User blog:Seieireppa/A few thoughts on what's happened

As most of you probably know by now, it was announced that episode 9 of the God Eater anime would be the final episode. Now, this is hardly a routine occurrence, both in the context of anime in general and specifically in the context of Ufotable.

Now, Ufotable is widely regarded as one of the top animation studios in the industry. For something like this to happen, an outright disaster of this caliber, is completely unheard of, especially to Ufotable. Their offerings have been nothing but amazing in quality ever since they broke onto the scene with the Tales of Symphonia OVAs and truly cemented their status with the Kara no Kyoukai films and the Fate/zero anime. When the God Eater anime was announced, many people, myself included, were extremely excited about what the anime would become—considering that Ufotable animated the openings to God Eater Burst and God Eater 2, as well as many games in the Tales of series, many were expecting a level of quality akin to the GE2 opening. And while they certainly tried to approximate the look, well...

I'll not mince words. The God Eater anime sucked. Hard.

Far from Ufotable's usual level of quality, the God Eater anime had an unimpressive visual style—not strictly bad, but unimpressive—was poorly paced, and was replete with more instances of infamous "QUALITY" than I can count. Especially coming right off the heels of the Fate/stay night Unlimited Blade Works anime, an anime that had superb production values and was not once delayed... we get God Eater, an anime that was delayed, delayed again, delayed a THIRD time, and then cut altogether before its total runtime had finished.

I don't know what went down at Ufotable headquarters, and I won't pretend I know. I don't know whether it was Ufotable just phoning it in or if it was some sort of meddling from Bandai Namco, but either way, the God Eater anime was an absolute disaster on countless levels.

And the worst part? This is the most mainstream exposure God Eater has ever gotten—and that's how it'll remain in the eyes of the anime-watching public. The hard truth is that the GE games aren't that popular even when compared to other Vita titles/franchises, and painfully few people, relatively speaking, have played them... so now, thanks to Ufotable fucking up to this degree, whenever people think of God Eater, they'll think of this disaster of an anime. That's it, as far as the public is concerned. God Eater doomed itself with this anime, and there's nothing we can do to undo it.

As for Ufotable's speculation on the possibility of further animated instances of God Eater?

Let us hope that never comes to pass.