Full Dive: The Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG Is Even Shittier than Real Life!

You know, the worst thing about a show like this is that deep down within, there is a reasonably competent, even funny and interesting anime buried within, that thanks to incompetent writing or directing or whatever will never see the light of day. Full Dive is terrible and I'm the kind of person who enjoys the stupid dick jokes from Sentouin Hakkenshimasu and held them in high regard. One of the biggest issues with this is with the characters. My God, Hiro has got to be the one of the most insufferable whiny unlikable twerp in anime (not the worst, that dishonor goes to OumaShu). I'm not against the idea of having a loser protagonist, but you gotta make the protag at least somewhat likable in spite of their incompetence. I've hated Hiro all the way through and he never NEVER gets any better. The rest don't fare any better, apart from Alicia, Mizarisa and Matsuoka-kun, everyone is so thoroughly unlikable and annoying. It goes beyond "funny character quirk" that overstays its welcome, it's "beating you over the head again and again with how much annoying they are and how they never stop". Then there's the humor. The awful humor. It's not that they're low brow or stupid, again, I enjoyed the stupid dick jokes from Sentouin. The problem is twofold, they're delivered by characters you don't like, and another one, they overexplain the joke, again and again and again. Yes, we get it the game is shitty because it's emulating reality, but my God, they won't stop egging you on it. The worst thing is, there are actually good jokes in this ruined by Hiro yelling and overly explaining the joke. Like, there's this one pretty good one where, after buying smoke grenades, Hiro couldn't use them properly because he didn't light them. The framing, the comedic timing, the pauses, everything was great! UNTIL Hiro decides to open his goddamned mouth. Like, for every potential this anime has at being even remotely decent, there's a big BUT hovering over it. Like, I like the meta aspects and how it wants to subvert general isekai cliches, BUT, it's done in such an overt manner it ruins any subtlety or tact. I like Alicia BUT she's barely in the damn thing and she does overstay her welcome. I like that one plot twist near the end of the anime BUT the foreshadowing is so non-existent and it comes so suddenly to the point there's no buildup to it. I like having a loser protagonist as a change of pace BUT there is no payoff to him being a loser apart from terrible and repetitive piss and shit jokes. In the anime, Hiro kept on playing that shitty game he was suckered into buying because of tits fairy, and in a meta sense I suppose I was the same for Alicia. In that sense maybe the anime is some kind of success. But most probably it was garbage to begin with and not some clever metacommentary. 3/10

I debated back and forth internally about whether or not I even felt like doing a review for Full-Dive RPG. Ultimately, I decided I needed to let people know about this show. If you thought this was another VRMMORPG Light Novel cash grab, you would be wrong. This is genuinely a unique anime. Uniquely bad, that is. SA…I mean Full-Dive, is one of the biggest wasted opportunities I’ve seen in some time. Episode 1 grabbed my attention and genuinely had me laughing out loud. I remember commenting in discussion threads that this would be the next Konosuba, and how funny it was. I could not havebeen more wrong. As the weeks went by, Full-Dive regressed into a walking meme. In fact, it seemed to be self-aware at times of how stupid its story was. I can confidently say that Reona’s tits literally carried the story and are the only things worth checking out in this anime. The Full Dive video game world that the anime set up was interesting at first, but quickly become repetitive and there’s only so many times the best friend chasing with a knife, or Hiro pissing himself could be used before they got old. Week after week, I watched and hoped that this show would improve, but it just never did. The same old jokes, same old tropes, and an MC who you just stop feeling bad for after a while. For me to not enjoy a show is pretty rare, as everyone who’s read my reviews knows, but this was just bad. Full-Dive’s disappointing story really is a shame, since the studio did a wonderful job with character designs and the art in the show is amazing. Unfortunately, there’s just not much substance there to back it up. I LOVE VRMMORPG, isekai, etc. etc., this was just a very bad example of one. Full-Dive is one of the few skippable shows of what ended up being a really good Spring 2021 anime season. If you just want to get a couple laughs, go for it. If you want an actual good VRMMORPG anime, just watch Bofuri. Full-Dive gets 5 piss soaked pants out of 10.

Recommendation: Don't waste your time, this show is bad and not in an entertaining way. Slight spoilers below. Welcome to One Joke: The Anime. From the paragraph-length light novel title of this series, you can probably already tell what the one joke is. Hiro, our main character, is pathetic and cringeworthy beyond belief in real life and the game he tries to play as an escape only piles on the misery. Usually in a story like this, there would be a little bit of the protagonist being pathetic before growing into a heroic figure the audience can actually find respectable. Well,aside from a brief training sequence at the very end of the season, Hiro displays no growth whatsoever. It's pure abuse for Hiro from start to finish. He loses every fight, he gets mocked and humiliated at every possible opportunity, the girls in his "harem" all either hate him or view him as a mark they can squeeze some money out of, and he never comes close to doing anything heroic (or if he does, it's misinterpreted as him being a pervert or criminal and he's attacked for doing it). It's a little funny at first just how committed the series is to never portraying Hiro in a positive light or allowing anything good to happen to him, but a few episodes into the season, the gimmick starts to wear thin and it's just pure secondhand embarrassment at watching him piss himself or get his lunch money taken by in-game bullies over and over and over. If the series had good side characters, this would maybe be a salvageable concept, but they're completely flat and uninteresting. Reona gets the most screentime but she does little besides provide exposition and a few jokes about how greedy and self-centered she is. Alicia is the closest to having an actual character, the Childhood Friend that is now psychopathically obsessed with killing Hiro after he accidentally kills her brother in the pilot episode, but that doesn't really go anywhere and she spends most of her time offscreen because any time she's on screen, she's trying to kill Hiro. The other two, Mizarisa the loli torturer/dominatrix and Kaede the tsundere little sister, have such little presence that they may as well not exist, and barely have any personalities beyond those few words I used to describe them. The voice acting is fine for the most part, but the artwork is noticeably substandard for its contemporaries. The character designs are ugly, with odd-looking multi-colored eyes and vacant, blank looks on the characters' faces most of the time. There aren't that many action scenes, and they're sluggish and not especially well-animated or entertaining. It's funny sometimes, there were definitely some gags that made me chuckle, but mostly it just spins its wheels and repeats the same jokes over and over while making the MC as embarrassing and unlikable as possible. Really the best way to summarize this series is that it's a sort-of funny concept that wears out its welcome immediately and has nothing behind it to sustain the premise or make it entertaining once the main gimmick stops being funny.

i know it wasn't the best story but i would really like to see a season 2 because i thought this show was so funny like you can't make up thee amount of times that I laughed while watching this show, it's insane. I really wanna see Hiro finish the game but i always forget that an anime is just an adaptation of a manga or light novel so if it was canceled and i did not know that it was, that would be really sad. I never expected him to marry o girl, the fairy chick, i just thought it was there for shitsand giggles, but in the end i thought that the joke was well executed.