A bit of an interesting premise, but the execution is so boring. I thought the lore was fascinating and was very impressed at how it was told to us organically (at least until they just started infodumping). But, if you’re going to have an anime about being good at games, skipping over the actual game and just explaining what happened instead is, um, a choice, I guess. And the way they describe the cards moving in a bunch of orbits when they’re just spinning in two rings screams that the animators don’t have the budget for or interest in (or both) telling the story visually. It’s just sad because there’s space for a good story in here and they just didn’t bother.

Overall, 2/5

A lot of talk about game theory, e.g. it’s pointless to make this choice because it gives me no information, between individuals who are really good at these types of games:

A slightly scary powerful red-haired goddess trying to get back into the god realm by winning 10 games in a row, and a guy who’s a genius at games.

A simple game that was sort of like the memory card game played with a standard deck of cards, was turned into a demonstration of how good these characters are at observation and memorization, as well as trying to get information about each other while the guy tries not to get himself killed by offending the goddess.

Also, with winning gods’ games is important because the winners get abilities called Arises, which can be used to survive when exploring the world, which is “93% unexplored”

It isn’t clearly explained which world is unexplored: The world our protagonist lives in, or Elements “The playground of the gods” a higher dimension where the games take place. I’ll assume it’s the latter.

Interesting idea to start, but it all depends on execution.

Like the games themselves, it’ll take a few episodes of this to suss this one out.

@rikka@ani.social