Review of Absolute Duo

tl;dr: A pretty generic battle school rom-com with a plot that hasn't gotten moving at all yet, but that does a good job with characters with what little it does with them. This anime has gotten a lot of terrible reviews, and while I don't think that it's amazing, I don't think its all that terrible either, though that could be influenced by me going in with low expectations. The story is certainly really generic, being a standard battle school harem rom-com. However, I thought that it was a solid enough implementation. The tone of the school is different from most battle schools, being somewhat edgierthough not too crazy, in that there's a certain level of craziness that should come from being a school dedicated to making high school students fight each other that other shows sort of sidestep but this embraces to a degree. I also really liked the characters in that the personalities were interesting and the relationship setting a good dynamic that lead to a lot of good character interactions. Though ultimately, it only really fleshed out and gave development to a couple of them who got developed solidly enough, but left a lot really mysterious about most of them, of especial note being the protagonist about whom there are a lot of hints about but nothing that really fleshes them out at all, which made the characters a lot harder to get invested in. As for the larger plot itself regarding the school and absolute duo, that too felt that it was greatly being hampered by the sense of mystery. There some level of explanation given for why things are happening, but so much is left mysterious that it isn't clear at all what the overall goals are or where the story is headed in this regard, so while it does feel like the anime encompasses an entire arc, it isn't really clear what the purpose of the arc was or how it advanced things in any meaningful way.

In terms of art style I really liked it and what they did with it, but it felt pretty lacking in terms of animation, especially during action. The CG was pretty bad. The OP was really solid in terms of visuals and audio, and all the EDs were amazing in terms of visuals being really pretty, and had good audio.