If I had a nickel for every death game series (that I've seen, at least) created by highly renowned creators with at least one other super famous/popular work, but then received abysmal reception, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that I can think of two of them. The first is Platinum End, whose episodes are sporting an average community score on ANN of 2.7 (the last episode alone has an astounding 1.8), which was bafflingly created by the same duo that made Death Note (Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba). And the second is KamiErabi GOD.app (henceforth KamiErabi), which somehow sprang from the same mind as NieR:Automata: Yokō Tarō.

Some background information on this anime: in March 2023, Tokyopop and MBC Group announced a partnership called MBC Anime, "that will commission, produce, and invest in a series of anime titles." As of the time of writing, the results thus far have been KamiErabi and Protocol: Rain. Like the latter project, KamiErabi fails to meet expectations.

On the one hand, Yokō Tarō is brilliant, and he isn't even the only big name involved with this project—Atsushi Ōkubo (Fire Force, Soul Eater) did the character designs, and Hiroyuki Seshita (Ajin, Knights of Sidonia) is the director. But this anime just doesn't look good—as in, visually, it's just not pleasant to look at. For starters, Okubo's designs just don't work as well in 3D. Moreover, the CG of KamiErabi looks, for lack of a better word, cheap. To be clear, I don't dislike the look of KamiErabi just because it's CG (I like my fair share of CG anime). But whether it's physical gestures, facial expressions, or even just the bouncing of hair, the movements of KamiErabi are remarkably stiff—even robotic at times. One might be more willing to look past this if there were more stylization in the art, but there's very little. And because the whole series looks like this all the time, it easily makes this one of the worst aspects of KamiErabi. One of the worst, but of course, not the worst—that, in my opinion, would easily be the writing.

At first glance, KamiErabi seems like a pretty straightforward death game anime. Think something along the lines of The Future Diary, Deadman Wonderland, or—well, Platinum End. And in some ways, it is. The basic structure and plot of the show are pretty standard-issue death game, for sure. The problem is that KamiErabi doesn't seem to understand a core part of the appeal of death game anime, and that's the psychological aspects; the stress, the strategy, the survival, and the stakes. Not only are none of these things present in KamiErabi, but in fact, we often get the opposite—characters who are too happy to trust and team up with each other with little or no thought, characters who don't seem to grasp the seriousness of their situation or the gravity of godhood, and characters who aren't acting particularly interested in playing this game to win. And it's hard to feel any sense of stress or stakes as a viewer when Goro's power is so obviously more powerful than anyone else's. KamiErabi attempts to reconcile how overpowered Goro is by making him pay a (vaguely explained) karmic price, but this does nothing when the series literally opens up with Goro saying that he's become a god.

But for as half-baked as the broad strokes of KamiErabi's story are, the dialogue is where its struggles with writing are the most apparent. In its best moments, it's bland. But in its worst moments, this results in the protagonists being either unable or unwilling to condemn bullying, one of them suggesting that bullying is okay because the bullies are people too (this character says that he stopped being bullied once he started working out—at which point, he'd even befriend his now-former bullies), and this same character functionally telling a victim of bullying that he should simply learn to deal with being bullied. The wording is a bit unclear, so I'm not 100% sure whether this is what the anime was going for, but it also comes off as though this character says (to a victim of bullying, mind you) that the bullies themselves are the actual victims in all this because they'll have to live with the knowledge that they bullied someone.

The writing's lack of quality is further emphasized by characters whose personalities and motivations often range from vague to inconsistent. Attempts are made to flesh them out a bit, but rarely do they amount to anything substantial—let alone anything that makes them more endearing or at least interesting.

By this point, you might start thinking: wait, cheap-looking CG animation. Terrible writing. Characters that make no sense. We've been here before! Is this another EX-ARM? Could it be—is KamiErabi so bad it's good? Frankly, no. While shoddy, the CG is nowhere near the visual trainwreck level of EX-ARM. Nor are the characters and dialogue so overtly disastrous that you can't help but cackle. Plainly put, KamiErabi isn't bad in a way that's over-the-top and makes it funny, or even memorable for that matter. It's just bad, making it unenjoyable and often boring to watch. So alas, the silver lining I'm sure plenty of you were hoping for isn't there.

At the risk of being too negative, I will say that I liked some aspects of this anime: some of the background tracks are nice. I don't particularly care for the opening and ending themes, so I don't think I'd go so far as to say that I like the soundtrack in the broadest sense, but I like it any time I hear the swelling sound of a choir playing in the background. Also, the voice acting is pretty good. It's so good that even this can often be due to the anime's deficit because the power in the acting only serves to make you more aware of how the characters' faces/movements can't quite match the power and emotion of the acting.

That there would be a second season of KamiErabi was confirmed pretty early on in the anime's airing. In other words, I have a hard time believing that the upcoming second season is coming from organic demand for such a thing. And given how negative the feedback to this first season has generally been, the second season will be fighting a very uphill battle if it wants to generate any positive buzz for this show. Any potential KamiErabi possibly could've had has been thoroughly buried under heaps of atrocious writing, rigid CG, and underdeveloped characters. What we're left with is a show that's really meh in its best moments and in its worst moments suggests that getting bullied builds character and, therefore, isn't that bad.