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There are very few pieces of media I've consumed that have made me drop them faster than this has.

The MC is an uber strong demon king and ends up in a world with a levelling system and his powers sealed, but despite that he's still real strong compared to everyone else as he's able to devour fallen enemies with his gluttony skill, and now in the new world he works as a hunter of monsters and travels through gates to fight in dungeons. It's your typical isekai plotline and I've watched plenty of those and enjoyed them, no judgement there, but doesn't that sound familiar? ... Where have I heard this before? Oh right, it's Solo Levelling with TenSura elements, but bad. I'm not about to claim that authors can't use the same tropes as each other, but if you're gonna' do it at least make it unique, with this the most interesting part of the story, him climbing the ranks in Hell, has already happened and we're just dropped in expecting to be on the MC's side, when we know literally nothing about who he is already in a story that we weren't privy to, that's like starting Sword Art Online with the Aincrad Arc already over and expecting the audience to sympathize with Kirito with zero knowledge of who he is and why we should care.

The MC is a spoilt brat that does nothing but complain about his admittedly highly privileged position the whole time and is unreasonably nasty to the demons who are just trying to help him, but most importantly he has one of the lamest traits any character in any story can have; he's h0rny on main. Literally the second he sees a girl he loses his mind and proposes to her, and when she shows him gratitude for saving her by taking him to her place for food, his language suggests that he assumes that something is going to happen, and I'm sure you don't need me to elaborate on what that "something" he's thinking is. He JUST met this girl, and he thinks she's going to thank him like that?? Degenerate MCs that treat the female characters like objects for their own satisfaction are the worst kind, I have no respect for any author that writes them.

Do yourself a favour and skip this, read Solo Levelling or watch/read TenSura instead, heck even Arifureta is better than this.

Do yourself a favour and skip this one. Perhaps it's because I'm not familiar with the source material (which others have said is much better) but regardless of that the quality of this anime is inexcusable. Some spoilers inbound.

First things first, characters; honestly just a little too generic for my tastes. Normally generic characters don't bother me if the story is interesting or they have some quirks, but this time round it's just bad. Leon is the only one who stands out a little but even then I go from enjoying him to saying, out loud, "Wtf are you doing, are you stupid??" which isn't ... a great position for a character to be in, and you just know something is wrong with the cast when a viewer's favourite character is the dry wit AI companion with thinly veiled murderous intent. I get that to an extent they're otome game characters and are supposed to be generic, but come on man, I've seen more depth in an ash tray.

Secondly, and most damning, the story AKA an absolutely clustertruck of nonsense. The synopsis and many points in the story go out of their way to point out that "this world is a matriarchy"...um, no it isn't, not in the bloody slightest. If by "matriarchy" you mean the ladies are all nasty backstabbing ingrates then yes, but that's not what that word means. Not to mention the story also puts a tonne of emphasis on marriage, that young men are useless unless married because until then they can't have any power...except that's a lie, case and point our main character is able to get money, official status, a warship and his own private island all without the help of a lady. Nothing stands in his way, no-one stops him or refuses based on the fact he isn't married, absolutely no meaningful pushback at a bachelor obtaining all of this.
The QUEEN isn't even the one in charge, they have a KING instead, and it's the PRINCE everyone bends over backwards for, speaking of him if this story had a legit matriarchy then Julius and the noble lads around him would have NEVER gotten away with scorning their fiances the way they did, nor would Julius get away with publically disrespecting and embarrassing Angie, they got the equivalent of slaps on the wrists, it's pathetic. The whole premise of the world is so poorly handled that Leon insisting he needs to go to the academy and get married makes no damn sense, he already has riches to last him years, high status in the royal court and a place to live, he doesn't need to get married and spend time in a place he clearly doesn't want to be. I don't like dragging the authors into these sorts of things normally, but I can honestly say I wasn't surprised when I found out that this laughably abyssmal attempt at a "women hold all the power" narrative was written by a man.
Other than that glaring, lore-shattering issue it's your bog-standard slice of life romcom with the occasional low-effort battle and boring low-threat stakes that you just know will be resolved without problem or real consequence by the MC.
Like I said at the start, maybe the story is better written or fleshed out in the source material, but as I've not read it I can only judge based on the anime, and the anime story sucks big time.

Lastly, and I don't want to linger too long on this, but the actual animation and general quality are pretty bad. For your run-of-the-mill mediocre romance anime it works fine most of the time, but everything that's not characters standing around talking is janky, and a good percentage of the time the lip syncing doesn't line up. It's nice to look at for screenshots but it's clear corners have been cut and not for the better.

Overall I'm kinda' thinking to myself "You got what was coming to you" because I don't usually give these kinds of anime a try, I went in with average expectations and found even that was too much for it to live up to.

Man, I'm honestly disappointed.

While the art and animation is stunning and the soundtrack is wonderfully whimsical, I can't help coming away feeling...cheated, I suppose. The pacing is off, the story is bare bones, the characters don't even feel like the same ones from the manga, it's all very disjointed, there's no sense of time or threat or urgency, if I didn't know the source material I couldn't tell you what was happening, but even knowing the source I still struggle.
I'm a long-time fan of Totsukuni, found it after only the first volume had published, but I really couldn't tell you who this film was made ... for; it's confusing as heck for viewers who don't know the series and so lacking in what made the series so good that fans won't like this either.

It's sad. I really hoped this would be good, but it just...isn't.

Do yourself a favour; skip this. Read the manga instead, if you feel like it come back to watch this after if only to see the gorgeous visuals, 'cus I can't stress enough that the one thing this film gets right is that.

I don't intend on writing too much since in depth reviews aren't my forte, I tend to ramble, what I will say first off is that like others I had some hope for this anime; the premise seemed good and episodes 1 & 2 aren't bad. It started losing me at 3, by 5 I was watching episodes in 1.5x speed and after that I was skimming them, only finishing the series 'cus I don't like leaving reviews unless I've seen all the episodes.

What prompted me to realize why it was losing me was the supernatural side of it, something I usually enjoy if nothing ... else. I wanted to know more about why creatures like elves exist and when introduced to the characters I remember them mentioning something about vampires being rare, so I went looking for information...and couldn't find any. Striking me as odd I searched a little more and found the exact phrase I thought would be the problem, "original anime".

Let's get one thing straight; there's nothing inherently wrong with an original anime, done right they can be very compelling, Mononoke, Cowboy Bebop, Darker Than Black, Anohana, Kill La Kill and Tsuritama are all fantastic original anime. This one is not done right. For lack of a better word it's vapid, there's no substance to it, they wrote a story for a single timeline with a single purpose and nothing else, despite hinting at something deeper there's nothing there, no grand past to it, no tangible lore, nothing.
The characters are bland and boring stock personas without any real emotion or goals that you can find in any mediocre anime. The police drama side of it felt like a fanboy's misguided version of mystery thriller with just one of those holier-than-thou super detectives who can work things out from clues the viewer is never privvy to, so it just gets boring. The action is stiff and sub par at best, and the crime part is often so damn contrived it's like a 10 year old wrote it. Don't even get me started on the supernatural element that doesn't even make much of a difference to the plot until the very end, in fact it would've been more interesting if the whole dragons ruling the world thing was actually made up and the villain boss was just deceiving his followers into believing he's some God figure, that makes more damn sense than the crap we're fed.

Never have I watched an anime before now and openly thought "Wow, this is a cash grab" but there's a first for everything right? Needless to say if you're looking for a fun supernatural police-like anime I'd recommend Bungou Stray Dogs, waaay better than this garbage space filler that's not even worth your time.

Now it might just be because I'm an avid follower of the manga that my score is the way it is, after all without prior knowledge of the series it's hard to glean anything totally solid from a 10 minute OVA.
Rather than being something to critique by itself, this short work of art proves itself to be the perfect advertisement for the enchanting manga of the same name, as it was the cover art of the manga that caught my eye to begin with.

There is, however, something to be said about the outstanding visual and audio directing put into this OVA; to be able to ... convey emotion without expressing it in words is a gift, and this nails it. From the sprinklings of delicate orchestral pieces to the dedication of sticking exactly to the manga art whilst adding a dash of colour works perfectly to give the audience the feeling of warm solitude. Without ever uttering a single word you learn Shiva and Sensei's bond, what they value, how they see things, what scares them, and most importantly what they want the more than anything.

If this OVA peaked your interest I implore you to read the manga, it will be worth you time.

I've seen a lot of anime get panned in the past by people being overly critical or having high expectations, so I like to give even poorly rated anime a chance...this one was not one of those instances.

My biggest complaint after the often broken and incomprehensible story is the characters, namely I felt no attachment to any of them at all, they're bland, expressionless and a lot of the things they say or do don't make sense. The other part that was extremely off putting was nearly every character's hostility towards the MC from the very beginning, even one character who was supposed to be ... like a brother to the MC started getting distant for reasons that, in any normal close bond, would be unimportant. Because of this, rather than getting attached to any character (bar one though that was short lived), I only felt frustration and sometimes anxiety for how badly they were treating the person who was trying to help them.

Then there's the pacing which was all over the place; some scenes lasted way too long, others were too short, there were jumpcuts to random places in the middle of fights or suspenseful scenes. The atmosphere never settled enough for you to feel it before something else ripped your attention away, and the subplots only served as distractions in an already distracting story.

Unfortunately, this series is just another sad example of an anime game adaptation that fell flat.

This isn't going to be a very long review since I don't plan on going super in depth, just know that there will be spoilers.




I hadn't had high hopes for this anime from the beginning, it was one that I'd looked at and thought "I'll watch that while I'm waiting for episodes of other continuing anime ." but even so I didn't expect it to be /this/ poor.
It starts off fine and then nose dives into the ground; the plot doesn't make sense, the soundtrack was alright but used poorly (e.g. the same song used for every battle), and the characters make irrational and nonsensical ... actions compared to their knowledge and beliefs, you can just tell that these decisions were made by the writer and not the character to shoehorn in some "emotional" or "gosh what'll happen now" moments.

I think what annoyed me most was the story though. You start off thinking it's some cout d'etat by the Vers people framing the death of their Princess on Earth, which is fine, it's a good starting point for a story. My first problem with this is that you discover that only /two people/ of the entire fleet are genuinely nice and want the Princess to live...just two? Really?
Moving on from that you much later find out that the ringleader behind all this has a personal vendetta against Earth, namely his wife-to-be was killed by humans-- but oh wait, later he explains himself further;
It turns out that the Vers people were panicking 'cus Mars ain't a great place to live (which in of itself is bullshit, though I won't get into the science aspect of things) and the Vers royalty were ignoring their people's suffering, to save their own skins the Vers royalty lies to their people and turns them against Earth, they send a landing party to check how good Earth's military is which includes ringleader and wife-to-be. You'd think here is where wife-to-be gets killed by humans right? WRONG. Humans turn out to be no match for the Vers technology and they are winning, when all of a sudden the gate on the moon they'd used to get from Mars to Earth blows up and shatters the moon in the process. Bits of the moon smash into the Earth, wife-to-be is unfortunately killed by moon chunks, the end.

So...why the fuck does the ringleader hate Earth again? Does he blame Earth for the moon spontaneously exploding? How does "chunk of moon killed wife-to-be" translate to "humans killed wife-to-be"? If it was the royalty that messed things up in the first place and the ringleader knows this, why is he going to war with Earth at all? Surely this cause should start a civil war right?

...You see my problem with the story here? There is no motive. The more the reasons behind the attack were explained the less sense it made.

!First Things First There Will Be Spoilers, You Have Been Warned!



I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. This anime had so much potential and I stand by my belief that things could've been improved even a little by allowing it a 24 episode run time rather than 12, but should nothing of the story and development change that'd all be for naught in the end.

For me this anime wasn't a complete waste of time, I seriously enjoyed it up to episode 8 and actually wouldn't have minded if they ended it there, went on a month long hiatus then came back with a fully fleshed out ... and well thought through ending instead of the crap shack we got instead. The visuals, the music and the characters for the most part were fantastic, even the story started out well being sort of like the CG anime equivalent of Arrival (excellent film, I highly recommend watching it), but as with a lot of ambitious projects they just couldn't seem to figure out how to appropriately end the series without royally fucking it up.

(From here on excuse me if I rant a little, the ending is about my only qualm with Kado).

For starters, Shindo, zaShunina and even Saraka (whom I didn't like that much anyway) were good characters in their own right. It made sense that the 40D alien boi had no understanding of human concepts and emotions, it made sense that Shindo wouldn't be at all shocked by making contact with an alien because that's his character, and it made sense that at least one of the main cast would be opposed to this and encompassed that side of humanity's reaction which was what Saraka represented. But all semblence of development was completely throw out the window when things started coming to a climax.
Shindo I'm not so hung up on apart from the fact that he's praised by the Prime Minister for being able to walk his own path, yet the power of boners makes him follow along with Saraka's wishes like a dog in heat. Or how his amazing negotiator skills are scrapped in favour of needless violence, yay! //throws up
Now here's where I start getting annoyed; Saraka was a character that, as I said, I didn't like (and I could also sadly tell where they were going with her character the second I saw her because she's the only other character in the whole anime with red eyes bar zaShunina). The reason being was not because she was written badly but because we stood on opposites sides of the argument, something I consider excellent writing for a character. She represented the cautious and fearful side of humanity, our distrusting nature towards a deal that feels too good to be true, the most basic and instinctual fear of even the most simple of creatures; fear of the unknown. This however is completely ruined by one simple fact...she's not human. She is fearful because she has knowledge of what zaShunina might do and what he is capable of, the complete opposite of humanity who fear what they don't understand. Her character could have had so much more depth and meaning if they'd just kept her human, but instead they reduced her to typical tsundere waifu material and only worth a damn for her womb.
Now comes zaShunina, the biggest cliché insult to me since I really loved his character (for reasons I shall make clear a little later on). From how much anime and movies and series I've watched over the years I've become really damn good at telling where a story is going to head (not to toot my own horn there, just fact), which is why I'm happily surprised when media does something I didn't expect. For all intensive purposes, Kado was heading the latter direction at first, being something I'm not unfamiliar with but something I don't see often, so it's refreshing, but unfortunately it started running down the road of predictability far too fast, tripped up and dropped its own plot down the storm drain. I have no doubt that zaShunina was intended to be the quote unquote "bad guy" of the series, but I highly doubt it was intended to be this blunt about it. All of the development he'd gone through was utterly trashed when the decision was made to have him turn psychotic, I find it hard to believe that A) he, who has never been remotely human in his life, could learn to be human in a month when it takes us humans years to learn to do that and B) a highly intelligent 40D being would become emotionally unstable. It felt messy, rushed and above all else out of character.

The other part of things that upset the fandom was of course the queerbaiting. I won't talk too much about it but I will say this; it was noticeable and disgusting. I have no idea why having a gay couple in a regular anime is so bad that they have to kill them off for it, just having a non-hetero couple in your anime does not make it a BL/GL or a yaoi/yuri, it makes it a wholesome and relatable story to a minority often overlooked in the media. I have watched anime made in the 90s do a better job representing the LGBT community than our supposed "world of equality" nowadays.

Now...for the part that pissed me off the most about the ending.
...I'm sorry but...for being a heavily science(ish) based anime...HOW THE FUCK DID THEY MESS UP BASIC MATH?
0 + 0.5 does not equal 2 for fuck's sake, there is no way that a human being and an Anisotoron who is essentially human and abandoned almost all her power could produce a being more powerful than a whole, pureblooded Anisotoron. That. Is. Not. How. Biology. Works.
And don't give me that "She's a Anisotoron, she can alter things" because she has next to no power anymore, she threw away her power to be born and live as a regular human being, retaining only as much as she needed to survive I suppose. To use an extreme example, a normal healthy human and a human with a hereditary degenerative disease /does not/ produce a child with the cure to cancer. It does not work like that. What happened in Kado was, say it with me now;

PLOT CONVENIENCE.

They could not figure out a way to end this anime, so they asspulled, and I think this is what annoyed me the most.
I have my own story and headworld, I've had it for years now and I share it with my partner. Between us we have created a wide universe rich with lore and mysteries in equal amounts, and the "God among men" situation is one I am very familiar with. This is why Kado appealed to me, it was like watching an anime that had parts of my own headworld lore in it and that was fascinating to see come to life before my eyes. I and my partner sorted the problems of having OP characters in a very simple way; the God-level characters in our headworld are /passive observers/. They don't fight, they don't interfere with "lesser beings", they are simply there to see to it that the universe is running smoothly and that there are no beings getting too powerful and causing chaos. The only time they clash is with each other in their own pocket dimensions, well away from any collateral damage. We asked ourselves why they shouldn't be antagonists and the answer was simple;
"Beings with enough power to create universes are wise enough to know that their power should be used to protect the weak, not cause conflict."

Too many writers create God-level characters and then slap human concepts onto them as if beings of that level would share our beliefs. None of mine and my partner's God-level characters have human emotions, they have a set of emotions that are like human ones but not the same and can copy human emotions if they want be can't really feel it. None of them have "morals" because those were things made by humans in the first place, they have an understanding of the concept of "right" and "wrong" but again these are human concepts that humans made to judge the actions of other humans, so they feel no need to adhere to these rules, they won't chastise someone for murder nor congratulate someone for saving a life, they simply acted and that is that. This is represented beautifully by one of my God-level characters who apologizes to others but never means it, he understands that whatever he did is seen as "wrong" but he himself sees no problem, so when he apologizes to others you can tell it's insincere.

More and more writers are exploring deeper and out-there concepts, but we must understand that these things cannot ever be fully quantified by our own look on the universe and everything within it, and I believe this is where Kado ultimately failed what it set out to accomplish.