime philosophy (red hair lady literally spends like 1/5 of the movie doing this). It was really difficult to try to understand what the point that each character was trying to make was because their lines were so vacuous and vague. They tried to tie it together with the overarching ... theme of 'falling vs flying' and some other bs but it falls flat because unless you do a English literature analysis of the movie and watch it like 5 times you wont really get what they are saying, and even then it doesn't really mean much. The story didn't make much sense either, but I guess you need to watch the rest of the series. The characters were also kinda boring but again this is one movie in 7 so I can't make any big judgement.

The art was pretty good, and so was the animation for the most part. The two fight scenes were okay but they were edited quite weirdly and the only shot that stood out to me was the big jump. There was a weird lack of sound effects overall that made some of the shots super awkward because Shiki would be jumping around stabbing shit and the show would be mostly quiet.

One thing I did like was the soundtrack, it set the mood really well and Oblivious is a banger.

Criticism aside, I still enjoyed most of the movie, it felt that uftoable was at least attempting something cool, even though most of it fell flat in the end.

Mekakucity Actors is perhaps the only show of it's kind that requires outside consumption of other media to understand or appreciate. While it can be viewed as a standalone show, it's actually the final arc in the Kagerou Project, a mixed media story featuring multiple albums, a manga, a light novel series, and an anime. Each arc in the series correlates to one of these mediums, with a shared backstory that is given in pieces through each medium. This presents a unique problem for the show: How do you create a show that can be a standalone experience while also being the last arc in ... a long story, while being considerably shorter than the other mediums with a budget of $3?

This problem is what causes the shortcomings of this show; The shows spends almost half of it's run time explaining backstory that the viewer needs to know. Despite this, a lot of stuff is still unexplained for the standalone viewer. It's the reason many people think this show is confusing: it expects you to know so much information that it doesn't have time to explain. For example, shinatro's eye ability, snake of retaining eyes, was given to him in the manga, but in the anime it's unclear of how he got them. The characters in the whole Kagerou Project are great, but a standalone viewer wont get a lot out of them. Most of the characters aren't touched on enough and the story doesn't give enough time in the present for the plot to be anything riveting. Far too much of the show's second half is just flashbacks, forcing a rushed ending that only actually makes sense if you know the endings of the last 3 arcs.

The art and direction by Shaft is very solid and standard Shaft work featuring unique shot composition and animation. However, the budget constraint are obvious. The show is crippled by animation errors and dull background art in some scenes that drag them down. The worst offender is on the aired version of the show in the CGI horror of Ayano's theory of happiness. Luckily, this got fixed in the Blu-ray release, implying that it was most likely a time or budget issue.

The music is the best thing that this shows does. The music tracks from Jin's original songs were all covered by popular singers, and the album to come out of it is one of the best albums released, period. Along with being great, the music is used to give context to scenes that they play over, with the title of each song used in each episode being the title of each episode. This only further proves why the show should be watched after consuming the rest of the media, especially since most English anime watchers dont speak Japanese. The lyrics of the music literally give story context to what's happening on screen, the first arc of the story is told through the music, so you would have to know the music in advance to appreciate the context that they give to each scene and how they relate to what's happening.

As a standalone show, Mekakucity actors is not very good. It gives little character development to it's main cast, and a large amount of screen time is given to expository backstory, featuring some budget and animation errors. As a final arc in the Kagerou Project, it's great. That's why it's difficult to actually review this show as standalone; the characters and most of the plot have already been established in other mediums. As a standalone show, I would give this a 6/10, but in the context of the Kagerou Project as a whole, which is the context people should be watching this show, it's an easy 8/10.