This review has a spoiler-free section and a spoiler section.
All I can really say about Wonder Egg Priority is: what happened?
The first episode of WEP is probably the best first episode across pretty much anything I've ever seen. It's surreal, it's melancholic, it establishes character wonderfully, it pulls at your heartstrings, and it's unsettling. The tone is clear from the get-go: this is a show that will handle a lot of delicate topics and it asks you to come to it with nothing short of sincerity. This review will be hard for me because the first episodes of WEP are SO strong and meticulously, lovingly crafted, and then it just kind of...falls apart at the end.
The best takeaway I can offer (before I jump into a more intensive review) is to watch episode 1 and then stop. There's no point getting sucked into the rest of the mystery of the story when WEP doesn't deliver. I walked away from WEP mostly thinking, "what was the point of all that?"
I will say that Wonder Egg has some of the most incredible visuals and framing in anime. The way some scenes are shot is incredibly masterful. The use of color is amazing. The character designs are charming and shoujo/magical-girl-esque while still feeling very much like a type of girl you'd see on the street.
The main girls are a very colorful cast, each with their own personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and traumas, and watching them bond and come together was nothing short of wholesome. The show loses itself at the end by turning away from its characters and trying to concoct a narrative along the likes of Lain or Madoka Magica, but where Lain succeeds as a character analysis of one very intricate girl, and Madoka Magica wins as a plot-intensive story furnished with fun characters, WEP just doesn't really do any of that.
# Spoiler review begins here.
Spoiler, click to view
My biggest complaint about WEP, as mentioned, is the turn away from its characters. Personally, I was really hoping that WEP would shape up to being the world's most unconventional form of group therapy as the girls became closer friends, grew into their strengths more, supported each other, and then ultimately were able to leave behind their friends who had killed themselves to move towards a better future. I was hopeful this story would be about an analysis of grief and how it molds us but doesn't define us. I was hoping this would be a tale of unlikely friends who bring out the best in each other and learn how to help others.
This didn't do any of that. I get there's a 13th episode coming out in June, but given the direction of the show, I can't see myself liking it much. The turn to this being a story of Frill accessing the multiverse (ok...) to tempt various girls to their deaths as a sort of revenge just seems so bizarre and out of pocket to me. The plot tries really hard to set up a backstory for the REAL reasons of all these suicides, as if girls killing themselves isn't good enough and they needed a real "bad guy" to direct their attention to, but it just comes off as sort of insensitive to me. At the beginning WEP was about confronting all sorts of traumas and horrible things that lead to suicide and understanding the why and how to move forward. Now it's placing a big mortal enemy behind all of that, as if taking down Frill will somehow remedy people from ever killing themselves. It feels like a disservice to the rest of the narrative.
I don't really know what else to say. I don't really feel like I disliked WEP, but I was definitely let down by it, especially as the first 7 or so episodes were really shaping the show up to be one of my all-time favorites. To be given that and then walk away with a hollow feeling is a strange sort of disappointment.
Giving it a 5/10 feels wrong, but giving it a score any higher or lower than that feels equally wrong. WEP just is. It happened, I watched it, and that's about all I can really offer. But I wanted to talk about the weird emptiness it offered me, so what better place to complain than a review on an anime site? lmao.
EDIT 6/30: My Priority just came out and given the generally negative reviews it received, I'm not going to waste my time with watching it. But since I mention the upcoming special episode in this review, I thought I'd at least add a blurb about it here.