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Northern War 1-3 episodes does not respect viewer's time and intelligence.
If you are expecting a military plot this anime is not for you. Nothing here is taken seriously.

BAD PACING/INFO DUMP: A considerable part of the first episode is two random characters with no sign of importance talking unnaturally just to give the audience a lot of information. And if you haven't been paying attention, don't worry because the second episode shows a group of politicians REPEATING THE SAME INFORMATIONS FROM EPISODE 1. The political plot is not complex or interesting enough to justify the wasted time. Honestly, episodes 1 and 2 could have ... been just 1 episode.

BAD PROTAGONIST: The protagonist has no charisma, no goals and she is no easy to identify with. Her only outstanding feature is being the ideal soldier model despite being a young girl in the battlefield. In a non-stop action anime she could even be interesting to have on screen but Northern War does not know how to create a suitable habitat for the character.

BAD CHARACTERS: All the main characters are bland/generic. The chemistry between them is non-existent. The direction prioritizes joke scenes than develop they relationship. For example: Talion starts talking > Lavi ignores and disappears. Talion helps Lavi > she ignores him and disappears again. Iseria hugs Lavi and yell: ''Lavi-chan!'' every single time. Does anyone in this anime know how to act naturally?

BAD WRITING: Episodes 1/2 are just introductory episodes without development. In episode 3 the group received the mission to infiltrate the empire and attend a noble party but the episode is a mess. The noble party serves no purpose. Why they received that mission in first place? Most of the episode is just Lavi walking around the city until she found a Clown and coincidentally the Clown is a terrorist and he attacks the noble party cause ''nobles bad'' but it is stopped by Lavi. It doesn't make any sense. The events are random.

BAD SLICE OF LIFE: The anime made a mistake in selling itself as an action/military show. Most of the time it's just characters doing everyday matters like eat, buy clothes, walk around the city, etc. But unfortunately the anime lacks elements that make a slice of life fun to watch.

AVERAGE ANIMATION: The production has a low budget. Sometimes CGI doesn't mix well with 2D. And the action scenes are static.

I only played the first ColdSteel game and it was pretty bad for very similar reasons but the game is more bearable thanks the gameplay.