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The art gets a pass. That's everything positive I have to say about this mess of a series.
During it's mid-section I kind of enjoyed the plot because they started to focus on the characters a bit, but I don't want to talk about it because then episode 19 and 20 happened and that's all you need to know.

There is a certain level of 'asspulling' that can be believable and not immersion-breaking, but this show takes the cake in taking that line and smashing it beyond recognition. For a show that spent a lot of time on worldbuilding and establishing characters, they did their damn hardest ... to throw it all into the wind.
Everything up to episode 19 is mediocre at best with some flickers of enjoyment, which would usually warrant a 2/10 at least, but then episodes 20-24 happened. The worst episodes I have ever seen in anime.

They start off episode 20 just normally, but around the 15 minute mark they just go APEshit (see what I did there) and shit out like 6 copout/stolen plottwists in the span of the episode's final 5 minutes. I was baffled and proceded to rant about it with someone I met on Misty/Chronexia's Discord server.

Episode 21 didn't make it much better by killing of a potentially interesting character which we had little to no exposure to and in the end they kind of suggested that 002 was dead.

Episode 22 was a lot of edgy bullcrap with Hiro 'Not wanting to live without 002' which is probably a perfect TVtropes entry for him. In the end they take off to get him to 002 because they speculated that maybe somehow Strelizia Apus needs a male pilot to function properly too and based on that assumption alone, they took off.

Episode 23: of course they were right. Big dumb uninspired space battle with those lazy round anime explosions that look totally ass but are there to suggest a lot of explosions at once. And when Hiro finally got 'INSIDE 002', Strelizia Apus for some reason becomes 002 in the flesh but it looks like a wedding dress and if for just one second you think about 'Yeah why would it work like that' or 'How is it designed like that' and your immersion is shattered. And there was also a conveniently placed Warpgate, which has been totally established to be a thing and is integrally woven into the plot.
I once again took to Discord to rant.

Episode 24 is the toddlershit cherry on top of a mudcake. Starting out, 002 and Hiro travel through space for years and 002 weirdly reminded me of spongebob in that episode where Squidward told him to be more 'normal'. All the edges and quirks in her personality are gone. She has been bleached and is an eternally white canvas.
For some reason Hiro became tired around the 700 day mark and he fell asleep during the final battle. What a coincidence. But don't you worry, power of friendship is there to help you. They literally gather around 002s petrified body and establish some kind of bond and they can suddenly hear each other?? Which wasn't a thing before when they stood around the statue... Then they transformed two more times and rekt the VIRM planet, which was weirdly unsatisfying because the actual VIRM entity still lives on.
Then they robbed us of all the character development by just slapping tangentially related characters onto older looking versions of our character's bodies and timeskipped themselves put of having to show any form of character development.

And then the ending... oh boy the ending. COPOUT is all I have to say. 'And another story begins'.

I have intentionally ranted about this as an isolated series up until now because this would have turned into an incoherent mess had I just added 'COPOUT' or 'RIPOFF' at every point where it was appropriate.
It's a giant mess of Eva's plot, Gurren Lagann's presentation and there's a bit of Kill la Kill as well with the sexual undertones, though I can't say that Eva didn't have those either.

I usually don't read manga. I don't read them on their own and neither do I pick them up after the anime has finished. But the anime for made in abyss made me want more of it SO BADLY that I devoured the 6 available volumes in less than 2 days. And I do not regret it at all. I have never read anything quite as entertaining as this, the artwork is original, impactful and doesn't shy away from the more graphical side of the brutality that's going on. Speaking of impactful: Being a show about going down a highly hostile hole (alliteration intended) there ... aren't that many characters, but those characters that DO exist, are written and designed really well.
As I mentioned, since I devoured it so quickly, I'm now eagerly awaiting chapter 43 like I'm a junkey who's waiting to get another fix of drugs...

I personally enjoyed it because the balance of fun and seriousness was spot-on. There is enough light hearted fun to not make it seem like sufferporn, but also enough gore and violence to probably get it age restricted almost everywhere. It's a fine line and the author manages to walk it to perfection.

The last arc that has ended was almost too screwed up for my personal taste though, but I still highly enjoyed it. It's just REALLY disgusting at some parts...

So, going into this show I didn't really know what to think. The artstyle looked retro and when I looked it up and found the 90s-show first, I partly knew why.

Mahoujin GuruGuru is a parody of old RPGs like Dragonquest and Final Fantasy. It openly mocks its tropes and plays around with them in ways you won't expect. The more interesting thing about it is, however, that it serves a totally different purpose nowadays than it did back in the day.
In 1994, when the first version came out, the type of game this is spoofing was still relevant in the exact way this show is ... spoofing them. But like everything, RPGs have also changed with time. Therefore, this 2017 version is more of a nostalgia trip for those of us who have played those games or at least know their tropes, so we can fully appreciate every gag they're throwing at us.

What makes this even better for me, personally, is a Youtuber called "Lennyficate" (german). He made a video series about illogical things in the Pokemon universe / games and a lot of those things are very much present in GuruGuru in a similar way.

Anyway: As you may see from my score: I find this show highly enjoyable. Most of the jokes land very well, the characters are interesting and fun, as they should be, and the parody elements aren't forced in any way. You can genuinely feel the love the creators have to have had for old RPGs to revamp this 1994 show and leave its artstyle completely untouched.
Textboxes are popping up from time to time, and even though I can't enjoy them as much as the japanese can (because I still have to read the subtitles and it's hard to also read text that is on top of the screen, since the textboxes are indeed written in japanese), but I can at least appreciate the humour they're trying to create with it. It's like the old "It's very effective" joke from Pokemon.

All in all: A great nostalgia trip back to the 90s and parody in more ways than one.

I am going to leave my review up to episode 5 below this, more actual version. Some of the complaints are still the same and you are going to see which ones when you actually watch the show. The reason why I'm gonna leave the older part up, is because I think a lot of people felt similar and dropped the show for those reasons. And I totally understand why someone would drop something over one of those episodes, but if this keeps up, it's worth fighting through those. However, even if later episodes are legitimately good, they can't undo the damage the first episodes ... have dealt to the show.

Up until episode 5, the show was somewhat interesting, but boring as dirt in execution. Now I got to episode 9 (since there honestly was nothing else to watch this season) and I must say, a lot of my problems were at least partially fixed.
They started to bring in more diversity through Magane (the lying creation) who might just be the biggest plot device ever, but is nonetheless interesting as a character.
There area more "tell" as opposed to "show" scenes now and even when the episode is mostly "tell" it's at least split into easily enjoyable chunks that develop characters individually or the plot as a whole, which simply wasn't the case with previous scenes.

What really sold me on the latest 4 episodes, though, was how the characters played off of each other. With the introduction of two more characters who don't join one of the two teams it became much more interesting, since it was no longer just a fight between Team good and Team evil, but more of a battle where some aren't really sure on which side they belong and some who just like messing with others.

Therefore, because I really enjoyed the latest 4 episodes, I will raise the score up to a 6. Consider it more like a 6.5 though.

START OF THE OLDER, MORE DETAILED REVIEW

Re:Creators reverses the standard trope of a guy being sent into a fantasy world / Video game, by making the characters from different (made-up) pieces of fiction come to life in Japan. This might sound like an iteresting premise, and it is, but the execution is where the whole thing falls flat.

What interests me the most about a story like this is the question "How do those characters react to the new world that they're put in". The show never really focusses on that. Instead, they focus on the conflict between a pseudo-god, in this case the writer, and the creation, being the fictional character, which would be fine, if it wouldn't encourage the writer(s) to be lazy in one specific way:

The basic principle that is ignored here is "Show, not tell" - and boy, do they ignore that principle. Episode 1 and 3 are fine in that regard, but 2, 4 and 5 are basically just exposition. They go into Monogatari-esque dialogue and monologue scenes about some philosophical question, which wouldn't be all bad. Monogatari IS one of my all-time favourites. But what this show lacks in contrast to Monogatari is 1.) The interesting character designs 2.) A fitting voice cast (You can't torture your audience by making them listen to a monologue by a character that speaks in a monotonous voice) and 3.) Everything else going on on the screen. Monogatari worked, because it was interesting to look at and to follow the conversation. This show doesn't work in both regards.

Since we're already comparing: Let's throw in another recent story that is very much comparable to this: Drifters. Both of these shows revolve around characters from different worlds/times (which is basically like being from different worlds) being thrown into a kind of Team Deathmatch and both of them have two opposing camps of characters.
Now, why did Drifters work?
It had interesting characters which ACTUALLY EXISTED in history, making dynamic Duos like Scipio and Hannibal a pleasure to follow.
It had visual identity. A special kind of artstyle that is basically only comparable to hellsing Ultimate.
And, to connect this to our last point: It SHOWS more thant it tells.

Okay, this has been long enough. Let's get it over with:

Story: 5. It's interesting, but they don't do enogh with their unique premise

Art: 7 - Standard. Nothing more, nothing less. I like the character designs, even though Meteora Österreich (*giggle* Her last name is my home country) just somehow doesn't fit... Her voice demands more of a cute look.

Sound: 5. The problem isn't the soundtrack itself. It's more how they use it. Hiroyuki sawano always does at least a decent job whenever he's involved. But this show uses the "Sawano song" (The one with the drop - see: AOT, Kabaneri, ...) in very weird scenes. It's just as if they were like "How can we make this scene decent?" - "Just throw in some epic music and we're done". But this doesn't work for every single scene, especially if it's the same for conversation, battles and gags.

Characters: 7. I don't want to trash the characters too much, because they aren't the problem. For the most part they're fun and interesting, even though I'm wondering why they chose such a whimpy protagonist - or a protagonist at all, because he really does jack shit until episode 5.

Enjoyment: 2. Here's where the "Show not tell" aspect comes in. I tortured myself with episode 4 and 5, because I thought "They can't just make 4 exposition scenes and call it an episode, right" - but they did. twice in a row.

Overall: 4. I will MAYBE pick it up later down the line, because I'm really invested in the premise, but I can't be bothered to push myself through so much meaningless and uninteresting exposition.