Phi Brain was first shown to me in this manner: “It’s Yugioh meets Professor Layton”. Upon hearing that, I figured it would be the best show ever or the worst. Here is what I found.
Most of the good reviews of Phi Brain are simply nostalgia from kids and teens who grew up with Yugioh. The show does start with a bang, with an interesting and deadly puzzle. Unfortunately it gets quite slow when the main character, Kaito, is given a millennium artifact…. I mean digital puzzle collection. Don’t worry, he finds the millennium puzzle later.
He is, of course, amazing at everything and runs through most of the puzzle easily. As it turns out the digital puzzle collection is an invite to a game that could get Kaito killed. He accepts and has to solve a deadly puzzle given to him by a figure called “Minotaur”.
So how is it? The first half is pretty boring, but that can be forgiven as most of the info is actually important to the story. The show appears to simply do everything to build up to “Puzzle Time”. This is the best part of the show, because you can say to yourself “Big O, Puzzle Time!” and pretend you are watching a better show.
We're saving money on animation!
Unfortunately even the fast paced part of the show isn’t terribly engaging. On top of that, the animation ranges from average to terrible. The above picture is how that scene actually looks. I know that they use a lot of techniques like this, but this is just lazy and awful.
But the worst part of all? One of the characters is the Tsundere girl combined with the girl who beats you up for no good reason. Both of these are overplayed, and the girl who beats you up for no reason was never funny in the first place. This cliche really needs to die.
Status: Dropped so hard I cannot even believe it. The only reason you would watch this show is if you are nostalgic for Yugioh.
It may get better later, I don’t care to wait on it. You can watch the trailer here if you absolutely love Yugioh. And no, I didn’t watch past the first episode. I made that mistake with Ao No Exorcist and it actually got worse.
