This anime has the standard battle game premise that involves a group of people being given supernatural powers, and then forced to fight each other in a systematic fashion with a variety of different rules and match types. As far as this season gets, absolutely no background has been provided on who’s running things or what their goals is. There’s not even a hint of mystery or foreshadowing. It doesn’t seem to touch the subject at all. As such, the plot is centered entirely on the fights themselves.
The protagonist, Akira Shiroyanagi, has an ability that’s a bit unique, though what it is and the specifics of how it work could be considered spoilers so I’ll be vague about it. It’s an ability that requires mind games and manipulating his opponents to use effectively. Akira is the logical type that’s always thinking ahead and trying to predict what his opponents are thinking and how they’ll react to him, so he ends up acclimating to his power rather quickly and uses it quite effectively. This anime also has a pretty strong emphasis on characters keeping powers hidden or mispresenting them in order to trick their opponent, so it fits into the broader dynamics pretty well.
Akira has somewhat of a character arc that starts with him being pretty cold and treating everything like a game but he eventually comes to care about his allies. This character arc is significantly advanced through his budding relationship with a girl named Yuuri. Yuuri and a lot of other characters also get some background that helps explain their personality and motivations. Still, none of any of this is all that strong. There’s not all that much depth to anyone. There are characters that you’ll probably find likable because they’re cool, funny, or easy to empathize with. But I didn’t feel anyone was all that well written.
The anime starts off with 1v1 matches. This part is interesting due to how Akira is still figuring out how his power works and has to experiment in the middle of actual battles, and also because this is the point where his ability to use his power is most limited. After that it transitions into a large scale group conflict. Having an ally he can trust removes a significant number of the limitations on his ability and the need for psyching out his opponent and such, which makes things much simpler for him for a bit. But the anime writes around that by separating him from said ally, and thus it goes back to him having to use mind games and well thought out plans to achieve victory.
These battles aren’t amazingly well written. However, the variety of powers and the fast pacing is enough to keep things pretty interesting from beginning to end. It overall flows really well and though there aren’t any major twists, it’s good at handling the smaller ones. Also, while there is a lot of death and it can certainly be serious at times, there’s a surprising amount of comedy, especially early on. So all in all it was a pretty fun ride. The ending obviously gets nowhere near the ending to the full story, but it ends an arc while also showing off a lot of interesting elements in where the story will go in the future. Thus, I was pretty satisfied with it.
The art and animation were decent enough for the most part, though never really good. The biggest exception to that was the ‘final boss battle’ so to speak, which very heavily involves really bad 3DCG and was jarringly awful looking. The character designs were solid enough. The OP and ED were both pretty solid in terms of the songs and visuals. The soundtrack was also decent.
