The story is still extremely hard to follow in my opinion, and there are a lot of huge text walls, I would suggest animating the text like moving them around or playing with fonts to add more creativity into what each character says and their emotion at the time.

Humor is inapplicable to this episode, so I won’t critique it.

This episode improves on some aspects of episode 0, but still has clear problems that need to be addressed. To start, the dialogue actually is decently done and everything is (mostly) spelled correctly with good punctuation, which is a huge plus considering this is a series. Some dialogue can be a bit on the awkward side (which isn’t really a dialogue problem but a pacing problem, I’ll explain in a second) but the majority of it was pretty good. The discussion scene with Atlent and Aquaman was particularly a good portion, as the argument was surprisingly well-written and displayed some personality. The tweened animation quality is decent, though it could certainly improve in some aspects (Life Lock’s teleportation effect for instance), it is passable overall. There could definitely be more dynamic angles to help with the overall presentation of the plot. The main problem this series episode has is 2 things: Life Lock and Pacing. I’ll start with pacing.

First off, everything happens way too quickly within this episode, save for the conversation with Atlent and Aquaman. Pacing is a critical part of telling a story because the audience needs time to observe characters within a story and develop their own thoughts about this character. Give the audience time to reflect on events, to analyze and understand the complexities of each character and their struggles. The nuking of the ocean happens way too quickly, along with Life Lock’s introduction. Cutting from 20 years ago to where the war starts to modern-day where the war is about to end does nothing for the audience in establishing an understanding with Atlent or seeing how the overall war turns out. In addition to this, nothing is explained about the UN’s decisions, which is also a missed opportunity. A montage going through the years and through the war would have been a wonderful inclusion.

Second, Life Lock is an incredibly problematic character. It is always difficult to pull off a god-character in a series, which Life Lock essentially is. The reason being, the audience has no reason to get attached to the conflict or fear the consequences of the enemy if one particular character could do absolutely everything and completely win just because their power level is way too high. Life Lock is a prime example of this, particularly with being able to resurrect literally millions upon millions of people who have died all throughout history for the past 20 years. Though God characters theoretically shouldn’t be limited because, well, they’re Gods, they HAVE to be limited for the sake of the story. If a character is too weak, they become a chore to watch (unless there is some sort of charm presented with losing or being unfortunate, like for the characters Mumen Rider and Kazuma). If a character is too strong, they take the danger and risk out of any fight they participate in. It’s ok to have OP characters, but there needs to be some form of limit or weakness they have. Many omnipotent Gods in stories don’t interact or interfere with the affairs of mortals or are limited in some way because the tension of the story dissipates if they actually use their godlike powers. Other God characters still retain many of their Godlike aspects, but then become mortal and are therefore able to be defeated and even killed. Life Lock is a serious problem for the longevity of the series because his powers are simply too strong for good storytelling. Even the most op of characters have limits/weaknesses, and sometimes they need to use their own intuition or intelligence to defeat their opponent. God characters also work if they have a charm to them or are enjoyable to watch at the very least, but Life Lock doesn’t exactly have a personality. If the series is to benefit overall, Life Lock requires big changes.

Overall, the episode is decent and shows a ton of potential, but has a lot of thematic and pacing aspects that need significant improvement. It’s decent, but not excellent. Enjoyable, but not outstandingly so. There needs to be some work on overall animation quality, but there still is quite the potential for overall improvement.

2/5.