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'Kay, so. This fuckin' show, right here.
This is one of the few animes that legitimately pissed me off. For starters, I stumbled upon its existence while looking up anime OSTs on YouTube. (Here, have a link!) Just going off that, it seemed like a smart series with colorful robots, cute girls, and a sci-fi bent. What more could I ask for?
The premise wasn't what I expected: In the modern world, VR has become commonplace; in addition, there's a strange program called "Brain Burst" that allows one to spend points to pause their perception of time in the real world; to gain more points, a "Burst Linker" fights other players, and should their points deplete the program permanently uninstalls itself and the player is cast out of the game for good. But I soldiered on, intrigued by the concept of a secret online society, as well as the enigmatic character of Kuroyukihime. And it all went downhill from there...
The main character was a wuss. Like, an exceptional wuss. And the rest of the characters aren't much better: The initial antagonist is a school bully that partakes in the same VR game that our protagonist is inducted into, and following a decent fight scene is subsequently banned from ever competing again. Okay, not the best of resolutions, but whatever. But then he comes back an episode later, I shit you not, and tries to run over the MC (in reality) with a car! And then he's never heard from for the rest of the series. What. The. Fuck.
Why do the unnamed extras have better designs than our three protagonists?
Oh, but it gets worse. It gets way, way worse. See, the VR game assigns a color to everyone based on their affinity (which has the unintended side-effect of making everyone resemble mechs made of rock candy); red for long-range, blue for melee, et cetera. As well, these colors serve as the basis for what are essentially guilds within the game. Naturally, none of these guilds are ever explored or expanded upon, with the exception of the red one, which is led by the single most annoying character in any anime I've ever seen.
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The name's Yuniko. Yuniko Kozuki.
Introduced mid-season, this fool pretty much torpedoes the listing show. For one, her voice has all the grace of a vuvuzuela played through a cheese-grater. She initially had some hope in that she infiltrated the MC's apartment and masqueraded as his distant cousin. But the true affront to logic comes when she's found out as the leader of the red guild. Rather than getting off his ass and giving her the boot, our MC actually keeps her around. And when Kuroyukihime finds out, she actually moves in with him too! Honestly it felt like a really cheap ploy to throw in some harem elements towards the third quarter of the series, but what's especially egregious is that we've established both of these girls as ruthless connivers acting ultimately for their own gain. In essence, that's two main characters playing completely against type, and one milquetoast of an MC who does pretty much nothing the entire time.
The ending was garbage. It didn't resolve anything, over half of the characters we met over the course of the series were absent, the two female leads turned against each other (Ooh, interesting!) only to suddenly reconcile (Fuck!), and as the credits finally rolled, it took every fiber of my being not to hurl the jewel case across the room.
And, well, that's Accel World. Long story short: Avoid this show like the fucking plague. You deserve better.
