I need a sequel this very instant!
This is on the same level as some of the best isekai fantasies out there. Like Overlord, Slime and Isekai Ojisan. And the fucking climax fight. It was one of THE fights i’ve ever seen period. Its even better than the Fate fights, and I love those, especially the one from FGO Paladin Agateram. This is peak shonen right here. Can’t wait for more.
When I first started watching, the show felt a little cheap. This made me appreciate the animation of Horimiya even more than I had when I was watching the show. It surprisingly had next to no visible CGI set pieces and low texture background items. Every set piece seemed as if it had effort put into it. In the non game world scenes of this, especially at the start, it was hard looking at the background because of how bad they were. Even the character art. This is entirely different to how I see the game world tho. I don’t know if this was intentional of if the animators simply put all their effort into polishing the VR world, but everything like the texture quality got pushed down a bunch in the real world scenes.
Where the show shines is in the fights. Its not just the spot on animations. Its also the choreography and the fact that almost everything makes sense. The actions the characters make feel like they have a logical progression behind them. This is in start contrast to Slime’s make out of thin air kind of battle system where you can’t really expect anything. Here you can, and seeing our characters morph what you were expecting with their own flair makes it even better. Especially with the combos they create.
Lets not even talk about the Wazaemon battle. I think that’s where the whole budget of the show went. The whole sequence looked fucking amazing. When he unleashed Clear Sky, i was giggling like a little kid at how good it looked. Fuck Artoria’s Excalibur, this is sword slashes at its best.