Good Night World

lukyknhas★ 7

This was such a wasted potential This show had a very interesting premise, with some deep complex emotional and psychological topics, a nice story progression, a very interesting plot twist, with some relatively deep character development, just to throw it all away near the end, rushing into the finish line and disturbing their own established lore and logic. The characters are basically a family of strong players in a game, they help each other and act like a real family, but under the curtains they are people with miserable lives, using the game as an subterfuge to escape from reality, the main twist making it alleven more interesting to watch. If it wasn't good enough, the game it self also doesn't exactly turns out not to be as simple as it looked, with the family now being forced to fight not only to maintain their union, but also to potentially save the entire virtual world. Their motivations are kinda simple, but complex and well established, each one of the family members are trying to replace some aspect of their miserable lives with the in game family and features, unaware of whom each other are in real life, while trying to find some meaning for their lives. But then we get to the ending part. This feels like it should've lasted 24 episodes at least, or delayed the main conflict to a possible second season, giving more time to deepen the character's relations and insert more conflicts and twists, to better building up the final plot. Instead they just dropped it all out of sudden, and rushed into the end, to make into a one season thing, leaving a lot to be desired. Specially the threat to Virtual World thingy felt under developed, with several events near the end feeling out of place. It had a lot going for it, and they just fumbled. The worse part is that even if they made a possible sequel, it wont make any sense, they will be forced into a fresh start or something. They just wrote themselves into a dead end. This show made me love and hate it at the same time, from how wasted it was

ShonerSul★ 6

Summary: "AI rules the world" in Ep 1 is fine as setting, but not in climax without development. Reading the synopsis, it looked like a heart-warming story of a broken family reunited via online game. However there is no such healing at all. It was good until Ep 5, especially due to the difference of art style between real life and game, but went somewhere else after the twist in Ep 6. Good character design (not only their looks, but also their traumen and accompanied behaviors) and animation, but it seriously lacks coherence in the story. It shares many subjects with SAO, but failed to justifyitself like SAO did. (For example, brain damage from headgear is accepted by everyone, and this show also borrows it. But there is not enough explanation here how AI can damage people in real world even though they are not playing that game.) The worst is that it is full of violent and unpleasant killing with detailed portrait of dead body. Not recommended to those who are looking for happy story, or well developed storytelling. Only for gore fans. I can't rate this below average due to the quality of the animation, but to talk about the story only, it's 2/10.