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Much funnier than the manga. Alya is animated perfectly, her live mannerism takes the show to the next level.

Don't expect much plot, it is a sitcom. Most of the fun is what they say to each other in different situations. The plot is basically "this dreaming boy is a realist" plus some lines from Nisekoi without marriage and mafia.
The characters are also generic.
Bland bitch protagonist haircut (all romcoms): check
Bald horny stupid guy (chunibuyo, eminence): check
Younger sister with huge brother complex: check

What makes it ti stand out:

... Main heroine.
It is a rare anime where the main heroine starts out as anal perfectionist narcissistic violent bitch and grows up from this.

Sex as a main driver and motivation for almost everything.
It is a rare anime that clearly shows that in high school the dating prospects totally upend the person's perspective, motivate to do this like nothing other.

About Russian
Who TF complains about Uesaka Sumire's Russian? Her Russian pronunciation is great and absolutely not a Japanese accent.
She makes small mistakes with consonants, like saying "ka rebyonok" instead of "kak rebyonok" or "totzhe" instead of "tozhe", and her "yy" is not perfect, but her "lya", "rya", "lyu" are very good.

The show is depressing as fuck.
But good.
As fuck.
It is about old veteran, all her friends are dead or dying. The men who loved her is dead and she did not even realize he loved her. She goes to the paces where events of her pas has been to revive the memories.
Frieren departs on the journey of memory, and her memories are the most important part, perhaps more important than the present. It is not even the "main story" interrupted by the series of the flashbacks exactly because the present story is mostly uneventful and just an container to relive the events of the past.
It ... is not a problem but the main point of the show that Frieren is dismissive of the present. This is a point that she has a body of a child but REALISTICALLY (and quite annoyingly) acts like an old man. She is like 800 years old. She have seen all of this hundred times. All her initial friends are already 700 years as dead. All her RECENT friends are dead or dying. She have seen her human friends to be born, get old and die for 32 generations. She have seen cities to be built and collapse many times. She just cannot get emotionally involved in the present moment because she sees everything in the present as one foot in the grave already. Like an old man, her glory days are in the past. Her Magnum Opus is completed. Like an old man, she picks some bizarre hobby to have just something to live for, with the only requirement for this hobby: it takes infinity to complete. Perhaps he is not a good person. Yes, she is callous. Or emotionally dead. But this is the point and on purpose. The development is that she starts caring, little by little.
The character growth here is when Frieren stops living in the past and let's the past go and the present becomes more important.
The outro is depressing as fuck.
Are you all right? Can you hear me?
Like somebody is at the death door and probably already can't hear shit.

Overall 9
Characters 7
Plot 8

After Senjougahara learned that Koyomi is a vampire, she has left him. Acerola transformed into 19-years-old LEWD version of herself, forced Koyomi to be her boyfriend and in absence of Meme Oshino rules the world of apparitions.
I shit you not.
There are so many parallels with Monogatari that every episode you expect a Hanekawa clone to pop up, and when they redo the crane machine scene you will feel disappointed that they did not pull out an animated doll.

On the other side, why the show is named "In/spectre"? Because it is a play of words with "inspector". There is no inspector in this anime but it ... also has a huge lot of Inspector Gadget vibes.
It is also a very good detective story.

What I enjoyed the most is a head science, where the events explained or excluded based on the human psychology.

Do not watch if you do not like a lot of monologues.

Watch if you like: Monigatari, Agatha Christhie, psychology, detective stories, ghost stories.

Overall: old computer game engine is used to create an anime which lacks substance.

Art: It is like watching somebody playing a computer game from 2000. A lot of CGI, mostly animated rocks or foliage. Animated cutscenes with animation on the level of "Full throttle" (i.e. 1996).

Story: The plot is yawn so far. "Bureau 13" premise with a bit of Hellboy and Indiana Jones. Too many cave scenes, perhaps the limitation of the graphic engine: they gave a graphic engine to render rocks so they make caves.
The scenes of secret Jame-Bond-like base are again from very old computer game/

The characters are yawn: a lot of ... cliche, mary sue protagonist who literally does nothing except walking and fighting, just ignore if he ever opens his mouth, he doesn't say anything minimally relevant, unknown hero but everybody has a file on him like a celebrity, etc. Cliche Sancho-Pansa sidekick.

Realism: The characters act like they are in a computer game and the player is not very good with the controls. I.e. jerky movements of 1995 RPG, I'm not kidding you. The dialogues are cheesy at best.

Overall 4.

Bottom line: "quintuplets" without plot, "monster musume" without monsters, hentai without sex, but not so bad overall.

This ecchi comedy jumps straight into the heat (literally): young and totally ordinary boy starts to live with a number of girls, and each of them is his future bride and out of the blue wants to have-sex-with/marry him, while the bland hero desperately tries to protect his virginity.

The show has two sides, which saves it from the plot perspective: Each girl has a background, mostly representing different categories of the fappable hentai FMC, like american girl, russian girl, gernan girl, chinese girl, teacher, hanekawa/pansy clone, etc. And each ... girl has a fappable secret side: pervert, secret agent, magical girl, etc.
The story also progresses in two planes: house, where they mostly follow quintuplets setup, and outside, tet-a-tet with one of the girls to reveal her secret, just like monster musume.

There is a lot of kitsch and cliche and borrowing from other animes and hentai, but...
it is well-intended, well paced, good morale ecchi over-the-top orderline-hentai romcom with episodes pulled from James Bond, Terminator, Madoka, even Black Mirror. So it is moderately funny and interesting.
It makes you wait for the next episode to see what happens next. Watching it for the plot, you know.

Overall 7.

Unfortunately this anime does a great disservice to the manga.

The manga is indeed obvious satire based on Kyogen traditional Japanese comedy, which can be described as slapstick, jackass and buffoonery. It is obvious starting from the style in manga (where each character is represented with a mouth open for half of the face either yelling or in exasperation). Each character in manga is obvious idiot from the beginning.
The satire includes not only the harem genre per se, as something only complete idiots can go into and even make it work, but also Japanese society and customs, where not only the moral choice of ... not rejecting a second girl does exist, because she worked hard and you have to be selfless and polite, but also the outcome of this choice, where a second wife is not a rarity.

The main idea is that MC is so proper and true, thus, inflicting any inconvenience to the other party is impossible. Therefore, when 2 girls propose, it is impossible to turn away any of them. The only ethical solution that is paradoxical but apparently works, if all parties are in consent to date both of them. But this is how the troubles only begun. The heroes are so busy trying not to hurt each other so they have no time to ... almost anything. The intimacy is also a huge problem, if one goes first, the other will be hurt. The MC sees a threesome as a solution but it also looks immoral to them.

The author of the manga just drives this custom to absurdity, adding third and second girls. The third girl is also obvious Japanese stereotype of the blond girl with the boobs, anti-Japanese, rude, selfish, grabbing what she wants without any manners. The fourth girl is an illustration that no matter how smart you are, love will make you an idiot.

To the show's defense, it is really hard to translate this manga into an action.
The panels in the manga take most intensive moments so the manga looks like a series of the still shots when the heroes are yelling. Of course this style is extremely hard to accommodate into an anime but the failure of the show is not only in this.

It is not only that filling the time gaps between the panels adds new nuances and add character to the characters where it wasn't in the source material.
The director just doesn't understand the spirit, the atmosphere of the manga. In the resulting show the pace feels wrong, the highlights are on the wrong moments, the key moments are subdued, etc.

The MC is not shown as painfully proper. He is shown as a creep who cannot decide which girl to date so he asks to date them both.
The girl do not behave like in manga despite saying the same words. They are just plain unnatural.

And here is why. They tried to turn a parody and slapstick into a romcom and failed.
They tried to make it more like ordinary romance story and this fails on the same level as you try to insert Ronald McDonald into Oregairu and do not notice he doesn't fit.

Mostly they fail to translate the key moments.
A little spoiler here.
Saki-chan is freaking out that she doesn't do something special for Naoya and the suspense grows and at some point Saki does something extraordinary and everybody is WTF?! and she is "he finally asked me for something" and this is hilarious because his ask was more like a figure of speech but the catharsis is real and disproportionate.
And they failed. They have made the trick obvious and the catharsis subdued. WFT?!

Episode 5 actually shows some light in the end of the tunnel but it is already chapter 13!!!

A boy returns to a hometown after some years.
There he meets his old friends.
A girl, who was super nice and kind but now acts like she hates him.
Old friend.
His old friend's sister who has grown up a bit.
And other unimportant characters.
The boy starts living alone.

This is a good start and potential for wonderful story.

... But.

The anime is kinda drag.
It is boring, cliche and going nowhere.

The MC is kinda bland and actually does not do ANYTHING in the show, he just observing. He moves from place to place and the things are just happening around him.

The girl is just a tsundere, acting cold and hot but it is obvious from the start that she is head over heels into the MC and very bad at hiding it.
And the MC is cliche dense.
The girl is kinda meek and boring.

The old friend does nothing except some very verbal exposures (remember, we did this and that) until turning super gross trying to be somebody to 11 yeas old girl without big desire to do so. And dropping heavy hints that he is attracted to his sister.

The sister is... hard to describe. She is like a painting on the wall. She is there and kinda says some phrases to move along the overall plot, but she has no personality or character. She is kinda genki girl but with some little evil or sadistic twist. She becomes a SJW for an episode but this doesn't add a character or empathy.

The girl with the boobs is just a girl with the boobs. She is moving around, opening her mouth and comes in where MC is laying on the bed on to top 11 years old girl. And she is like "I need to run to the convenience store to buy an AWL" (c)

The 11 years old girl is the best and worst part of the show.
With an absence of the substance, she creates some life and the gang rotates around her.
But the whole premise is oversexualization of 11 years old girl who gets into some adult situations with the gang, like living with the MC and being in love with the old friend, claiming "I'm not a child".
Maybe somebody finds this funny, I find this disgusting.

Story:
11 year old and semi-incestual relationship between the twins are the only interesting parts.
The girls drama is kinda cliche and predictable and yawn.
As I said, the MC has no story.
The romantic story is predictable and yawn. And goes nowhere. It takes them 12 episodes so the girl finally reveals that she is mad over nothing. And this is it.

Some side lines never developed in any story. The teacher, the political father and his wife.

The dramas are external to the charaters and stupid.
It reminds "School days" where show was OK to the middle then the author had forced the show to be dark. Same here. Some forced shitty drama with imbecile antagonists.

Otherwise it is a slice of life, where people just doing some small stuff.

The only value is that you recognize a lot of the plot moments that later Oregairu developed 100 times better.

The art is Popeye-the-sailor quality.

The OP and ED show scenes that are unrelated to the anime.

Self-aware dark comedy-parody isekai very much alike of "Interstate 60"
First of ll, let's start with the genre.
Sometimes dark, sometimes funny odyssey of an unready and naive hero, a wonderful adventure turned something not-what-you-had-expected. And the hero have to run for his life or endure embarrassment, humiliation and inconveniences. But upon reflection you understand that how the real life is, in grotesque and exaggerated form, and the hero is actually getting the life lessons leading to the catarsis and personal growth.
First thing that comes to mind is "Interstate 60".
Second: "Hitchhiking guide to the galaxy".
Of course this anime is not as brilliant, it contains less recognizable satire, ... it is sometimes slow, sometimes gross, but to its defense, it is not afraid to be gross and makes it a feature.

An interesting aspect rarely used in "game dive" settings: you do not gain any new skills by logging in, you remain the same weak stupid shit like in the real life. You might say, so what, there are skill-based games. But in this anime your acquired skills in mouse clicks do not translate into better running.
And you cannot login, train martial arts and then log out and be a cool fighter with a biceps size of a football in real life.

Therefore, there is a strange psychological phenomena, emphasized in this anime by the encounter with another traveler: if the game is no better than the real life, what is the attraction, why the hero keeps spending time there, why the other character logs in for years just to spend time in prison?

I have found my answers watching this anime but I would not spoil it for you. And who knows, may be you will find a different answer, your own.

It is NOT about old guy turned into a loli.
This is a generic isekai adventure with a player suddenly appearing in the world of the game he was playing before and suddenly it is life, there is pain and blood, NPCs are having free will, fall in love, have children, etc. You know the drill.

Unfortunately, this show doesn't explore the shock and psychological trauma of being ripped out of the ordinary life and being placed into a world that looks familiar but anybody can just impale you with a spear on a spot, like "AFK" (highly recommended).
It is not even Alicization which explores the free ... will of NPCs and human rights of the newly sentient beigns.

If you want a comparison: it is "Reincarnated as a slime" without the "being actual slime" phase and city building and with HEAVY references to Overlord (basically the entire Ep5 is Overlord graveyard arc including freaking maids). The MC appearance being similar to the Rimuru is not random.
Second will be "In the land of Leandale".
Third will be "around the world with my smartphone".

Once again, it is not SAO and not Spirit chronicles. This show has no drama, no goal. There is just OP MC wandering around, having fun and kicking ass without much effort.

The old man is out of the picture almost entirely except an accidental joke once per episode "are you actually THE old wizard?" --- PANIC-PANIC.

Neither we go into a shock and novelty of the sex change. For the MC the loli body is just ANOTHER COSTUME. A bit embarrassing but not much more embarrassing than the old wizard costume.
Ultimately, we are never bothered by the image of the actual player MC. We even do not know if this is a boy or girl.
So gender-bender part is all but invisible and is just a basis for a couple of jokes.

The show can be seen as "isekai turned into generic fantasy" if not for this "find other players" part.

Nevertheless, as a parody-comedy based on the well established tropes, it delivers more that one laugh per episode.

What about "detective" aspect of this show?
Expect some trash middle schooler fanfic about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being a middle schooler and a hot chick with supernatural abilities fighting supernatural mutants.

The whole detective aspect of the show is the hot chick knowing everything about a particular character without explaining how she knows.
In the very first episode it becomes utterly ridiculous on the level
"You are this and that"
"How do you know"
"Wait, but actually you are that and this"
"Wow, how did you know this as well.... But I'm actually rather that"
"I knew it"
The revelations go on, not caring that every new revelation cancels the genius ... guess that was made before.

What about the romantic aspect of the show?
Expect the same middle schooler level fantasy of a super girl begging some random "bland bitch protagonist" (tm) to live together, travel the world together and do superhero stuff together at her expense, and she is ready to beg wearing nothing but a bath towel.
Why? Because he is so special and unique (there is nothing special in him that warrants this behavior except being rather unlucky).

The supergirl orchestrates all of the adventures "80 days around the world" (the cartoon series) style, with the series of the chained highly unlikely events, like it is some kind of "plan" which eventually totally comes together because of course, of course.