It really feels like a 4-episode story stretched beyond comprehension. Characters endlessly repeat the same points, sometimes even within the same episode, as if it were written for viewers who can’t retain information for more than five minutes. The pacing is painfully slow, and the dialogue is so redundant that you could skip entire scenes and not miss a single development. It’s like the creators had a few ideas, realized they needed twelve episodes, and decided the best approach was to say the same thing over and over. I did end up skipping at 3 second intervals so I could just read the subtitles instead of waiting for the characters to finish their lines.

It all seems promising at the start but loses steam almost immediately. Before any plot point has a chance to resolve, it's been reiterated at least five times, leaving you bored and waiting for an inevitable, predictable conclusion. It’s not a slow burn. It’s just slow, and not in a way that builds tension or character depth. It’s the kind of slow that makes you check the episode timer repeatedly, wondering how much longer tou have to endure.

I feel like there’s a glaring lack of oversight here. It’s obvious that money was thrown at an idea, and nobody bothered to ask if the execution was actually any good. It probably cost over a million dollars to make this. Where is the quality control in this industry? The lack of care in writing, pacing, and editing is depressing. It’s as if they assumed the mere presence of familiar anime tropes would carry the show, but all it does is make it feel derivative. And I'm actually fine with derivative. I honestly don't care if its a trope monster reskinned to death. Just.. don't stretch out stories arbitrarily. It's awful to sit through, and it must have been really awful for all the people who worked so hard to make this.

Nothing about this series is fresh or original. We’ve seen these characters before, heard these voices, and watched these dynamics play out in countless other shows, often done much better. To make it worse, the overarching story is regurgitated at least twice per episode as if the audience is incapable of following a basic narrative. Watching this is like having someone repeat the same tired joke over and over, expecting you to laugh every time. (Which, to be fair, is a problem in almost any anime. You can find this issue in pretty much every top rated show from the last few years)

You could argue that rehashing is the cornerstone of this industry. But you have to do it well. There are plenty of shows that just look like they ran a whole script through a thesaurus bot and sent it. But that doesn't mean they can't be good

Look, I don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. I liked the art, I liked the actors performances. It's just a shame how it all came together so poorly. It wasn't a bad story, it was just told terribly. It really doesn't deserve this many words.

I apologize in advance for this analogy, maybe don't read it if you haven't eaten yet. But I can't shake this thought so I'm going to put it here because it's all you needed to know:

Imagine you have a really nice high quality steak. Dry aged, perfectly cooked. These are the good parts of the anime. Now imagine yuo have one of those big Deli sized bologna sausages. I mean the really large ones that are thicker than your arm. You cut the whole thing up in large cubes and put it in a bowl. Then you take one of those offbrand mayyonaise jars from a large department store and dump in the whole container. Mix it together and you have a wonderfully delectable bologna mayonnaise salad. That is the rest of this anime. Good enough to give a dog diarrhea. The first bites are steak, then more and more its just chunks of bologna drenched in mayo. You keep going because that steak was good, surely there has to be some more. But in the end your stomach is full of deli meat and the bits of steak just don't make up for it anymore.

Do you really want to spend your time fishing out bits of high quality steak from that bologna mayonnaise salad? That's what it feels like to watch this.

I'm going to give it to your straight, like a bologna sausage that is made from 100% bologna: