The models and are so bad and jarring that any scene with them automatically looks like shit. The CGI is child’s play for any anime fan to pick at. There are two factors that influence the awkward feel of the 2D animation, and they’re the three most noticeably awful aspects of the production: editing, direction, and CGI. There are moments where it’s unbelievable like when Hajime unveils his giant rifle in episode 4 and you can see the wrappings linger and only move once every half second. Don’t expect to see it too much and even then, it feels stilted whenever it is there a lot of the time. To finally get away from the color and brightness complaints, we have the monster designs. Even then it sometimes crosses over into squint territory whenever the lighting remotely increases, and the colors are so much brighter in the side characters that they almost feel too bright in the dark labyrinth.
It takes 5 episodes for us to reach a setting where the color palette works to the point where the characters aren’t too dark or bright to look at. When you couple this with how poorly drawn, borderline melted their faces are at times, and how comically the show likes to distort the main character’s face, it all just becomes an aesthetic nightmare. The contrast with all this in mind is downright eye-searing, so much so that I often needed to squint to the point of closing my eyes in order for my eyes to stop hurting. Sadly, the insanely bold and bright colors damage even that, especially when you consider that the show has to swap from these characters being barely visible in a cave so dark you can barely see a thing, to bright daylight. Even then, the MC’s design is so ridiculous that it’s almost endearing. The character designs (the better ones, at least) are inoffensive enough but that should not be my highest genuine compliment beyond some of the girls being attractive. Speaking of worst things I’ve seen all year, the visuals in this anime are some of the worst to come out of 2019. That said, one can only be so positive here given that we are talking about one of the worst anime anyone cares about this year. It invokes something sweet, almost nostalgic at points. On the other hand, with vocals and instrumentals this inviting, I don’t care. One could call it a generic sort of soothing ending theme meant to give the viewers a breather after whatever whirlwind any given episode puts them through. Barring an admittedly decent insert song in episode 5, my only other compliment to the music is that the ED, “Hajime no Uta” by DracoVirgo is actually pretty good. The worst part is that the moody piano and violin combo at the beginning makes the track inviting, like a siren or a succubus luring you into your untimely demise. As for the OP, it’s trash with an obnoxious saxophone and weird autotune, as well as an awful trap beats section right before the chorus.
Let that put into perspective how low a bar I’ve set for this anime. A lot of these tracks (inserts included, of which there are four and only one of them works) don’t even fit the scenes they’re put in half the time.
The background OST, whenever it's actually present, is either fairly decent or downright awful. Let’s start with the least awful aspect of the anime, that being the music. Now that this anime has ended, it’s time I get a little payback. I felt betrayed, as did fans when the premiere dropped. Even when I thought I grew numb to whatever the show threw at me, it would always find a new way to make the viewing experience worse. Barring a few tolerable moments, the more the show went on, the more dreadful the experience became. Imagine my grief when Arifureta quickly went from the most gloriously awful anime of the year to the worst I’ve seen all year. Imagine my shock, my awe when we were told that isekai finally had a Big Order to call its own. It had become something so legendarily awful that it would be remembered as the best With episode 1 at least, Arifureta seemed to have done the impossible. Most bad anime are just frustrating or boring, especially when it comes to the prevalence of bad isekai anime. Have you ever been excited to watch a dumpster fire? You know, that special kind of train wreck that reaches so bad it’s good territory, or the legendary "schlock" status”? It’s rare to find such titles in the current anime market, as Big Order and Inuyashiki are some of the last ones out there at the time of writing.