Title really says it all. If i was in stuck in a waiting room at the hospital or something, this would be (marginally) better than staring at the wall in silence. It feels like a low effort crapshoot that would have been better served never making it past the conceptual stage. When I first finished I was going to put it at like a 5/10, but I sat with it a little longer and decided no, this isn't just thoroughly mediocre as befits a 5/10, it crosses the line into something that actively annoys me, and it manged to convince me to make my first review on Anilist just to say so.
Visually, it's one of the most thoroughly mediocre animes you'll ever see, which occasionally dips into outright ugly- it's hard to believe that this really came from Production I.G, who have shown they are capable of far more visually pleasing anime. I can chalk this up only to pure laziness on the part of the animators- and you know what? I don't blame them, if I was working on such an uninspired story, I wouldn't want to put my best effort into it either.
That takes us to the plot- it is a half hearted and poorly executed rip off of the very solid Mass Effect 2 plot- I am going to get into spoilers here, but given how bad this anime is it doesn't really matter if you get spoiled on it. HOWEVER, if you intend to play the games and have not, this will also spoil parts of those, and they are very much worth playing for yourself.
For some reason, they try to copy Mass Effect 2 beat for beat, even forcing in every major discovery and plot twist from 2 despite them making 0 sense. Vega and his team independently discover the existence of the human reaper, the identities of the collectors as protheans (which they discover by using a Prothean terminal that only Shep should have been able to use, since having the Prothean Cipher was an inportant plot point in the games), they make their own antidote to the collector's paralysing drones, they even have their own Suicide Mission segment which is blatantly copied from the Me2 finale, where Vega enters the collector's ship to save the kidnapped colonists- however, if you've played Mass Effect 3, you will recall that Vega says he was forced to make a decision as to whether to save the colonists or recover intel on the collectors, and he chose the intel. Yes, thats right, the colonists all die anyway so Vega's team can recover some info that is almost immediately rendered worthless by Shep defeating the Collector's during Mass Effect 2. This plot worked much better as a piece of backstory in ME3, and not as a fleshed out story (or at least, attempting to be fleshed out) with such a painstakingly anticlimactic ending.
Oh, and also the Collector's are like, 20 feet tall for some reason in this.
Most of the voice actors are painfully mediocre, with only a handful of exceptions. Freddie Prinze Jr reprises his role from ME3 as Vega and is one of the only decent VA's.
Not that I can blame the VA's for doing a poor job with such painfully lame, cliche writing. This really has no redeeming points. I am a die hard Mass Effect fan and I went in thinking that even if it was totally mid, I would still like it since I am a sucker for anything Mass Effect, but this is just crap.
2.5 out of 3 users liked this review
