Review of I'm Standing on a Million Lives

This anime is below average. It is a very confusing anime, it does not execute many things right. The theme of the anime is discovering who you are, or learning/having a deeper look into yourself. I will give a score for each element of the show along with my thoughts on it. Please keep in mind that if I write any spoilers I will put them between *'s. Frist of all, the story. The story is honestly bad, or at least badly written. You know nothing about the world they get sent to, we don't know why they got sent there, we don't even trulyunderstand why they were chosen. On top of that, there is no end goal for us to look to, which makes the whole thing seem pointless. It feels like some sort of setup that would all make sense in later seasons, but it is so poorly executed that you are just left going with the flow without really learning anything, and gets more and more frustrating little by little. 2/10 for the story.

The art is mediocre. It feels low budget and sort of like cutting edges where you can, which is understandable for a show in its first season and a studio that hasn't produced much work. It is not bad by any means, but it is also not good, let alone amazing or groundbreaking stuff. Overall, 5/10 for me.

The soundtrack/music is a little worse than the art. It is also budget, and as mediocre as you can get. Nothing stands out, no ost really enhanced my experience of any scene, whether a serious, comic, or evil scene. The only reason I give it a little lower than art is because the only times I remember the ost vividly was when I thought "what was that noise" lol. That did not happen much, but the few times it did it took me out of the scene completely. 4/10.

Finally, the characters. In a show where the story gives you nothing at all, those shows typically depend on the characters to keep the show alive. Sadly enough, the characters in this anime are also badly designed. First of all, every main character in every story should have some sort of defining characteristic or personality trait, a sort of "backbone" to the character. However, with the show's theme being what it is, we get to see Yuuskue discover himself with us. But that process is executed in a really bad and confusing way. You go several episodes in a row with Yuusuke displaying a certain persona, then go the next several episodes with him displaying the opposite persona, then you also have the episodes where he contradicts himself several times within that one episode. It leaves the viewer very confused as to his personality, because whenever he does an action he seems very sure of himself and with no hesitation, so you naturally assume that that is a part of his characteristics, only for him to flip around a few episodes later, and with no setup/lead up at all. You only get to learn about the main characteristic of him at the very end, which actually makes things a lot more understandable, and explains a lot and actually hits kinda hard. *(spoiler) This main characteristic is "who am I?", it is what makes up the persona of this character*. However, for 11 episodes before that, you are completely confused and lost. As for the others in the party, they are honestly pathetic attempts at characters. None of their backstories were compelling, they were either super generic or straight up delusional. On top of that none of them are decisive, useful, or important in any way. *Several times I saw them die and I never really felt anything for them at all*. Overall, I would rate the characters 3/10, and without that last bit explaining the main character, it would have honestly been a pathetic 1/10. Even with that last bit, I think it came too late.

To sum up, this show has no real identity. It has no definitive mood. In most shows you see a certain mood, whether it is dark with some comic relief, or lovey-dovey with some serious moments and so on. However, this show has no one main mood, instead its equal parts several moods which leads to confusion and eventually frustration at the characters. It also has no world building, no character growth or development, and the relationship between the characters does not grow at all. The idea and theme behind the show are really interesting, but the execution is a confused mess that causes watchers to break their attention often or straight up get bored. The only thing that kept me going was seeing how the main character completely changes personality every few episodes, and that kept me interested enough to keep going to the end. It led to a relatively good ending compared to the mess that is the show, but now that I am out of it, it feels like the whole show was badly executed, with A LOT of wrong choices made.