The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

KamiErabi GOD.app

Goro's life isn't going all that well, and he's frustrated at not being able to act when he thinks he ought to. After watching a cat get hit by a truck and noticing that no one else tried to help either, he goes home to find a strange new invite on his phone. When he accepts it, a tiny oni-like creature named Lall appears and tells him that he's become one of many people vying to become a god. Granted one wish by the app, Goro now has a special power to use to fight against the other competitors. But can he really bring himself to fight in a battle royale against his friends? Is this truly the power he wished for?

KamiErabi GOD.app is an original project from the minds of Yoko Taro, JIN, Atsushi Okubo, and Hiroyuki Seshita. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

Before I get into this, I think it's important to mention that we were able to see not just the first episode but the first three episodes of KamiErabi GOD.app before writing our entries for the Preview Guide. Now usually, being given several episodes implies that there is some sort of revelation therein that re-contextualizes the whole thing once you've seen it. And while there are twists and turns, there's nothing in the first three episodes that fundamentally changed my initial impressions of this show: It's Future Diary as written by Nier creator Yoko Taro.

Now, on paper, that's an idea I am 100% here for—I enjoy death game anime in general and Future Diary in specific. In practice, however, I have some major reservations. Basically, the most boring parts of Future Diary are what gets reused here. KamiErabi GOD.app follows Ono, a socially outcast boy who one day finds that he has been entered into a divine death game where the final remaining player becomes a god. Moreover, each player has some sort of power (as well as a smartphone app) to help them in battle.

Yet, largely gone are the psychological games—the mystery of uncovering who each of the players is, what their powers are, and luring them into traps that put them at a disadvantage. Not only do other players appear on the app so you can identify them and their location at any time, but Ono's power is so mindbogglingly broken that he's only truly in danger by choice.

Now that's not to say that there aren't some interesting Yoko Taro ideas thrown in here and there. There's a staggeringly dark price for Ono's powers—not to mention that being a generally nice person in a death game just primes a person for suffering. Pretty much every character has a tragic and depressing backstory—which explains why each is willing to kill in order to become the next god.

But then there's the elephant in the room: the animation. When it comes down to it, the simple fact is that I really dislike the art style and character designs—no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise. They just look cheap and tacky so much of the time. That said, the direction—the camera shots and the choreography—constantly surprised me with how good they were. It's bizarre how the show can look so bad in some aspects and so good in others.

All in all, I can't imagine coming back for a fourth episode—despite my love for Yoko Taro's work. This show is the epitome of a mixed bag and in a season with so many strong shows demanding my attention, this one simply doesn't make the cut.

KamiErabi: It's like Future Diary, but with smartphones. Okay, that's entirely too glib a way to frame it, but I am very strongly reminded of Future Diary in this show's setup. Kids (thus far) who get randomly entered into a competition to be the last man standing, and therefore a god based on their smartphone usage? Then they each get a power based on their wish? That's not too far off from that other series's flip phone-based diary powers. I understand the decision to do a special broadcast of the first three episodes to give the show a chance to strut its stuff; frankly, episode three was my favorite. After two episodes of Goro being scared and trying to do what's right, episode three shows him that if he wants to make it out of this alive, he will have to make some tough decisions.

That said, this still feels like it wants to come across as more intelligent than it is. At its root, it takes people who have experienced hardships of some kind and carry resentment within them, whether for how their life has turned out or simply because they couldn't act the way they think they ought to have. This is nowhere near as deep as it thinks it is, partly because Goro's skill allows him to cheat when he doesn't like how things turn out. He's also the least interesting of the three protagonists thus far. However, I admit that he lost a lot of my sympathies when he didn't move to save the cat he watched get hit by everyone's favorite vehicular killer. At the end of the third episode, there's no guarantee that he'll use his power to resurrect someone else, which could be a turning point for him as a character. Regretfully, for the show, I have very little interest in finding out if that's the case.

This is mostly due to a combination of uninteresting characters and not pleasing art. Credit where it's due, I've seen a lot of terrible girls' uniform designs, and this show does the boys much more dirty, but even if the characters didn't bear a striking resemblance to the designer's other work (Soul, is that you?). They did not translate into 3D particularly well. The animation also has a difficult time moving them around in anything remotely resembling “naturally.” When you pair that with some genuinely odd color choices, this is more baffling than anything else.

This isn't without its points of interest. It tries to give its characters motives, and episode three ends on a stronger note than the rest of the available content. But I can't shake the doubts about how the plot is unfurling or the unpleasant look of the thing, so someone else will have to tell me how it all ends.

Watching this premiere was an exercise in waiting for something surprising to happen. While I have friends who practically worship Yoko Taro's work, my only experience with anything of his is the first episode of the Nier:Automata anime from earlier this year. So without that in with the scenario creator, all I had to go off was that this show was some death game featuring magical powers and distributed via a smartphone app. Sure enough, as of the conclusion of episode three, that's exactly what it is, and there's not much else to it.

If that sounds like your bag, this should work well enough. I'm 100% burnt out on death games; I'm just plain tired of seeing them and having the same basic setup explained in the same way with the same overwrought deaths as every other one of these shows. That being said, this one seems like a fairly earnest and well-constructed entry. While many of these shows can delve into a juvenile nihilism that only seems cool to 15-year-olds, KamiErabi centers itself on Goro's empathy and distaste for violence. While there are hints that he's had problems with anger in the past, his first reaction when getting thrown into a bloody brawl for godhood is to talk people down and insist they don't need to hurt each other. He still ends up offing his opponents, but neither he nor the show revels in that brutality and actively takes steps to counteract it when possible. That's not enough to get me back in, but it's a refreshingly non-edgy perspective to center for this kind of story.

Of course, it's hard to be too edgy when the show looks the way it does. While a valiant effort has been made to translate Atsushi Ohkubo's character designs into 3DCG, the results are just north of passable at best. The important characters are somewhat expressive and move well enough. Still, the animation struggles mightily when it comes time for any action. It is forced to rely on heavy editing and digital effects to gesture towards the bloody violence they're trying to portray. The decision to render bystanders as greyed-out models is a smart one that leans into the uncanny atmosphere of the story but also makes the world around our characters look unfinished, as if a few minutes from now, the textures will pop in like a poorly optimized PS3 game. It's an admirable attempt to make a fundamentally strained production feel cohesive and intentional, but it can't quite work despite how hard Hiroyuki Seshita tries.

If nothing else, I can say this feels like a production that's trying its damndest to make what it can from a stale subgenre and less-than-optimal resources. There's even some little details that charmed me, like one of the characters having to keep packs of steaks on hand all the time because her Death Game power requires her to stab meat to activate it, or episode two's villain having shoes that squeak like rubber ducks when they walk. Those kinds of goofy idiosyncrasies lend the premiere some much-needed personality and charm. Altogether it's not enough to make me excited to watch more, but in a creative space that so often devolves into overwrought sludge, I'll count this one as a win.