Review of Darwin's Game
(some spoilers ahead) Terrible Pacing: A character will start monologuing in a do-or-die situation for a few minutes and the antagonists will just stay there and do nothing (this happened twice with the Florist and then with Ace at the warehouse). The show will spend 4-5 minutes on a analogy (the 3 pigs one) with little pay off and also add dialogue that goes nowhere (the importance of gem rarity). The story is running to get to season two and thus leaping and cutting non-essential ingredients that could add flavor to this anime (From removal of backgrounds of characters like Banda-kun, reduction of how horrifyingthe Florist's abilities are, retconning essential characters and putting others in a literal shot in the background from a expository scene), but also at the same time spoiling stuff from future story arcs and adding an unnecessary character that ruins a moment that the main character experiences at a crucial point.
The Animation: It's enjoyable, mostly in the first half of the show. There are parts where the animation deeps in quality tho. The worst has to be episode 9 (the first fight was terribly animated with characters explaining the fight while it was happening and the second one was rushed so fast in order to get to the next episode). In fact the fighting parts of this anime (aside from the second-half of the first episode and some of the fast fights here-and-there) were pretty terrible and sometimes continuity breaking (the fight between the karate-eyepatch and sonic comes to mind).
The Artstyle: I didn't mind the character designs that much, but I couldn't get over the terrible blur and some of the constant light effects, especially when it was day or a lit room.
The Soundtrack: I don't think it's bad, but it wasn't fitting at all for me, there was like a constant disconnect between what was happening visually and whenever a track started to play. Also, I couldn't get over that terrible loud dubstep song, that was godawful for me.
The Voice Acting Coordination: The voice actors sounded excellent and did a great job, but I feel like in some (minor) tense parts they were underperforming due to lack of direction.
It's a good ad for the manga, but I don't know if anyone will like this after reading the manga. There were a lot of positives that I didn't mention due to the huge negatives that I experienced. The clever writing is mostly buried in the rushed story and the good animated scenes are buried in the clunky scene to scene animation and terrible fight scenes. I don't know.