I got here from looking for anime similar to Solo Leveling, this was the most commonly cited rec on MAL. Those people are liars. This has only the most basic similarities to Solo Leveling, as in they both use video game tropes. This has vibes akin to Ready Player One, but is otherwise just generic anime in of plot.
Characters die in the first few episodes, but these characters have had a total of like 5 minutes of screentime, so the melancholic music just reinforces the "trying too hard, and falling flat on its face" notion. Then in E4 it randomly shifts and becomes a Blushy Crushy romance show and contrives every situation it can to get a girl to flash her panties at the protagonist. Then it becomes a character drama to some degree, and a mystery. Then it keeps on cycling through genres until it's checked almost every single one of them off its list. Is it an action/adventure? A love polygon? A harem anime? A comedy? A power fantasy? A mystery/thriller? A tentacle hentai? I was half expecting mechs to pop out to really cover ALL the bases.
Meandering through a lot of different genres is not in and of itself a bad thing. But it's usually best to have 1-3 consistent themes, and then make small excursions into other areas. In contrast, this show is wearing a completely different hat from episode to episode, which makes watching them in sequence extremely jarring. Furthermore, the protagonist's personality swings massively. Is he this confident, edgy, Shadow the Hedgehog type? Or is he a generic dorky anime protagonist? Or perhaps somewhere in between? The answer is: whatever the show creators want him to be at any given moment.
There's no real meta-narrative to drive the overarching plot along, other than "get to the top of the castle to free yourself from this digital prison". But that really doesn't seem to be that much of a pressing concern. There's dithering between whether being locked in the game world is terrible, or if it's actually not all that bad since they get to spend it in an interesting place and form friendships and relationships. This tossup is interesting, but the show doesn't know how to handle it, and instead of trying to do a nuanced take between the two, it wildly vacillates between the two extremes based on whatever's going on in the scene at that moment, e.g. if they're about to make progress towards escaping they have a flashback on all the bad things that happened implying they're about to be liberated from the worst prison to ever exist, completely ignoring the previous episode's conclusion that this game isn't all that bad.
The main conflict just gets... randomly resolved halfway through season 1. It just comes out of nowhere, for seemingly no reason. A dude essentially says "surprise, I'm the final boss", he dies, and the overarching narrative is just gone. Then the game's creator is asked why he created the MMO in the first place, and he essentially responds with "IDK LOL". Like.... what!?!
This show is so bafflingly badly paced that I investigated what happened. It seems like this was a big webnovel series that went on for quite a while. Apparently the anime adaptation had no idea what to do with all of this, so the show creators just kind of picked random bits and jammed them together without thinking much. The result is this absolute mess that I don't understand how anyone can take seriously.
The second arc of season one is much less chaotic and actually tries to tell a coherent story. Instead of "abysmal", it's merely "bad". In its best moments it never rises beyond generic anime pablum, and it still has a decent amount of structural flaws. The most glaring flaw is that the stakes don't make sense -- the characters are no longer in a "if you die in the game, you die in real life" situation, yet they still act excessively cautious. Furthermore, the main tension is how the protagonist's girlfriend is due to be married in a week to a total creep, so that presumably sets a deadline. But... it's not like marriage is a death sentence. The girl would still be alive, and they'd probably give leeway to a quick annulment given the circumstances.
The first arc was so bad that it made me want to watch it to see what nonsense would happen next. The second arc was better from a qualitative standpoint, but was just kind of goofy and bland.
