#1
Music is good. The rest... meh.
Plus, am I the only one who thinks the animation is utterly weird!? Like some kind of 2D CG.
I personally LOVE it. It looks amazing, in my opinion.
It is something I'd say is similar to this:
Like, the shading is much more emphasized and it is done much more extensively - you can spot a lot more shades than you'd usually do while watching anime. It is called cell shading, if I'm not wrong. Correct me if I am. XD; But yeah, that's definitely not CG. It is 2D art with lots and lots of shades of colors being visible at characters at any point of time. Definitely does make it easier for the characters to blend with the kind of monsters they have in this show. The monster themselves, though, are undoubtedly CG. That's an undeniable fact. Show also uses CG models for the characters at action-intensive moments, surely, but it is undeniably 2D art done in a style that makes it looks like how it does.
Definitely do not see a lot of people enjoying the art online haha. But I think this is something you'd probably get used to over time. Might even come to enjoy it a lot. Idk. I personally LOVE this style. Definitely prefer it over the kind of usual stuff we get. This just looks insanely attractive to me. And, well, this amount of shading isn't something you can achieve without a large number of animators working on each frame. I heard many studios and animators were roped in to help for doing this episode.
The episode itself wasn't really all that well done, imo. The cuts and slow-mo might look cool to someone who is new to anime but...it doesn't exactly add anything to the episode. In fact, it looked very jarring apart from the one scene where the MC takes his shirt off. The rest of the instances...it just felt unnecessary.
Really love the music used. OST is definitely something I'm pumped for. OP was okay. Overall, decent episode. But I hope we get more action next episode. And that we get to see Alisa. God, she looks really great in this show. She's a major reason behind me watching this series so I definitely was kinda disappointed to see that we merely get to see one single second shot of her in the episode along with barely a few seconds in the OP - that's it. :( But yeah, hopefully next episode remedies that. And please, ufotable, tone the slow-mo's and the jarring transitions a bit down. They don't help the pacing of the episodes. At all.
Edit: Also, the animation itself. While fluid for the action scenes, it was very choppy for a few scenes. It looked very...weird. Like, take for instance where the officer pulls him by collar and throws him on the other guy. That, and there were other scenes too iirc.
