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This show has some great moments in terms of worldbuilding and the mysteries involved, but my god does it absolutely WALLOW in annoying anime tropes. Subaru is by far the worst protagonist of any anime I've watched so far, and that's a very, VERY high bar. He whines and cries constantly, he's cripplingly unconfident, he's insufferably cringe when he's trying to be "suave", and he's as dumb as a rock.

First, the crying. This might sound excessively gender-stereotyped or callous, but I have a viscerally negative reaction to seeing grown men cry. It triggers a very similar disgust reflex that I get when I see ... something gross, like e.g. maggots crawling around a rotting animal carcass. I can of course make some allowance for men weeping when something truly terrible happens, like when they lose close family or a best friend. But it seems like Subaru cries almost every other episode in this series, with it oftentimes being exaggerated wailing that verges on goofiness. The obvious retort might be that he's going through a bad situation, dying repeatedly himself and seeing those he cares about die as well, at least temporarily. I'd say most normal men would rapidly become inured to this to a large degree, like Okabe does in Steins;Gate. But this series verges on torture-porn at some points, and crybaby Subaru is never far from turning on the waterworks. When he's not crying, he's usually complaining about how pathetic he is. I wholeheartedly agree, Subaru is absolutely pathetic, but he'd be a little less pathetic if he stopped exclaiming how pathetic he was! His whining gets so bad that there's almost an entire 22-minute episode where he does nothing other than complaining while the blue-haired maid gives him a pep talk. This was the nadir of the show for me, yet shockingly the people who watch anime seemed to like it, as it has the second-highest IMDB rating on ratingraph for season 1.

The suave cringe comes in when Subaru talks to Emilia. This show shows the problem when a romantic relationship is meant to be a focus over a long period of time. Relationships aren't all that complicated, and in the real world people can just ask the other person explicitly if they'd like to date. But that's over far too fast, so these shows find reasons to drag out the process ad infinitum. Subaru is blushy crushy towards Emilia for all of season 1, and finally openly declares his love for her as part of the climax of the season, and yet season 2 sees a regression and repeat of this. It's cringe the entire way through, with Subaru being way too much of a simp for this girl he's only known for a few weeks.

Then there's the idiocy. There's a lot of intrigue going on in this series, but Subaru is painfully incurious about it until it becomes blatantly obvious. There are several points where Puck or Beatrice give VERY VERY strong hints that they're hiding something, but Subaru apparently doesn't care enough to prod on subsequent lives. The best encapsulation of this mindset is when he goes to the Witch of Greed's tea party where she offers to tell him anything he wants to know, and he says "no thanks!" I wanted to punch him in the face at this point.

The mysteries of this world are great and well done, and the arcs of both seasons 1 and 2 are brilliant from that perspective. But I simply hate having to watch this through Subaru's eyes as he's insufferable in every way.

Finally, this might be a cheap shot, but Subaru's name was distracting. It'd be like naming the protagonist "Honda" or "Toyota".

I'm getting extremely strong Steins;Gate vibes from this, which given the release date of the Erased manga, it was almost certainly a main inspiration here. I enjoyed S;G, so this was welcome for me. I think this series actually has a stronger opening than S;G since it paces itself better, although the rest of its execution and especially its ending were less impressive, but I wouldn't call them "bad" per se.

The premise is that the protagonist is stuck in a timeloop that swaps between his current 29-year-old self, and his 10-year-old past where he had a chance to save a girl who was kidnapped. ... He makes a few changes to the past and it changes the present, but he doesn't successfully prevent the murder so he has to go back and keep trying. It's a compelling loop to push the story forward, although the limitations on his time travel power aren't explained. He just time-jumps back at seemingly random points, until eventually he says "this is it" as he arbitrarily intuits that he won't be able to time-jump any more. It's clear the writer did this to add tension, but it's hamhanded almost to the point of breaking the fourth wall. There's also the issue with him randomly being accused of a murder he obviously didn't commit, which was probably added to add more tension, but which strained my credulity.

When the protagonist first jumped back into his 10-year-old body, I immediately became worried that the show would devolve into childish tropes that anime likes to fall back on, but that happily didn't happen. The protagonist still has his 29-year-old mind, many of the other characters are adults, and he has a "smart" friend who acts like an adult as well. This prevents the series from regressing to focusing on nothing but pre-teen angst. That said, the show *does* have a few moments where it focused on the magical, metaphysical power of characters saying "I believe in you!" which caused me to roll my eyes.

The show was brought down somewhat by me correctly guessing the killer/kidnapper in the second episode. I was thereafter on alert for any foreshadowing, and it became very obvious that my guess was correct by the 6th episode. The antagonist's motivations and ending monologue were fairly goofy. It's just pure, irredeemable evil with a side-order of nonsense psychologizing that made him boring. This wasn't a Game of Thrones or Dexter level of quality decline, but it could have been handled better. As a final complaint, the protagonist's mom has weirdly puffy lips that I couldn't stop noticing.

I enjoyed my time with this series despite its shortfalls.

I enjoyed this show quite a lot for reasons I myself don't even quite understand. Most anime action scenes are somewhere between mediocre and garbage given all their tropey nonsense like lengthy mid-combat internal monologues, random debates with opponents, and characters arbitrarily manifesting new powers to defuse tension. While this show isn't particularly excessive by the standards of anime, it definitely has all three of those tropes to a decent degree. Even still, this show overcomes those shortcomings by executing the power really fantasy well. I also think I might have a personal preference for "hero conceals their power level" stories, and there are parallels ... to Frieren: Beyond Journey's End here to that effect.

The start of the show is a bit rough as the main character starts as the typical Joe Average anime protagonist, i.e. he's a whiny useless loser. There's also some painfully obvious riddles in the first dungeon that were a bit goofy. The characters entered a room with a 3-step puzzle that killed people when they failed, and yet they started celebrating once they solved one part of the puzzle, essentially saying "surely that's all there is to it, right?" before getting turned into red mist.

The protagonist's growth arc only really starts in the third episode, which isn't *that* long (it's only about 40 minutes of screentime), but for a 12 episode anime it was probably a higher percentage of the total runtime than it needed to be. On top of that, his "getting stronger" arc proceeds very rapidly to where he's basically already a god by the end of season 1. The series uses typical tier list rankings (E, D, C, B, A, S) for power level, and he's upper A or S tier in the blink of an eye. The show would have been better paced if it only used one episode to tell the background story, and then slowed his growth to where he was only a C tier by the end of the season so his growth could be savored rather than rushed.

But my issues with pacing are mostly just my indirect wish for *more* of this series, and when somebody wants more of something that's usually a good indication that they liked it. I wish I could better explain precisely why I enjoyed this show as much as I did, but since I really can't I'll just plead "vibes" or something and be on my way.

The premise of Death Parade is set out in the first episode, where the characters are being judged on whether their spirit gets reincarnated or cast out into the void. The main focus is on revealing what type of person they are through a simple game, with the game sometimes being manipulated to cause tension and force the players to reveal their secrets. If that sounds intriguing to you, I would agree. I hope I get to watch a show like that some day, because Death Parade quickly forgets about its premise and instead tells a story of people going through emotional turmoil instead. It's ... not altogether terrible, but I think the show would have been better if it focused on the moral judgements and mystery rather than having people cry all the time.

There's a LOT of overdramatic crying in this series. I kept a tally and over half of the 12 episodes feature someone balling their head off, frequently multiple times per episode. I guess it makes sense since they're dead and they're learning the often tragic circumstances of their death, but I'm the type of person who really doesn't like a focus on crying. I'm fine with a little bit to add dramatic flair to a particularly poignant scene, but this show wallows in it in a way that's just excessive. I've never been big on emotional stories, and that's especially true for characters I don't care about. Most characters in this show last for only one episode which isn't nearly enough time for me to care about their problems, so their crying quickly just became annoying.

The moral judgement bit was also somewhat confusing. A lot of the situations ended up seeming like they weren't deserving of moral judgements at all. In one case a girl gets plastic surgery and reunites with her childhood friend, and this somehow ends up being a moral clue that she was deserving to be reincarnated? Another dude doesn't appreciate his stepmother, then commits suicide... and also deserves to reincarnation? There's even one trial where they don't show the results of whether they're reincarnated or cast to the void, which may have been an artistic choice, but it sorta seemed like the show writers either couldn't make up their mind on whether to save or condemn, or simply forgot to pass judgement.

The mysteries were a mixed bag. The trials are set up such that people slowly regain their memories and recall details of their life and how they died, but I figured most of these well before they were revealed. There's also the overarching meta-narrative involving the other characters that has some mystery, but it doesn't really end up mattering all that much. In contrast, the setup of the trials was quite well done in episode 1, where the audience was put in the same boat as the people in the trial. There are red herrings to misdirect people into thinking e.g. whoever wins the game will be sent to heaven. I fell for these hard, and was pleasantly surprised when they were subverted. The show does this at least one more time later in the series.

Also on a more positive note, I liked many of the recurring characters in this series. I enjoyed watching Decim's dispassionate demeanor that reminded me a lot of myself. I also enjoyed watching Nona (the little manager chick) with her quiet confidence. She steals every scene she's in, and I wish her story and its reveals were more important. Finally, I enjoyed how this series was fairly mature overall, barring the excessive crying of course. I've probably been watching too much shonen anime (although I'd argue this is more an issue with anime as a whole), so it was refreshing for me to watch something that wasn't aimed at kids.

I dropped this halfway through as I was really not jiving with it at all. This is the Youtuber Alpharad's favorite anime, and I thought it could be interesting to watch given that it was supposed to be a parody of the genre. Redo of Healer was an inadvertent parody of anime and I enjoyed that a lot, so I figured this could be similarly worthwhile. It turns out that when anime is actively trying to be subversive of itself, it just ends up failing hard.

This show is very trope-filled, presumably for the purpose of satire. The protagonist Ryuko's school uniform is skimpy, and ... it can power-up to grant her special abilities -- and doing so makes it become even more skimpy in the process. This is clearly poking fun at fanservice, but my question is "where's the parody?" It's moderately more over-the-top than fanservice normally is, and it's on the screen almost all the time, but it mostly just fades into the background. Maybe Redo of Healer broke my brain here in terms of how ridiculous these things tend to be, but Ryuko's attire doesn't seem *that* crazy to me by the standard of anime. There's a bunch of further plot details relating to uniforms, but they don't deal with the revealing nature of the clothing that much. The show doesn't do enough to subvert or transcend the tropes, it just sort of winks at the camera and keeps doing them.

While I was fine (or at least neutral) towards the fanservice, the show is also very trope-heavy in its action scenes as well. These are the majority of the show's runtime, and they were boring enough that it killed the series for me. They're very formulaic: 1) Ryuko challenges another a foe to a fight. 2) That foe brutally smacks Ryuko around for a while. 3) Ryuko thinks "oh no, this is going really bad", before finding either a specific enemy weakness or some powerup she didn't know she had. 4) If the foe is important enough, they might reveal a secret power of their own to turn the tides again. 5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 if needed to pad out the runtime. 6) One character arbitrarily becomes the victor.

These fights obviously lack tension, and they don't have much visual spectacle either. Maybe if you like exaggerated anime combat you might think it looks cool, but to me it's very plastic. The fights are also constantly interrupted with the usual anime cliches of characters debating each other, or announcing their new powers like they're reading off a checklist. If this is supposed to be satire, I ask again: "where's the parody?" The show doesn't seem to be subverting the tropes or making fun of them, it just does them with a bit more gusto than usual.

Yawn.

Ghost in the Shell is one of those superclassics that was clearly brilliant for its time, but doesn't really live up to modern expectations. It might be a worthwhile watch for people who are interested in the evolution of anime or film, but I found little in terms of subjective enjoyment here. I was bored enough while watching it that my mind frequently drifted towards other things, and I was somewhat relieved when it was over.

I watched the dub, and there was a very annoying sound difference between characters speaking and the special effects that meant I either couldn't hear what the characters were ... saying, or I'd be deafened whenever something like gunfire happened. I eventually settled on the dub with subtitles from the sub. The differences between the subtitles and the words being spoken was enough to be a nuisance, but at least I could understand what was being said without randomly going deaf.

The film is too short to do all the things it wants. It's only 78 minutes before the credits roll, and it devotes many scenes to long, ponderous views of the cityscape or futuristic tech. If those are subtracted, then that leaves scarcely over an hour to cram several action scenes, a political thriller, and a bunch of existentialist philosophy into.

The action scenes were what I enjoyed the most, although I'm grading on a pretty generous curve here. If you've read any of my other reviews then you'd know I typically don't find the action scenes in anime to be all that engaging, but this film had enough spectacle to at least be somewhat interesting. Some of the "futuristic" special effects look goofily dated, like how people in the 90s expressed "computers" by spamming green numbers on the screen. Otherwise, the effects in the fights were pretty decent. Old Western special effects can often have an uncanny valley problem, but that's less of an issue in anime.

The political thriller is mostly just used as a setting, which is fine. I enjoy political thrillers so I was a bit disappointed that the film didn't go more into that area, but it's OK to just use a thin vertical slice of political machinations as the backdrop for a story. There's a lot of people and departments thrown out that I had some trouble keeping them straight, but it ultimately didn't matter.

The film Waxes a bit excessively philosophical about the difference between a body ("shell") and a person's sense of self or "soul" ("ghost"). The concept of a soul, while powerfully evocative to almost every ancient human society, is known not to exist by modern science. At best, it's just a useful shorthand for how people perceive themselves. Fanciful notions of the self existing beyond the physical confines of a human brain are childish nonsense. It naturally follows that a robot could be just as much as a "real person" as any normal human, assuming the tech was sufficiently advanced. As such, I found most of the philosophical subtext of the film to be akin to a nuanced discussion of whether Santa exists. The answer is already obvious, and any attempts to claim it's non-obvious seem like a tryhard liberal arts undergraduate attempting to be galaxy-brained.

My score of 4/10 reflects my relatively negative subjective enjoyment while watching Ghost in the Shell, while the "mixed feelings" indicates that I can appreciate the film as a historical artifact. I believe the movies it inspired (e.g. the Matrix) did a much better job of capturing its techno-dystopian vision while also being more entertaining to watch.

I came to this series from the recommendation of a friend when I asked him for a solid comedy anime. I hadn't really been jiving with the comedic bits of other anime like FMA:B and Steins;Gate, and I wanted to test whether this was just a fluke of a few shows, or whether Japanese comedy as a whole simply doesn't translate well to English. After watching Konosuba, I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the latter interpretation is correct. I've heard that Japanese comedy can be big on wordplay which I'm sure would get absolutely mangled by translation issues. Some turbo-weeaboos might claim this means ... I'm unable to properly judge the genre, as I'm not really getting the full experience unless I've learned the language. I understand their position, but I'm going to ignore those people and consistently judge anime purely by the end result of its English-language attempt.

The jokes in anime mostly consist of the following: 1) characters overreacting to things, 2) lewd cringe comedy, and 3) a handful of gags that are repeated ad nauseum (often involving characters overreacting to things, or lewd cringe comedy). Maybe 12-year-olds would find this stuff hilarious, but I'd reckon that most adults wouldn't find this list to be a particularly fertile field for laughs. There are 4 primary characters in Konosuba: Kozuma, who is the Joe Average protagonist, and his 3 female companions. Each of these 3 companions has a single gag that's repeated over and over. For Aqua, it's that she's technically a goddess but she acts like a toddler. For Megamin, it's that she can only cast one big spell before flopping over and being useless for the rest of the battle. For Darkness, it's that she's a horny masochist (of the meme variety) who becomes *blushy crushy* whenever she's physically or emotionally attacked. None of these gags are funny. Very few of the other jokes were funny either. A few made me smirk, and a tiny percentage made me do a light chuckle (e.g. the result of Kozuma's "steal" spell, which is just quintessentially Japanese), but nothing really beyond this. I don't think laughter is the *only* metric that comedy ought to be judged by, but it's undoubtedly a pretty big portion. As such, "it's not that funny" is pretty damning cricism of a show that spends a plurality of its time trying to tell jokes.

If there's anything that salvages the show, it's that it slowly morphs into a halfway decent character drama. Season 1 is practically a sitcom with each episode being mostly self-contained, and only a handful of details mattering from episode to episode. The show is at its worst here, as the characters are mostly static and the show only has its comedy to carry it. By season 2 the creators started playing with longer narratives and character development, and then by season 3 they had fully embraced both. I'll be darned if I didn't start to care about the characters by the end, even though many of these overarching developments were quite silly, like "will the loli form a relationship with the protagonist given that she clearly wants to gargle his dick" and "will the muscley armored girl be forced to submit to the life of a servile housewife". However, the show was still uneven in some places, with Aqua in particular being almost forgotten relative to Megamin and Darkness.

If the show keeps following the trajectory it's been on, then I *might* be convinced to watch future seasons if they're ever made.

Redo of Healer tells the dystopian tale of "what if r/healsluts was reality?" Healers possess incredible powers, but the healing process is deeply traumatizing for them, so they're kept submissive and breedable through a steady stream of drugs, sexual abuse, and demeaning comments. It turns out that this isn't a particularly fun existence. The healer protagonist gets a chance to redo his life, to get revenge on those who had wronged him. The best way to do this in his mind... is to form a harem and have lots and lots of threesomes. And oh yeah, some revenge on the side might be justified. You ... know, in between all the threesomes.

If you've heard anything about this show, it's likely that you've heard it's halfway to hentai-town. It exists in this weird twilight zone where the sex scenes are gratuitous and frequent, but also heavily restrained in some ways. Anime boobs are frequently on display, but even the uncensored version refuses to show any dicks or vaginas. They're obviously heavily implied through shadows, character expressions, and conveniently-placed objects, but they're never directly shown, even with a blur filter. The sex scenes mostly just consist of jiggling anime breasts and girls making ahegao faces. Also, I'm pretty sure the creators have a foot and CBT fetish. This is all... fine? It's clear a lot of anime fans hate any amount of cleavage given how derisive discussions of "fanservice" typically become. I'm in the perhaps-unusual position of not really caring one way or the other. I don't find sex scenes gratifying, but I also don't recoil in horror when they happen. I mostly just find it funny to see how the show's creators try to have the plot bend over backwards to justify them, like how the catgirl character can only get stronger through creampies. Sometimes the writers didn't even try. I laughed no matter what. This inadvertent humor is the only type of comedy that anime can do well in my view, and this show has it in spades.

The revenge content was another lightningrod of controversy. There's a lot of noncon in this story, which is probably why the show had such a high proportion of female viewers. Rape is used as a tool of punishment and revenge, which enraged the fake feminists who claim men and women should be equal, but then turn around and demand old privileges like "women are precious little snowflakes who must never be harmed". As a Real Feminist(TM), I enjoy watching evil women get their shit pushed in just as much as the evil men in this series. I'm not a fan of gore, and the show veered a bit too close to that in some scenes for my liking, but it never goes completely overboard.

The show has a few problems. The action scenes, though infrequent, are just as boring as in any anime. The protagonist is a healer, but he also gains peoples' experiences when he heals them and relives their memories. Apparently this also translates to having the same physical prowess that they do? Furthermore, his "healing" magic can functionally do anything that the show creators want him to do at that moment, like mindbreak girls, break locks and weapons, and change physical form (but NOT his genitalia, of course). There's no tension in fights when the characters can just manifest as-of-yet unseen powers at any moment. Moreover, while the protagonist is fairly relatable (he doesn't kill people who haven't wronged him or gotten in his way), he's still unnecessarily edgy in some cases, like where he claims that spite and hatred are good qualities. I guess that makes sense from his perspective, but it nevertheless makes him seem like an angsty teenager.

I would have liked a better explanation for why the kingdom, and most of the characters that come from there, are so one-dimensionally evil. A lot of plot threads remain unresolved at the end of the season for what was clearly the setup for another batch of episodes, but unfortunately it looks like it will never get them. I'm not really sure how to judge the show in this case, as there could have been some compelling reasons for why most named characters from the kingdom are unabashedly corrupt. As it exists, the show just has them as evil cardboard cutouts built specifically for a revenge story and nothing else. There are flashback scenes to justify the protagonist's revenge, but it seemed like I wasn't being told the other half of the story.

Overall, I had a lot more fun with this show than I thought I would. It's the only anime I've watched so far without a dub, which is a pretty big impediment to my enjoyment, and yet I kept wanting to watch more whenever an episode finished.

Kids: "Mom we want Death Note!"
Mom: "We have Death Note at home, kids"
Death Note at home: Code Geass

Code Geass had the chance to be great if it learned the same lessons that Death Note did in regards to setting up clear and consistent rules regarding the protagonist's superpower. The hook of this power, combined with the political intrigue and mech suit fights, could have created something special. Instead, the show decided to wallow in a bunch of anime tropes that undercut the tension -- and by "anime tropes" I'm not just talking about Kallen Kozuki's exposed breasts, although those are frequently on display as well. ...

The main selling point is the protagonist's "Geass" power, which is the ability to mind control anyone he looks at. However, the show establishes some boundaries early on: First, he can only use this power if he's directly looking his victim in the eye, so it won't work if they're just talking on the telephone or are wearing fancy sunglasses. Second, he can only use this power once per person. He only gets one command so he ostensibly needs to make it count, although the limits of this get fudged as the series goes on. It’s not as detailed as Death Note, which explains its rules at every commercial break, but it’s sufficient enough. It starts to break down a bit towards the end as more characters have random immunity to it to create tension, and it receives a "powerup" to arbitrarily resolve tension at one point. Still, my overall opinion of it is net-positive.

The plot twists are a mixed bag. Minor spoilers in this paragraph, I suppose (I'll try to be vague). In one instance, the protagonist has a *whoopsie* moment and accidentally orders one of the girls to go on a murdering spree. I REALLY enjoyed this twist, for what I'm sure is the wrong reason. It was one of the funniest sequences I've seen in any anime, with this hitherto sweet girl suddenly telling everyone to KYS like she's a CoD gamer, and then gunning down innocents with an assault rifle while still in her dress. The show played this off super seriously, clearly trying to show it as a terrible tragedy, but I was cackling with laughter the entire time. The emperor's reasoning was also fairly well-handled. The emperor is shown as a one-dimensional villain earlier in the series, where all we hear is him giving speeches about how much he loves racism, or flashbacks of him beating his children while screaming at them. The reveal of his plan adds some nuance to him, although it needed to be fleshed out a lot more as the protagonist basically says "meh, don't care lol" when he learns of the plan and still opposes it anyways with a soaring speech, and it's not even clear what he's really arguing against. The final twist of what the Zero Requiem entails is utterly stupid and is a bad note to leave the series on. It's essentially Step 1) Become hated, Step 2) Buzz off, Step 3) ?????, Step 4) Everybody sings Kumbaya. It stretched my suspension of disbelief well past breaking point.

The philosophical bits are also a mixed bag. Like many anime, this show devotes a decent chunk of time to the "justified use of violence". Initially it handles it surprisingly tastefully. There's a sequence where one of the minor character's father dies as a result of the protagonist's actions, and instead of doing the usual anime thing of either swearing off violence forever or turning into a total psycho, the characters just kind of muddle through, accepting that what happened was bad but not going off the deep end. Later on though it seemed like it was headed to crazy town, with the protagonist ordering the death of a bunch of mostly-innocent people while ranting about how he couldn't wait to betray a minor character who was completely loyal to him at this point. I thought the show was going to imply "anyone who uses mind control ever is irredeemable" and became worried. But that's not what happened, actually. The show just kind of forgets about the whole idea, and by the end the two sides are nuking entire cities, and the reaction is little more than "that was bad... anyways, let's continue with the plot". I think this should have been done better or just ignored entirely, but at least it didn't go full Vinland Saga.

The battle sequences and especially the mechs are a mess. They have no defined power level, and there's a new version in almost every battle that seemingly annihilates all its competitors except for ones piloted by named characters. The show tries to set up scenes where the protagonist is "dueling" the enemy strategist like the generals of two armies facing off against each other. But the reliance on anime tropes wreck these attempts, as battles are always decided by whichever side pulls out the trap card of a new mech model or some environmental hazard that instantly blows away 99% of enemy forces. The show likes to imply these battles are like chess matches, but this would be like if one side had the ability for their queen to shoot a laser that instantly killed all enemy pawns. Fantasy writing can sometimes have an issue where if magic is too powerful then it just dominates everything, and there'd be no reason to assemble armies if e.g. they could all be destroyed by a single wizard casting a giant fire inferno. Code Geass shows this problem extends to sci-fi. There's no tension in these fights, and the generals are idiots for bringing extra soldiers into the battle. The fights don't even look that cool, as the animated mechs seem more like toys and their pilots spend much of the battle taunting and debating each other.

The costumes are excessively goofy (especially for Zero), and characters' proportions seem really off, like these toothpick people all have severe anorexia. I got used to it after a while, but it was still jarring at the beginning.

There's too many minor characters, and by the end I was getting them mixed up. I would think "Why is this lady taking pictures of everything?" and "Who the heck is this blonde twink and why is he having an existential crisis. Why should I care?" C2 is probably the most interesting character in the whole show, but she gets fairly little screentime with all these other randos running around. She spends most of her time locked in the cupboard eating pizza. There's a pretty big reveal about who she's talking to in her mind, but it gets resolved in like 5 minutes.

This is the series that arguably got me into anime. I watched it after playing the VN on Steam, and there are a lot of me-specific details on why I personally enjoyed this so much that likely wouldn't generalize to other people. Obviously all opinions are subjective, but this review is especially so.

To start, the story has some big flaws that I enumerated in my review of the VN here: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198018927756/recommended/412830

To summarize, most of the more glaring issues are frontloaded:

The protagonist Okabe starts as a very immature and unlikeable idiot. Its clear this is deliberate by the writers to show his growth later ... on, but it's still a nuisance. Nothing kills my enjoyment of a story more than disliking the major characters for one reason or another, and this is something you just have to endure for a while.

The slice-of-life stuff at the start drags on for too long and is military-grade cringe. Some might argue that all anime is cringe to some degree, but it's especially bad in bits of this series, including the catgirl maid cafe and some of the raunchy humor.

The disjointed pacing is too cleanly split between the first and second halves. The first half serves as the setup while the second half is the payoff as everything reverses, like a Matryoshka doll being reassembled. Steins;Gate is at least partly a Mystery, and much of the appeal of said genre is in secrets being revealed and figuring out how they impact the rest of the story. The problem here is that almost all the answers come in the second half, meaning there's little to chew on in the first half. All you'll be getting during that time is exposition dumps broken up by dorky flirting with tsundere girl and cringe comedy bits that don't land.

Once you break through to the second half, though, things pick up rapidly and don't stop until the end. All the mysteries get solved one-by-one, and there were several that caught me by surprise but seemed very obvious in hindsight, which is the hallmark of great writing. All the major questions are answered. Lots of things that seemed unimportant at first end up being important foreshadowing. There are no major plot holes that I could think of. Okabe stops acting childish and is much more relatable, and it even puts his previous childish behavior in context and it starts to make sense why people put up with him in the first place. The ending is fantastic as it wraps up everything in a nice little bow.

As for the me-specific factors of why I liked this show so much, the first is that I simply really enjoy time-travel stories, and this one is done quite well. All the other reasons come from having played the VN before watching. The VN is entirely in Japanese, which made hearing the dub a joy. After spending 30-40 hours with these characters, it was nice to finally understand them through spoken language rather than just subtitles. It also made Okabe's childishness much more apparent, and more clearly something that should cause you to laugh AT him rather than WITH him. It was more clear what the writers were trying to do with him. I also got to enjoy rewatching the plot with the knowledge of what would happen later, and I picked up on quite a bit of foreshadowing that I hadn't noticed in my VN run that was cleverly hidden. Finally, the anime is a lot shorter (about 9 hours of content) than the VN (which is around 30-40). Due to these time constraints, the anime unfortunately has to leave out some plot points (like Nae becoming a psycho) and the optional endings, which includes some fairly standout moments. But it's probably better for it overall, as it also reduces much of the unnecessary padding especially in the first half. It gets to the good stuff a LOT faster.

So yeah, Steins;Gate is great with the exception of the front half. You'd be well within your rights to drop it if you can't make it to the second half, but if you push through then it'll quickly become apparent that the show is worth sticking around to the end for.