SPOILERS FOR PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2 THE ANIMATION. DONT WATCH THIS ANIME. IT IS NOT WORTH YOUR TIME Advertising a game isnt the easiest thing in the world. Making an anime that is based on a game whether it be an adaptation a tiein or just something to promote the product in question is even harder. Hell the movie industry has had an exceptionally hard time trying to make a movie on these same grounds that actually worked well. That being said you need to try to keep the spirit of the game youre promoting as well as make something that can be a good gateway into the game series for people who probably wouldnt have bothered otherwise. With the exception of Visual Novels they are only visual novels not multigenre games with a visual novel storyline games have been notably hard to adapt right if the likes of Blazblue Alter Memory are any indication. That brings us to todays target: Phantasy Star Online 2 The Animation. As you can see from both the MAL aggregate score and my score at the top right this anime really didnt do a good job at anything. Now why is that exactly? Not only that but should it be declared as one of the worst anime of 2016? Well lets find out shall we? The first few episodes dont really exhibit much of a major narrative. However they have plenty of their own problems. The logic behind some of these characters decisions is weak at best. Why is an average student like Itsuki immediately promoted to VicePresident of the student council right or the bat after joining? Apparently its because he has good attendance and his grades are decent so whats stopping the rest of these guys from taking up that role?. Why is the company behind PSO2 putting the student council in charge of testing out an already widely released and profitably sold video game that has already been released for seemingly a long time? Because...plot but why not just enlist hardcore gamers and not a bunch of students that have to manage clubs. Why is Itsuki the handyman of clubs when he wasnt even in a club before the student council? I dunno probably just so we can have a discount Shirou Emiya that doesnt even do Shirou Emiya things but whats the point?. Why is the main relationship between our two MCs based around a game of fucking hide and seek? Because we need something to give our hero motivation so why does this go nowhere?. The premise is kind of dumb as well: You can be conscious while playing the game IRL and you can actively communicate in the game in real time as if youre speaking normally. It gets genuinely confusing how this plays out. Im not even gonna mention they condescending attempts at teaching us about things that their audience already knows like conventions trolls etc because we need to move on. One last though before the next paragraph the first half of the series is riddled with horrendous forced drama moments that also tie in with condescending aesops and retarded character reasonings so the story quality was horrible even before the main plot drags this all to hell. The major plot that really kicks off in the second half of the series is that Darkers weird aliens in PSO2 have somehow sprung from the game through the screens of electronic gaming devices to the real world. They dont even bother explaining how this works. We get a glimpse of this in episode 6 but t only becomes important in episode 7. We see this mysterious character named Aika who takes the game way too seriously as if to foreshadow that theres more to the game than meets the eye. Still what comes next is what truly makes this premise one of the stupidest in anime history: Apparently PSO2 isnt a game but a world. This is all kinds of wrong. First off how the hell did developers of PSO2 allow it to be a real world? If it existed beforehand then that only complicates things so much further that it would be pointless to try though I would like to see one of you come up with every single way this theory makes no sense in a blog. Then again part of the reason nothing about PSO2 makes any sense is that we know next to nothing about the game at all with crucial information being relegated to eyecatcher commercial cards that play before and after a commercial for 3 seconds each The handling of PSO2 causes a bigger pool of plotholes and questions than the Sword of Akasha from Code Geass R2 the combat systems in Mahouka AND the combat systems in The Asterisk War HOW DO YOU EVEN DO THAT?? The other plot is the preparation and execution of the school festival. Its also full of forced drama bad comedy and the fact that it has to tie in with the main plot which leads to even more moments of character idiocy and a generic hero must save the damsel in distress final climax that has its own problems not worth delving into here. The ending is also pathetic as well. Apparently Dark Falz which wasnt mentioned previously corrupts Itsukis love interest Rina Izumi and some fights later Itsuki his friends and his now saved love interest unleash a friendship speech so cheesy that Fairy Tail haters would almost want to apologize for any jokes made about that series friendship speeches and they literally rip off Fate/Zero Second Seasons Excalibur scene to finish the bad guy for good. In reality itll come back someday but for now we finish on a relationship going nowhere and the school festival finishing smoothly. The story is ridiculously bad and it somehow manages to be one of the few that get literally everything wrong at every turn. The characters do not fare much better in terms of writing. Itsuki is almost as bland as they come with the two notable traits being how exceptionally awkward he is and how much easier he can be compared to his contemporaries like Ritsuka from Fate/Grand Order: First Order. Still hes hardly worth investing in. Izumi is worse. She is either a pathetically bland tsundere luckily without the Baka or hurting the MC shtick with a really lame connection to Itsuki or an awkward mentor depending on if she is IRL or playing as SORO. As SORO she is extremely awkward in episode 1 with really confusing quirks that get abandoned immediately. Plus when she switches into her original game persona its the same as IRL. Worse she becomes a damsel in distress and really contributes nothing to the main plot. The school plot is where she has the most involvement but she gets hijacked from that in episode 10 for...you know. IRL Kouta is the bland and awkward classmate guy character. In the game he is rather eccentric and flamboyant making me wish he was like that IRL since this cast needs more life. Aika...is weird. While her initial social oddities become explained in the fact that she is an NPC from PSO2 which is part of the cesspool or plotholes and stuff surrounding their interpretation of PSO2 it can be embarrassing to sit through. Still she had the most emotional stakes out of everyone. Too bad her personality is also weak since shes the bestwritten character in the show. Im not even gonna discuss the other logical problems involving her because these sidecharacters aka the other Student Council members have waited far too long for their beating. Yukata flat out sucks. IRL he is a wimp that nobody really understands until Itsuki does. In the game he is an arrogant troll who dicks people over somehow knows who Itsukis avatar is IRL and threatens to expose him for no reason. He is a pathetic troll who only exists for a condescending Aesop in episode 3 never to be relevant again until episode 11 for a lame ass your friends join you for the penultimate fight cliche battle with a pathetically weak personality. Two of the student council members whose names arent even stated in the anime have literally the exact same personality. Theyre beyond superfluous to any of the plots and there is no reason for their existence other than badly done comedy. Then theres Kudou who starts off like most of the other student council sidecharacters: generic asshole for the sake of being an asshole. He eventually shows off his eccentric and flamboyant side but it was too late for him. Mika is aggravatingly douchey towards Itsuki because Izumi hangs out with him more than her. Her forced melodrama doesnt help her character at all. Barring Last Samurai and his wife the PSO2 friends have little going for them as well but they are luckily harmless. The only problem is that two of them are also never seen again after their debut until the penultimate battle and theyre not the last characters Ill say that about. In fact barring the leader Kasura who is also generic this applies to the NPC ARKs guardians as well minus the pop idol whose singing I dislike. Thus there isnt any time to make them remotely memorable which is a shame as they have some potential to bounce off each other to work well in both combat and humor. Some of the students namely the trio that constantly surrounds Aika are aggravating to deal with at all times and add nothing but annoyance. Hell three of the other students that were advertised in the OP are there for a quick moment and are never seen again. Not only are most of these characters pathetically lame and poorly written but the potentially interesting ones never get their chance to do anything and some of the advertised ones have literally a few seconds of meaningless screentime. The student council here is so bad that it makes the one in Mahouka look like it was comprised of actually great characters albeit one of them is actually decent. Not a lot of these guys are actively heinous but the ones that are ruin the already mediocre and underutilized cast. In the real life scenes the art is passable and the character designs are mediocre. I still hate the occasionally badly blurred backgrounds and their usage of lighting at times is horrendous dont get me started on the one scene where there is bright and dark lighting for some reason and the bright lighting is unbearably bright while the dark lighting is nighimpossible to see anything in but nothing dealbreaking here. However the PSO2 game stuff is horrendous. The omnipresent CGI here ranges from eyewatering to eyebleeding The random monsters are revoltingly bad and the Darkers arent that much better. The CGI avatars are hideous as well with special mentions going to Silver one of the PSO2 friends and SORO. Hell during an action scene the CGI is so bad that it legitimately obliterates the frame rate which is something that an anime should never be able to pull off on its own especially on a properly supported platform like Crunchyroll. It makes the already horrible action scenes incomprehensible and impossible to follow properly. The actual action scenes are filled with putrid choreography and asspulls left and right usually due to how we are told nothing about how anything in the game works. Yes the character actions when CG break the frame rate as well probably more than the Darkers and other random monsters at times. Plus the actual avatars look awful by design. The excessive use of excessively bad CGI ruin he already mediocre art and turn it into a disasterpiece that would make artcritics vomit. The art in episode 9 is definitely a stepup with better CGI and character models and no frame rate issues. The action is weak but better than before. Too bad that degrades after episode 10 because I was starting to believe that the animators actually were improving everything at that point. Its as if they said that the final battle needs to look as fugly as possible and I wont mention how wrong the CGI dragon looks there or how badly they screwed up laser beams because you need to actually see it for yourself. The music is you guessed it: lousy as well. The OP Zessi Star Gate by Shouta Aoi is...odd. The first half is as awkward and lame as it gets. The second half feels like its desperately trying to be good but misses the mark heavily at points. It makes it really weird to sit through. The ED Rare Drop Koi Koi One more by the two female members of the sad excuse for a love triangle that Itsuki is a part of is really bad and when coupled with the horrid CGI footage and whatever SORO is doing it becomes both infuriating and embarrassing to sit through. The OST in episode 1 is decent. However it is horribly misplaced with everything as if it was made for a more expressive and interesting show instead. Thats why for episodes 210 the OST is pathetically generic and lame. Then they try some newer songs that also feel relatively out of place even if there is one OK one that actually fits in episode 9 as if to say that most of the effort and talent went to episode 9 while all the mediocre and bad sht went to the rest of the series. Honestly nothing works whether it be decent music that doesnt work with the anime or lame music that just fails to do anything. The comedy is embarrassing and awkward. Almost none of the jokes work at any capacity. In fact some of the earlier episodes feel extremely condescending which really pisses me off. Your audience should never be talked down to and the show doesnt get that. Theres shoving morals in our face and then theres doing it in a way that really insults our intelligence. The latter half of the show while aggravating for how hideously had the plot becomes and how pathetic the finale is the less we mention the Excalibur ripoff scene the better is borderline tolerable if still tedious. At that point the damage had already been done and this barely even tried to redeem anything rib my experience with this abomination. If you noticed and you probably did I used the word awkward quite a lot. Thats because the show is exactly that. Everything about this show barring some condescending absurd moments is awkward and uncomfortable to sit through. It was an endurance test through and through. There is hardly a single redeeming quality about this anime. The music is either decent but misplaced or mediocre the art is mediocre the CGI is on a whole other plane of bad the fights are horrendous the characters suck the story is incomprehensible and any good character with potential is incredibly underutilized. Its as if they wanted there to be as few redeeming qualities as possible. Either that or this was incompetently made. This doesnt cater to potential fans because we are told next to nothing about the game. This doesnt cater to existing players due to how bad the game looks in the ahem and how bad the story and characters are. Who does this even appeal to? Well thats enough rambling from me. I dont think this abomination can take it any longer and Ive pretty much run out of things to say about it. Well with that said I bid you adieu.