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Do authors even try at this point, or is an empty self insert story the best they can produce?
World. The most generic magic system with heavily discriminated non-magic users. You will find nothing new or exciting here. Mandatory magic academy and dungeon diving just to fill all the checkboxes.
Plot. Reunite with the love of your life, simple stuff. What happens in this plot? Tournament arc, dungeon arc, all the most blandest and most boring things. No unexpected turns or reveals here.
Characters. “Underdog” MC, yeah. The problem is that the underdog must be someone who isn’t really expected to be good and/or his abilities are unknown. ... Here we have an honorary student in a school of magic who can’t use magic, so logically he is so good he can make up for it in other disciplines, right? Also he goes solo into dungeons, so one more sign of him obviously not being underpowered or “abilities unknown”. And yet he is bullied by people for being erm… better than them? Oh, sorry, “not being able to use magic”. Don’t worry tho, cause we also have a 10/10 waifu who is in the highest position possible in that world but can’t just bring her boyfriend with her, we have a 9/10 side waifu who has no chances but doesn’t stop following our MC, we even have a rival who bullied MC cause he wanted MC’s respect. So yes, our “underdog” is, in fact, a usual all mighty OP MC
Visuals/music. Will not argue, the show looks nice, if you just stop thinking about how typical the fights go (enemies show off their fireworks, make a surprised face and get defeated) - it is surely nice. The problem is that all those efforts were used on an underwhelming source. The music on the other hand - I can’t even recall if it was there.

Conclusion: I watched this whole thing without feeling any thrill or being entertained once and the reason is simple: I have seen everything this show has to offer a number of times, and many of those times were much, MUCH better. It doesn’t try to be original, it doesn’t try to be a good copy, it just uses the most simple and lazy tropes and calls it a day. This show has nothing but good visuals to offer.

This one is a mixed bag for me. On one hand it surely didn’t follow the usual isekai routine with a bland MC that has zero traits and personality, on the other - it still plays really safe and doesn’t stand out too much. Now let me give you a bit more details.
World/story. An isekai world mass imported unhappy broken people to wage their war only to find out that unhappy broken people can easily go rogue, so someone now needs to solve this new problem. I will not lie that while the whole mass transportation isn’t a new concept, a twist with rogue heroes ... plays pretty good here, at least because I haven’t seen it used for a while now. Just don’t expect the rest of the world to have a unique twist, as it mostly is the usual isekai stuff.
Characters. Finally we have a main character who isn’t a self-insert. A very depressed suicidal writer is indeed a rather unusual hero for a story. Sadly him being an author and suicidal is just a reason to go for a few dark humour jokes, and those ones aren’t really good. Even though I do like dark jokes, those ones are playing… kinda safe? They are the easiest, the most obvious and the most tame jokes you could use in that situation and while some of them managed to make me smile a bit none of them made me laugh, as if it either didn’t land or didn’t hit hard enough. So while we finally have an interesting hero, not much interesting stuff is happening to him. For a secondary cast we got a more standard set of heroes. They have their growth, they have their moments, but those heroes lack the unusualness of the MC so they are rather basic. Villains are mainly of a “misunderstood/mistreated” type, and while the whole concept gets predictable very fast it is still executed on a good enough level to be passable.
Production: well, it isn’t bad. Loved the ending, didn’t notice BGM, VA all did a good job and the visuals are fine - nothing stellar though, as there isn’t really much action to be honest.

Summary. So, did I enjoy the show? A bit but yeah, I did. Can I recommend it? Not really, cause, to be honest, I don’t think there is enough stuff put in it to be worth a recommendation. To put it in another way: this title would be good if it focused more on all the unusual twists it makes, but in its current state it is just another isekai with a few small differences that elevate it from mass produced boring garbage but not enough to leave the “mediocrity zone”.

I’ll be honest with you: I read both the LN and the manga so I already knew that this anime would be bad, the question I had was “how bad”. And let me tell you, even a poorly written source can get hacked.

Story. OP MC who is stuck in VR MMORPG does the usual stuff - tries to look humble (and failing horribly at it), getting praised 24/7 for how cool he is and gathering a fangroup/harem around him. Did you expect anything else?
World. It is a VR MMORPG that SUDDENLY became a “death game” with no explanation given, and after that turned into a ... world with NPCs becoming sentient, basically going from a game to a fantasy world. And no, there was no explanation for this transition too. The setting is as generic as you can imagine, with mediaeval european style, weird monarchy that is totally ok with MCs lack of manners, dungeons with monsters and average NPC in the world being nowhere near the MC and considering him a mythical figure.
Characters. Yeah, empty MC for self insert and girls with their core personality built around liking the MC, that wasn’t really hard to guess. Villains don’t have a personality at all, people who are met in this world are just empty, it feels like for some of them you can’t even choose ONE word to describe them, cause they are way too bland and have nothing going on about them.
Production. It is normally called “production value”, but I see no value in it, period. Not only is it way too basic, with fights being just still images with flashing lights, but it cares so little about the source that right in the first episode you get a “black haired elf” whose hair is blue. So if the creators of the show didn’t care about it, why should I?

Overall: it is just horribly executed stock standard isekai. It has nothing good, original or enjoyable. The reason I didn’t give it a score of 1 is that Re:Monster was in that season, and at least gate isn’t actively revolting.

One word comes to mind when I think about how to describe this anime: disappointing. It has a rather unique setting, but instead of doing something with it the author made the most generic shounen possible. Let me give you a bit more details here.

World. What did I expect after reading the description and watching the first episode? Humans fighting against giant monsters that emerge from time to time and wreak havoc on cities and countries, or maybe something even more dire, like existential threat to humanity (like in AOT). Sadly, in this world real kaijus are more of a background noise, there are no ... special defences or architecture solutions to minimise the damage (walls, some kind of detection perimeters for early warning), cities look exactly like any city in our reality and the only thing in them that acknowledges the existence of kaijus are bunkers/shelters. So even the world itself does not recognise those monsters as anything but nuisance, and that is further reinforced by the ease that special forces show while removing said kaijus. And now the most disappointing part about it - both the hero and the “new deadly kaiju” are humanoids. Yes, just some average height dudes that look weird, like they are monsters (or mutants, or humans in special suits) from any other generic shounen. So what was even the point of taking a setting about giant monsters if you are not going to use them? I have no idea.
Characters. The next disappointing part is the effort that was put into characters, or to be more precise - lack of said effort. If you read the synopsis or just watch the first episode you will see that our MC is 32, he has a broken dream, a broken promise to someone he cared deeply about, a dead end job and nothing in future to look up to - this is some really depressing and heavy background for our protagonist. So please explain to me, how come he behaves EXACTLY as most 14 yo protagonists of shounen anime, constantly making himself look like a fool and a clown when out of combat? Why none of the secondary characters have any personality at all? Even the “best friend” character has only one thing going on in his mind - “I must get stronger”, but his motivation isn’t even unique as most characters in a typical shounen fashion are obsessed with it. Sure, one is cooler, the other is more aggressive, the third is a professional type - but their personalities never go deeper than their talking style, none of them gets development. Considering how many characters are there in this short anime - I never expected them to be deep, but I at least expected something, not replaceable cardboard cutouts with one defining trait. Also the fact that the childhood friend who is the main reason why our MC enrolled into anti-kaiju forces is simply ignored for the most part of the anime (cause “I'll talk to her later, OK?”) is just a cherry on top of all that mess.
Fights. Yes, they look good. However, there is a reason why most shounens use superpowers or melee weapons - and this reason is “logic”. Superpowers are both flashy in style and can easily explain why character X is better than character Y. Similar goes for melee, different schools of combat, different sizes of weapons, so different strong and weak sides. You know what lacks any uniqueness? Standard military gear. So when a character easily kills an enemy with “other type of bullets” for their gun and no one except him switches to those bullets EVER - I just get confused and my already low opinion on the writing falls even lower. When melee weapons appear - they are presented exactly like you would expect from shounen - screaming stupid move names like telling it aloud will make the attack stronger or something. In a fantasy title it would be fine, we are used to it, but this world looks like our modern world does, and blades don’t cut worse if you are not shouting some cringe power move. But wait, I am only speaking about the weapons that the secondary cast uses, what about our main kaiju guy? Welp, he doesn’t get much action. A better way to describe his combat scenes is “you wait for them for far too long and they end way too fast”. I know that there is a large cast that needs their time to shine, but keeping away the main hero from action even though his action scenes are the most interesting this anime has to offer - well, that’s a wrong move.
Pacing/story. While this is the last point of my review, it isn’t the last in terms of importance. I would even say that most people would not care that much about lacking worldbuilding or empty characters if the story did something interesting and managed to capture viewers attention. Sadly the story is like the rest of this anime - generic, basic, dull. Each episode ends with a cliffhanger - and yet said cliffhangers are so obvious you will know EXACTLY what happens next. And the same goes for any and all events - as soon as it gets a bit too peaceful you will think “well, now this thing will happen” - and it does, every time. And since you already know what is going to happen - all the attempts to build up tension just fall flat and achieve nothing, it just feels that you are waiting for the part you already know to end so you can guess the next part and wait for it to end, and that makes the whole anime feel really slow

Overall: this show is too dull even for watching as a background: it is generic and devoid of any interesting details. The only good thing about this show is its opening, so you can check it and stop watching right after - you will not lose anything worthy of your time.

Blue archive is a rather strange anime. First things first: I have never played the source game, but I have some experience both with games like that and their adaptations. So, what does this anime have?

Pros:
Visuals. Unlike most promotional anime, this one looks pretty solid. Not only do the characters themselves look good, but the backgrounds are nice, and even the action is properly animated.
Sound. OP/ED are chill, VAs did a really good job, I have nothing to complain about here.
Characters. They are distinct, they have their own personalities, even though there isn’t much time to get some development - those are still entertaining. I ... will mention that the villains are somewhat meh, but considering those are some game bosses to go through - I didn’t expect them to be good in the first place.

Cons.
Worldbuilding. Where is it? Cause I didn’t find any. 12 whole episodes ended and I still have no clue why the girls have halos, why are they armed, how they are just knocked back after catching a slug from a shotgun to the face, why is there a mix of humans, those halo-girls, some humanlike dogs and robots living in the city in the first place - none of those things is explained. While for a gacha game that has dozens of chapters, events and a lore on the wiki this situation is not a problem, for a short 12 episode anime it is - cause through the whole thing I was confused about the world and this confusion didn’t really go away.

Mixed:
Story. How do I put it? If this anime wants to be an action - this amount of story is not enough, as there isn’t much story to begin with. However in my opinion this is more of a “cute girls doing cute things” show, and for that type of anime story isn’t really required, so I am willing to give Blue Archive a pass and not judge it for lacking a good story.
Fighting scenes. While the animation is good, the structure of the fights is strange. In most fights there are basically 2 stages: nothing happens, heroes are pinned down, enemies are shooting at walls for whatever reason, and after that the main cast says something like “we can win/I have a plan” - and the real combat begins. The second part looks cool and is well animated, but I still wanted to mention the existence of the first part, cause it does feel strange.

Overall: if you have played the game - I can bet that you will like it, cause you already know the world and will not have questions that I had. If you haven’t played the game - your enjoyment will depend on your ability to ignore the holes in the worldbuilding and the story. As for me - I enjoyed the show. It was cute, it was nice and it was fun to watch, even though I still don’t know what the hell is going on in their universe.

Oh well, look, this trashy manga got an adaptation. Why? Who needed it? Wasn’t there anything better to adapt? Who knows, but let me tell you how bad this trash is.
Visuals. Take a look at any picture related to this title. See those humans with a bit of a different colour of skin? Those are supposed to be goblins. Even better, after evolution most of them basically become humans with slightly bigger fangs. If this is not a good enough explanation of how little effort was put into the animation - check anything else. Everything looks bad and cheap. And at some points the combat ... isn’t even shown, here is your “I killed X and got Y from this fight”, a really great “show, don’t tell” implementation, am I right?
Sound. Is it even there? VA did barely any job, and the bgm - I can’t even tell if this anime had any.
Story. Oh boy, finally the worst part. First of all, this whole thing is a “diary” of sorts, so everything is structured like said diary with really abrupt cuts between days. And considering the events I can only guess that this is a self-insert fantasy diary of some edgy 14 yo teen who is REALLY horny but can’t get any female attention. You can’t really impress me with OP “heroes” in the isekai anime that has RPG stats, and watching a show about an all-knowing all-mighty being who just gets skills/power cause he has a UNIQUE ability to absorb stuff through eating isn’t really fun, cause a lot of time is wasted on just naming the things that MC killed, ate and what skills he got from it. Maybe if he actually used half of it - sure, but most of the stuff is just there to bloat the list. Ok, we got through the OP part, what about being horny? Well, I have a question for the author: why didn’t you write and publish this thing as a hentai if it is just a hentai plot with all the action heavily implied, just not shown? For example, our protagonist speedruns 5 human captive girls into Stockholm syndrome in 2 episodes to the point that they beg him for sex. Yes, they beg a demonic looking 2m+ tall ogre with horns (evolution from a goblin, just don’t ask how this works) to have sex with them. Yeah, author, I understand that no real woman will ever ask you this, but it is not the reason to justify unleashing your poor written fanfic on our world. But wait, there is more! After that the “hero” adapts the “it is not rape if she asks for it” mentality aaand… drugs every single captured woman till she breaks from hornyness. At this point MC will mention that he had sex REALLY often, but we all already understand how unsecure the author is so it didn't really surprise me.
Characters. Kidding, did you expect that there would be anything after the previous paragraph? Even MC is simply a vessel of the author's wishes, the rest of the cast are tools of various sorts, be it a tool for world domination, for equipment grind or sex.

Overall/enjoyment. This show is pure trash. It is not fun, it is not entertaining, it is not interesting. It is a waste of time and doesn’t deserve even the lowest rating possible.

While the start of the first season was a rather interesting one, in S2 we are given more like the ending of the first season - a rather ordinary isekai OP MC story with no innovation or effort put in it. Let me just give you a quick rundown so you can go watch something better instead.

Story. Typical OP MC isekai stuff: our hero takes on “impossible” challenges while being constantly praised for being basically godlike. This time “The Hobbit” was taken as the source of inspiration and most of the season is about the journey to a fallen dwarven country to kill a ... dragon. Sadly no creativity was put into making this copy so the entire arc was so generic that not once I was caught off guard and I always managed to predict what will happen in the next scene. While being predictable and well telegraphed is better than Deus Ex Machinae events used to dodge poor writing decisions (there is one those here too though), it is still not a good thing.
Characters. You know how it goes. Old ones don’t really show much, new ones are added to praise our hero even more. Only the party has enough screen time but I struggle to say that they had serious development (with the exception of the newbie who went from a wimp to a battle hardened veteran in a span of like 2 episodes).
Art. I will say it looks cheap. Some things look horribly stiff in motion, some scenes are just ugly, but mostly the visuals are “servisable”.
Enjoyment. Well, is it even here? The show is so shallow, generic and forgettable that it doesn’t really feel like I even enjoyed it, more like “I consumed it” and moved on.

So yeah, overall I can only see fans of the show that are OK with any adaptation enjoying the second season. The rest of the potential viewers? Just watch something else.

This season continues to show how cutting content and worldbuilding makes a “good enough to be enjoyable” source to a dull bland mess. So, what exactly are you signing in for when you start watching this season?
-Visuals. They are mostly fine, but there are enough cheap looking scenes, and tre CGI is still ugly, clunky and looks horrible.
-Sound. Nothing impressive, nothing memorable.
-Plot. Horribly rushed. As I have already mentioned, the whole season follows the rule “take the source, cut details, stitch together whatever is left”. The result - most of the events feel rushed, some of them completely lose sense and weight. Most of ... the fights feel like the MC doesn’t even care about the fight as he just wins without trying. And considering that some of the fights in this season SHOULD be tense as the enemies were pretty hard - the overall feel goes into the usual “generic immortal OP MC”.
-Characters. To make the “generic” feel even more obvious we are given a whole village of side characters. While it could work in a longer anime where those characters have some development and actual screen time, right here it feels more like a fan group or a missed opportunity. The characters from this fan group are lucky if they are even mentioned, as most of them are somewhere in the background. While this was the case for the source material too, in written form it was more of a background workload for our MC. But much worse is the state of the main heroes, as they, on one hand, are finally given SOME development, but on the other hand the quality of said development is abysmal. One is reduced to a joke character, two others have basically the same edgy-dark story but under different sauce.

To be honest I wish I had more to say, but the problem is that without the details that were mercilessly butchered, the shield hero is just a bland, generic isekai show. All of the positive traits were lost in adaptation, what you get is something that you have already seen thousands of times. Just don’t waste your time, read the LN if you are still interested in the title instead.

To be honest at this point I don't even want this series to get another season. I liked S1 a lot, S2 was disappointing, but there was at least SOME hope things would go better at S3. Well, it didn’t. So here is a quick list for you if you are considering if this anime is worth your time.

-Visuals. Yes, I know I am late to the party, I just thought that I could get used to it. I couldn’t. Everything looks like it is some of those “cute girls doing cute things” slice of life anime on an extreme budget, but we have a ... reverse isekai here, with some magical stuff going on. Most details are gone, expressiveness is gone, personalities are no longer seen. Even if females look tolerable with that artstyle, all male characters, demons and beasts are just a laughing stock. Obviously no great combat scenes to be found here.
-Plot. I don’t know if it is even here at this point. The story repeats itself yet again, with half of the show being old stale jokes about demon king working at Mac and being poor, the other half tries to be action packed fantasy stuff - but at this point it lost all its novelty, the reasoning behind actions is no longer impactful, the combat scenes themselves look dull and pathetic. Overall it just feels like there is much more bland boring stuff than things that actually matter - and it kills all your interest.
-Characters. There is really nothing to say here, even though this season has some major inner conflict for the hero to resolve and shows us the motivation of the demon king - it was all way too predictable and given to us in such a lame way that it is just impossible to care.
-Sound. Even though voice actors try hard - their effort is put onto barren land: there is no animation to amplify the emotions, to show the weight of their words. And apart from dialogues there are no sounds that weren’t taken from a free sound sample library. Even OP and ED feel generic and empty.
-Enjoyment? Well, none. The show was way too bland and boring, after finishing it I simply can’t remember a single good moment that made me feel something.

To be honest, I just wish that the show stayed dead. Instead of 2 seasons of continued interesting story we got 2 seasons of cheaply made bland and generic show that was done solely to milk the fans. Don’t waste your time.

Wow, a few years too late but we got the continuation of Horimiya. Well, calling it a continuation may be a bit of a stretch. We have more of the character and the same title name, but I have no clue why this is called Horimya. Well, let me make a bit of a list to make it easier for everyone.
-Romance. It is dead. I think nobody forgot that the culmination of romance was in the main story and the episodes after that were just some kind of fillers that missed their train and came after the show had ended. And now we have an ... ENTIRE SEASON of leftovers. “Well, maybe they decided to wrap up other arcs for side characters?” - a good question, sadly the answer is a big fat no. The entire season has barely enough romance for one episode but spreads it on the entire season. Thats why I hesitate to call it Horimiya, as there is no real romance between the main couple. Barely anything happens, barely anything moves, when you get scraps of said romance - you just feel cheated and wasting time instead of watching something else.
-Humour. It is horrible. At best it could barely make me smile, but most of the time jokes are either completely flat and unfunny or simply inappropriately bad, the kind that makes you think “oh God why, who wrote this and who laughs at it?”
-Slice of life. Somehow 13 episodes of barely nothing are less eventful than even my own life: all of the events were straight from a “generic stuff list”, none of them had weight, they were just decorations for another stale joke. I have no clue how someone can make a generic school slice of life THIS boring, but the creators of this anime showed their expertise.
-Character progression. Kidding, there is none so let's move on.
-Well, this one is obvious from the previous points - but the PACING is horrible. Too little content, almost no important events, next to none development - and to add insult to injury - most of the scenes feel disconnected from each other, others feel stitched together. The story is simply uneven and patched. Even the pacing of some dialogues is off, with strange pauses, it almost felt like the voice actors see the script for the first time.

The biggest problem of this anime is the fact that it isn’t even a story, but “pieces” that were cut from the main story to cram it into one season. As a result, “pieces” is nothing more than filler episodes for the anime that ended ages ago and that only hardcore fans care about. If it was made as OVAs for the main story, if it was merged with the main story - we would have 2 perfectly fine seasons of Horimiya. Instead we had one rushed season and this discarded pile of trash that has no value and gives no enjoyment to viewers.