THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN A FEW SPOILERS
I love the Toaru series, I really do, I have seen all the spin offs, read the novels, read the manga, will watch the third season of railgun and will watch the Accelerator spin off. Despite this I will be giving this particular adaptation of the show a low review, not because the source material is bad, but because its just a terrible adaption. If you want to actually enjoy this series, please just read the damn novels. This adaptation was basically JC Staff butchering the plot, stitching it back together incorrectly, throwing out important parts because hey we need to save budget for Misaka’s rear view camera angles, and then setting it on fire. Anyway, now that I cleared that up we can get onto the actual review.
Story: 4
I have never seen such a poorly executed story in anime before, and I have seen that one isekai anime involving a Kirito clone and a smart phone. Nothing in the story actually makes sense, and this is from a novel reader who knows exactly what is supposed to be going on. The anime was already very fast paced in season 1 and 2 and those 2 seasons adapted 12 novels combined, while this season tried to adapt 10 at once, this lead to a great portion of the plot being cut out.
The battle Royale Arc, one of the best arcs in the novel, with mind games, extremely well written fights, great conflicting motivations, was turned into an endless blood bath. What happened was a bunch of characters you don’t care about got killed, some soldiers got shot up, and all for a bunch of reasons that they don’t expand beyond a single line here and there.
The British Halloween arc? One of the best political stories I seen in an LN, one that successfully predicted Britain in real life leaving the EU before it actually happened, was turned into a half ass coup by some bratty girl who was really tsundere about Great Britain.
Don’t even get me started on the acqua of the back, arc with more focus on Misaka’s ass than the motivations on WHY acqua was in the city, how he got there, when in the timeline he got there, and why Academy City dint put him down as fast as possible.
Also the exposition in this season was some of the worst, it was already bad in previous seasons, when they start explaining character abilities, half of it sounds like chuuni nonsense someone on drugs came up with, the other half shouldn’t even be included since it wastes a good portion of the episode with someone just talking. Would it be so hard to just simply explain their abilities, since clearly going into the origins of the abilities in depth won’t work in an ANIME, it works well in novel because they can dedicate 3 pages to something like that. They also don’t do this once, they do it like 30 times, every time some new character shows up.
Art: 3
The animation is honestly disgusting, and I have seen shows released in 1998 that are much better looking, I am serious, we have scenes that look worse and more broken than that bad berserk adaption a few years back. The fights which in the novel were described as shattering mountains, tearing space, explosions in every colors as reality was distorted, had no weight to them at all. Most of the fights were just the characters talking, them using their abilities 2 or 3 times and then eventually one of them backed down or got knocked out.
The effects for the abilities looked terrible, curtana was supposed to cut through space, what were those stupid cubes of jello???? Or how Accelerator’s black wings were not consistent between this season and last season, heck it wasn’t even consistent in the 2 fights this season alone. Also, what the heck were the gods right seat abilities, seat of the left had some weird look blade that moved slowly through the air, acqua’s speed was downplayed the entire time, fiammas holy right looked so ugly and did not do any of the cool sounding stuff it was supposed to, like teleport to the target and knock them out without force, oh by the way his sword was supposed to be 40KM long and on FIRE.
This being said, the only reason the art gets a 3 instead of a 1 was because of the second opening, after seeing it though it made me even more angry, how can they make an opening so great visually, and then make a show that looks so awful after. The opening visuals were possibly top 10 out of 100s of series I seen, if JC staff is capable of that, then it’s clear it was not even a lack of talent but just laziness on why the show looked this garbage.
The sound: 8
The openings were absolutely amazing I will admit that, and the soundtrack is as good as ever, I guess they managed to get one thing right. I have nothing bad to say here, the sound effects used were interesting even if it was not consistent with the previous season, and I really enjoyed the soundtrack that played during major fights.
Characters: 2
Accelerator became the epitome of edge and stupid justifications instead of a well written anti hero, the MC became an endless platitude generator who quotes basic lines about justice and punches out his enemies without understanding their view point, and hamazura apparently survives every situation by luck. This is essentially how the anime adaption portrayed them, one dimensional cardboard characters with no nuance, who can’t think beyond the most obvious solutions to their issues, and who win by luck or plot armor. I will tell you that the novel does not do this and the characters are much more likable but I think I already said this enough, the character writing and development in the series is just awful.
Another issue in the series is that they add like 100 new characters without developing any of them, some of them genuinely have great character designs, interesting abilities, and look really cute or cool. However, we will never get to know them because they either die, or are forgotten about in the next arc, and you don’t care much about them because the show skipped any significant development or backstories for the characters.
Also outside of fan service some of the most popular characters got no screen time, we dint even get to see Misaka do anything substantial or have any of the Academy city students show up outside of 3 minutes of screen time.
Enjoyment: 5
I really wanted to enjoy this series, since the source material is something I love, and I was looking forward to seeing this anime. However I just could not get myself to like it for the most part, I know the story from the novel and could barely follow it, I feel sorry for anime only viewers who likely understood nothing through the entire show. Now I wouldn’t say I hated all of it, but a majority of it except some highlight scenes were pretty bad. I used to like JC staff as a studio, however after this adaptation, and whatever they are doing with Date a Live 3, they are garbage to me. All I can hope for is that the railgun season 3 director manages to put on a good show despite the studio, like he did last time with railgun s.
Overall: 5
I give this show an 5, it was really hard deciding whether or not to give this show a lower score since it was very bad and disappointing, however I will give it a 5 just because I love the source series, and because I rarely ever give a show under a 7, if its under a 7 on my list it means the show it hot garbage and I would never recommend it.
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