If I had a penny for every death game series (at least that I've seen) created by creators who are known for at least one other super popular/popular work, but then received a lukewarm reception, I'd have two. Not a lot, but oddly enough I can think of two of them. The first is Platinum End, with an average ANN community score of 2.7 for its episodes (the finale alone has a staggering 1.8), which was inexplicably created by the same duo who created Death Note (Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba). And the second is KamiErabi GOD.app (hereafter KamiErabi), which somehow came from the same idea as NieR:Automata: Yokō Tarō.
Some background on this anime: In March 2023, Tokyopop and MBC Group announced a partnership called MBC Anime, which “will commission, produce, and invest in a variety of anime titles.” As of writing, the results so far are KamiErabi and Protocol: Rain. Like the latter project, KamiErabi has failed to live up to expectations.
On the one hand, Yokō Tarō is excellent, and he's not even the only big name involved in this project—Atsushi Ōkubo (Fire Force, Soul Eater) designed the characters and Hiroyuki Seshita (Ajin, Knights of Sidonia) directed. But the animation doesn't look good—it's just visually unpleasant to look at. For one thing, Okubo's designs don't work well in 3D. Furthermore, KamiErabi's CG looks cheap. To be clear, I don't hate KamiErabi's look just because it's CG (I like my fair share of anime CG). But whether it's his body language, facial expressions, or even just his flowing hair, KamiErabi's movements are stiff—even robotic at times. One might be more willing to overlook this if there were more stylization in the art, but there is very little. And because the entire series has always looked like this, it's easily one of the worst aspects of KamiErabi. One of the worst, but of course, not the worst—in my opinion, it's easily the writing.
At first glance, KamiErabi might seem like a pretty straightforward death game anime. Think something like The Future Diary, Deadman Wonderland, or—well, Platinum End. And in some ways, it is. The basic structure and plot of the show is certainly that of a pretty standard death game. The problem is that KamiErabi doesn't seem to understand the core of what makes death game anime appealing, and that's the psychological aspect; the tension, the strategy, the survival, and the stakes. Not only are these things absent in KamiErabi, in fact, we often get the opposite—characters who are too happy to trust and cooperate with each other without much thought, characters who don't seem to understand the seriousness of their situation or the allure of the gods, and characters who don't act particularly interested in playing the game to win. And it's hard to feel any sense of tension or anxiety as a viewer when Goro's power is clearly stronger than anyone else's. KamiErabi tries to reconcile how overpowered Goro is by making him pay a (vaguely explained) karmic price, but this doesn't work when the series literally opens with Goro saying he's become a god.
But only half—Building on the broad strokes of KamiErabi’s story, the dialogue is where its struggles with writing are most evident. At its best, it’s bland. At its worst, it results in protagonists who are unable or unwilling to call out bullying, one of whom argues that bullying is okay because bullies are people (he says he stopped being bullied when he started working out—at which point he even befriended his former bullies), and the same character whose job it is to tell a victim of bullying that he should just learn to deal with being bullied. The wording is a bit unclear, so I'm not 100% sure if this was the anime's intention, but it also sounds like this character is saying (to a victim of bullying, mind you) that the bullies themselves are the real victims in all of this because they'll have to live with the knowledge that they bullied someone.
The lack of quality in the writing is further accentuated by characters whose personalities and motivations often range from vague to inconsistent. People try to give them a little more nuance, but rarely achieve anything substantial—let alone anything that makes them more likable or at least interesting.
At this point, you might be thinking: wait, cheap CG animation. Terrible writing. Characters that don't make sense. We've been here before! Is this another EX-ARM? Could it be—KamiErabi is so bad that it's good? Honestly, no. Despite the poor quality, the CG still doesn't reach EX-ARM's levels of train wreck visuals. The characters and dialogue aren't so bad that you can't help but chuckle. Simply 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, uninteresting, and often boring. So, alas, the blessing I'm sure many 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 soundtrack is great. 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 do enjoy it whenever I hear the swelling sounds of a choir playing in the background. Also, the voice acting is pretty good. It's so good that even this can often be attributed to the anime's shortcomings, as the strength of the acting just makes you more aware of how the characters' faces/movements can't quite match the strength and emotion of the acting.
The fact that KamiErabi would be getting a second season was confirmed pretty early on when the anime aired. In other words, I have a hard time believing that the upcoming second season came out of a natural need for such a thing. And given how negative the first season was, the second season is going to have a very uphill battle to fight if it wants to generate any positive buzz for this show. Any potential that KamiErabi might have had has been completely buried under a ton of atrocious writing, stiff CG, and underdeveloped characters. What we’re left with is a show that’s actually compelling at its best and at its worst that shows that being bullied builds character and therefore isn’t that bad.