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This anime got a lot of shit because of its visuals but honestly, a big part of it feels undeserved. Ok it’s true that there was undeniably a big drop in quality from the first episode to the following ones, and it was made worse because of the anime being in development hell for years and sacrificing even color to supposedly look good, but besides some infamous scenes, the visuals weren’t all that bad. They retained the same grotesque and bizarre look from the source material and nailed a unique aesthetic within the medium. But at the end of the day it’s true that the overall level is just fine and nowhere near as good as it seemed at first.
The atmosphere was overall ok despite the audio aspect not being that strong either. The music was ok but not exactly memorable, the sound effects ranged from good to meh, and the voice acting was fine for what the show was going for but not great for the same reason. Is it supposed to sound insane and scary but honestly to me it sounded more like over the top and kinda ridiculous, despite every character having a properly selected and performed voice.
What matters most to me is the plot, which wasn’t all that different from the original, thus there’s not much real reason to rate the adaptation much lower than the manga. The anime took all the initial ministories and had them happening at the same time, instead of one after another. This change made the whole seem more organic on one hand, but certainly took away individual importance from each one, and it diminished the impact of the ironic twist of fate type of ending that each one of them has.
But down to it, people always seemed to care more about the grotesque and bizarre situations occurring in Uzumaki, and not so much about the writing, otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense not to point out how every person on that damned town seems to carry on with their everyday lives despite all the bizarre stuff that keeps happening. Another was made fun of for years for the same reason, why not this one? Well, to be fair, Uzumaki never had accidentally hilarious situations in it, but still, it suffers from having extremely passive characters reacting in unnatural ways to what happens around them, instead of trying to do something or leave. Not to mention the main character survives so many situations she shouldn’t that it comes off as plot armor, all for nothing in the end.
To its credit, eventually the characters do react and try to do something, as well as leave, and the setting is more or less explained, but it comes at the cost of making them even more helpless plot devices unable to do anything in the grand scheme of things. Combine that with the looped ending, which I don’t remember being the same in the original, and they come off as even more disposable than they already were.
So at the end of the day, this is a work you consume more for the bizarre situations and grotesque visuals than the story and characters, so as long as you don’t mind the drop in quality, you should be fine with it. The writing is and always was rather poor, as the plot never really made much sense, and the cast was always made of disposable plot devices with forgettable personalities and zero immersion and fleshing.
4/10
