Review of Darwin's Game
This anime is the type of anime that people have completely opposing opinions on. One side will say that the anime is pretty good, not the best, but good. The other will say that the entire anime was crap. I, unfortunately, fall into the latter. I won't lie, I did enjoy this anime, but I enjoy a lot of crappy things. Mainly because I never am picky of the anime I watch and can enjoy almost everything. But I can see why people disliked it. Story: 5/10 In summary, the story follows a boy named Sudo Kaname who found himself stuck in a mobile game called Darwin'sgame. The game grants its players special powers upon registration, because, well, why the hell not? It'd be boring to watch a bunch of kids murder each other without powers. He ends up getting himself in an event, and ends up making a clan which he leads.
Call me picky, but the fact that no one questioned the important stuff pissed me off. Like, how did they make the civilians of an entire town leave for three days for a game, without any outsider noticing? I get that the characters were more focused on survival, but this wasn't even brought up. It was like the writers wanted to avoid the entire topic in general.
All in all, the story was plot generic. The execution of the plot was pretty generic too. The intro and outro pretty much spoiled who was going to die. Most of it was predictable. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll leave it at that.
Art: 4/10
I'll say for a record: I loved the unique shading of colours in this show. But the rest was in the bottom of tolerable. The characters' faces continuously change with every shot. The body proportions were off in many scenes. They were so noticeable that they ruined the enjoyment of the show.
Sound: 7/10
ASCA strikes again with her talent, this time showing it off through Chain. Chain, the intro of Darwin's game was amazing. The ending, Alive by Ayano Mashiro, was an awesome song too. It definitely did its best to reflect the intended aesthetic and theme of Darwin's Game, which the anime failed to reach.
The soundtracks were good, but they weren't memorable.
Meanwhile, the voice actors and actresses did a wonderful job. Wang's voice actor was amazing, and Kaname's and Sui's also did great.
Character: 2/10
Character personalities were stereotypical and bland. Their actions were extremely predictable. First, we had our edgy Gary Stu Kaname, our main character who found himself in the middle of Darwin's Game and somehow became the best player on it. Then, we have this blonde girl I can never memorize the name of. The blonde girl was obviously meant for fanservice. She was our typical yandere. Nothing more, nothing less.
Then is the supporting characters. We had a Florist guy, who, thankfully, was a tolerable character at first then changed his outlook on everything for absolutely no reason. We have a guy with anger issues. That's literally it, all he did in this season was shoot and scream at people and accompany Kaname. We had an Info Broker, who was the brains of the team. She was your typical quiet and stoic girl. We have a shy girl named Sui who you could've replaced with a brick that had the power to control water and it wouldn't have made a difference, and her brother, Sota, who you could've replaced with a brick that had the power to control ice and it wouldn't have made a difference.
We weren't given the backstories or goals of characters rather than "survive Darwin's Game". For characters that had backstories, it didn't really describe them. It was like the characters were slapped together with something that contained death just for the sake of it.
Enjoyment: 7/10
Like I mentioned, I tend to enjoy watching a lot of anime, and that contains crappy anime as well. The plot was okay, the art was okay, the music was pretty good, the characters were pretty bad, but oh well. It's not like this show was a nightmare. I never did physically recoil out of cringe. I was actually looking forward to the next episode. Not as much as other shows this season, but I did genuinely enjoy it.
Overall: 5/10
This show isn't the best show, but it's far from the worst. I suggest that if you want to watch this, then go ahead. If you don't want to, you won't be missing out.