Review of Listeners

Spoiler free article: A short description that's just a bit longer than normal synopsis to give you rough idea what to expect from this anime. Conclusion for TL;DR at the end of the articles. Reading time: 3 minutes read Review: Facepalm. This is what I got from this anime multiple times, at first I'm intrigued with the promising premises, but after watching 2-3 episodes, I facepalmed, for the first time, because somehow, they successfully turned the interesting premise to some generic story, they didn't expand the amazing worlds, I don't know why they didn't tapped into this potential, but I still didn't gave up hope, I kept watching,to be facepalmed again, this time with a chair...This anime didn't improve, it regress, they introduced a problems, that everyone who have watched a couple anime already know not only how will it ends, but also how they get to that ends, so it's predictable, but it should be somewhat interesting right? Nope, because along the way the also succeeded in introducing unrealistic plot holes, and they thing I dread the most, the blatant usage of plot armor. I mean, at least, if you want to use plot armor, make up some reason to back it up, even though it's unrealistic, but this anime is too lazy for it, that they didn't even give any reason to the viewers. They paced it weirdly too, they time skipped on the moment you least expected, the back and forth are also confusing.

The visuals albeit have a few charming points, it have an even more flaws. The world building are interesting, that I must admit, along with the interesting character designs, it's not a really outstanding one, but it's definitely not a generic looking characters. But that's it, that's all I can praise in this department, the other are way below average compared to other anime. First of all, I didn't dread the usage of CGI, especially in action genre like this, but use it only if you've mastered the technology, this one clearly haven't and showed that they used this just to save budget by applying it on literally (almost) everything. The weird things is that, despite the heavy usage of CG technology, the anime still fall in the choppy anime category, why the animation aren't smooth for most of the casees? I don't know either... Also one of the goal of using CGI is that to save time, so that animator didn't need to draw a highly detailed item many times, but only one time, so I expected a highly detailed model, but no, not even the models are highly detailed, the building, the robots, the environments, nothing... Not to mention the battles, is that even a battles? It's more like a staring contest with minimum movements...

The theme songs are okay, they're not bad, but it's just too underwhelming for an anime with musical theme to have this "bland" OSTs, that even get overshadowed with a couple of the featured songs in between. The surprising part is the seiyuu, looking at the cast, it should be a great one, but it isn't... they're just like a beginner who don't know the rope, because no matter what the scenes are, they have a relatively same tones, there isn't any sense of grievance, fear, and so on when there should've been one. The sound effects also a big no no, it might be fine if it's something from the 80s or 90s, but definitely not in 2020. Overall I think they just throw money to the biggest seiyuu they can get and skimped on everything else, heck even those seiyuu turned to be underutilized due to the lack of direction here, a perfect example that you can't just throw money to solve everything.

Conclusion:
Reasons to watch:
-You're looking for some rock songs to add to your playlist...

Reasons NOT to watch:
-A bland story with an even worse execution
-Usage of immature CGI all over the place that didn't improve the animation quality one bit
-A very underwhelming theme songs for an anime based around music