This show would be much better if they just entirely cut out the time-consuming character backstories and kept the screentime exclusively focused on the battle royale plot. Instead, literally entire episodes are wasted on inconsequential exposition for characters nobody cares about. None of these characters are compelling or interesting in any way. They easily could have filled an entire cour with a 12-fighter battle royale conflict; I have no idea why they threw away that opportunity to instead waste half the runtime on generic uncreative character backstories that would be better off in an OVA or auxiliary literature. This really was a terrible decision. By far the most boring part of this anime were all these pointless backstories. They spent way WAY too much screentime on this. Nobody cares about the exposition for some one-dimensional character in a huge cast who gets killed off one episode later. I am not watching this anime for character development (although I usually value it in other shows); this is not the situation for it and this show does not benefit from it at all. I don't care about your cliche tragic backstory or that Grug likes opera and long walks on the beach when he's not crushing skulls. I am just here to watch people with cool abilities plot against each other and fight; stop wasting my time with anything that isn't that. Just as an example to illustrate my point: they waste an ENTIRE EPISODE on the utterly generic boring backstory of a character who was killed off SEVEN EPISODES AGO. Right during what should be the pinnacle of the story they pivot to this nonsense &ndash; it was utterly ridiculous and totally stunted the show's momentum. <|endoftext|> 