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I enjoyed the anime overall, at first from an interest regarding the characters and concept that I knew from a friend and later on as a player myself. It was nice seeing the characters interact with each other, they moving around and fighting. It was often fun, especially when I wasn't trying to take it too serious. I would give the anime a high grade of 8 (although more of a 7.5). By the way, I always rate based completely on my enjoyment of a show and nothing else (although all parts of a show do affect the enjoyment).
Even thought I was able to enjoy it quite, I do think it had lots of flaws and could have been a much better show. I will focus my post on these flaws:
+They often used lines from the game even thought many times it wouldn't fit very well the situation becoming awkward. It's nice to have a few lines here and there kinda as easter-eggs but only in situations where they would fit really well.
+The admiral existing but being off-screen was a very bad decision. In the earlier part of the show it was ok, but get really bad later on when the story starts to revolve more around him and his plans. It would have been better if he was an actual character or didn't exist with Nagato or someone else being the commander of the base.
+The anime was trying to get way too many characters in while it had only 12 episodes. The result is many characters only being showcased, but without being given background/motivations nor development. I think it would have been better if it focused on a smaller cast, like one of the squadrons Bucky was part of during the show plus a few more characters.
+The anime didn't try to explain and give more information about it's setting to enrich the story. How did the ship-girls came to be? Are they created or constructed in some way? Born as humans with the souls that latter are taken from their homes and enlisted? If that's the case how was it like to be suddenly taken from a normal life to fight? I think it would have been a much better story if it tried explaining things and giving us a better background.
*The mood transition was a bit bad, especially in last episode with the mood of the battle that is supposed to be serious and tense being broken many times for funny scenes and jokes.
I think a big problem of the anime, that is a cause for all but the last flaw I listed, is it having too much fanservice for the gamers. The lines being obvious fanservice; the admiral being off-screen so the players could insert themselves or their favorite image of an admiral there; many characters because between the players you have fans for all different characters and they don't need to learn about them as they already do from the game; the story not being explained to not outreach the game that don't give explanations for that and scenes like the buckets or fairies appearing can be taken as "that's just how it works in the game".
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