Everyone say it with me: "FAILED POTENTIAL". This show had a good chunk of the anime community clamoring for more after the first few episodes. How could a witch flying around on an anti-tank rifle killing Nazis possibly be a bad thing? Well, it turns out that even the most novel or interesting of new intellectual properties can turn to shit given enough time. To be completely fair, Izetta was a slow burn when it comes to pure combustion into garbage, but I was naive to ignore the signs that showed up as early as the second episode. Overabundance of "A-1 face" character designs, steadily increasing amounts of fanservice to the point of absurdity, a growing amount of plot-convenient asspulls, and a glossing over of the ever-important political interactions (this is alternate WW2 after all) are some of the biggest shortcomings that this show came to present. The first few episodes were light on these though, and I'd be remiss if I didn't admit that I had bought into the show entirely at that point. You can check my season previews to see just how excited for it I was and how much promise I thought this series had (which it did), only for how dejected and sad I am here to tell you how it all turned out in the end. If you're still interested enough in the premise to check this one out, just know that although the action scenes are pretty good and well choreographed, it's not enough to save the show from the stark contrast between them and the political/fanservice/yuribait segments.

"What do you mean yuribait segments?", you might ask. Well, this show was determined to incite a lesbian relationship between our two main female characters because it figured that it just couldn't be interesting or well-done enough on its own to warrant selling enough merchandise to make the property profitable. Many a scene of Finé and Izetta laying on a bed or eating lunch together was enough to make me just want to puke with how the series' incredibly poor attempt to make this "subtle". Let's not even talk about the episode eleven hamfisted euphemism for sex (complete with orgasm) that not even Disney could have gotten away with without raising eyebrows. Yuri is more than fine in my book, but you have to do it right. If you're just going to bait it, do it like Hibike, but otherwise you better just go full Sakura Trick, because everything else is just going to make your "product" feel like garbage for any normal person to watch. Actually, I think that's a great way to sum up my feelings on Izetta as a whole. It's a product, and was designed to be that from the beginning. It never had any aspirations of being art, like Flip Flappers obviously did and succeeded in. What's sad is that I don't even think Izetta succeeded in being a successful product, with originally great, albeit generic, visuals and soundtrack grinding to a mediocre halt at about the halfway mark.

I'd avoid this one unless you really just want to see how the premise plays out (poorly) and can let the bad stuff roll off. It's the only way you'll be able to stomach the rest of this series.