That being said the designs themselves are completely average at best with nothing standing out or interesting, and the redesigns for the established characters are downright criminal. In its defense the CGI is completely passable, and the weaker parts are masked by fog and dim lighting like a Marvel movie. The show is CG, which does knock it down in a lot of people's eyes. Again there's just no valid reason for the changes regardless of the quality. And in universe the justification is equally dumb, saying that Empress and Death are passable names for orphan children. Not only is it weird to want to drag an IP through the dirt for clout, it's even weirder to then not even call the lead character her own name 90% of the time. Granted the characters we do take from BRS are so devoid of anything that originally made them likeable, to the point that we even renamed them based on tarot cards (since Strength already was a tarot card). What the story adds sure isn't GOOD but if it tried to stand on its own maybe it would've been forced to do something interesting. Again, despite being called Black Rock Shooter, most characters and premises in this story are entirely new, and maybe I would've been slightly more forgiving if this wasn't trying to milk marketability from the heyday of late 2000s anime. None of this serves any purpose other than trying to establish this as edgy, though once it goes away in the second half I found myself missing it because a desperate attempt at shock value, while crude and unnecessary, was still more entertaining than the run of the mill second half plot full of the same tropes and archetypes acted out by characters with no likeable traits or interesting personalities. best to be gritty and dark, throwing around copious curses, death, and rants about sex as well as repeated on screen rape.

This show is an absolute edgelord nightmare of mediocre writing. None of these characters, plot, or setting has to be a part of BRS, and as a consequence of that none of this feels like it is. I really don't feel this is fair to call a BRS story, as it really feels like a subpar light novel (which it was) that only got greenlit by attaching itself to the BRS identity. I guess this adaptation definitely evoked this line of the song, by destroying everything else.

Black Rock Shooter, where did you go? Never has that line been more true.

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