Anime: Kumo Desu ga, Nanika?

This series came out in 2020, and I watched it in 2024. I'm not going to reiterate what other reviewers have said. I'm only going to point out two important things for anyone who wants to see it:

1. The show's animation quality gets progressively worse in the latter episodes. The last 2-3 episodes are awful and nearly unwatchable. I've seen this issue in other anime, and I believe it happens when the budget runs out.

2. This show has no ending. It's been four years since its release, and I expected an OVA or something as an epilogue to wrap things up. Nope; it seems it was too unpopular for even a 20-minute OVA to be green lit. So if you watch it, don't expect a conclusion to the story, or an explanation about the various plot holes.

Overview

(I've actually read the web novel that this anime is based on, but dropped it midway as the translation had gotten really bad.)

A transmigration isekai with the USP being that the protagonist, an oft-bullied young girl, is reborn as a spider albeit one which can evolve. In that sense, it is similar to Slime Datta Ken where the protagonist is reborn as a slime. However, here, it's not just the one student, but an entire classroom including the teacher who end up being transmigrated.

Animation

Having recently been exposed to the horrors of Chinese Donghua production values, I might be giving this section a bonus point. I found the CGI competently done and considering how unique the subject is, the spider's animation was well put together. The spider itself is very kawaii, an aspect that could only be/is only conveyed in the anime. Not all of the animation is CGI and at some point, even the CGI-ness of the animation becomes invisible and only reappears at certain moments when it can be quite jarring :|

Sound

This is probably one of the best features of this show as the OP and ED are excellent, kumo-chan's seiyuu is very expressive and the other seiyuu are generally above par. The ED is seriously hilarious :)

Story

As someone who reads a lot of isekai and cultivation stories, I've given up on hoping for watertight plots and look to enjoy the imagination and world-building more; that is certainly also the case here.

The basic premise of the story with the whole spider thing is quite unique and that provides a certain freshness to the isekai trope. The spider is, as is stereotypical, OP and the 'cultivation' aspect of her growth isn't anything terribly new and is riddled with holes. However, the lore of the new world does provide a setting that attempts to explain how and why things are the way they are. We are only exposed to the outlines of this reasoning in the first season. At any rate, you still get the dopamine rush whenever kumo-chan levels up and discovers new OP powers. This can get repetitive, but that's part and parcel of the cultivation genre.

There is apparently a complicated, convoluted plot that ties everything together and the script attempts to build things up slowly and methodically. While this can get a little boring at times, things kinda heat up in the climax of the season and an antagonist is revealed. The bad guy is rather clumsily developed, but hopefully the next season will handle things better.While it's nothing new to these stories, 'time' is handled particularly poorly here. This includes both the passage of time as well as the sequencing of events. The same could also be said of 'distance'. That said, events in the story are usually well paced and atmosphere is allowed to build where necessary without undue corner-cutting. The book, of course, goes into far greater detail.

Character

Kumo-chan's character is very well designed. The childish humour juxtaposed with the gore and darkness of the environment is rather refreshing. Certain mechanics such as multitasking using multiple personalities etc. have been well scripted and reminiscent of the GITS tachikoma. However, as mentioned earlier, time is poorly handled in the story and the character doesn't really mature at all. This makes things terribly repetitive at times, but this is also a 'feature' of the genre.Besides the protagonist's storyline, there is plenty of screen-time given to her classmates who have also transmigrated. Some of these classmates are given more importance than others and there are even some dubious love triangles that seem to go nowhere. You really want the story to move back to kumo-chan who is completely isolated from her classmates. But as things move along, there is a building anticipation on what will happen when the two parties meet.

Value

I can't really say how rewatchable this will be until the story is wrapped up. But for the moment, the world and character are certainly different and memorable.

Enjoyment

While certain episodes were a little dull, I've enjoyed watching Kumo Desu ga, Nanika? and am looking forward to any forthcoming seasons. I hope that it's not more of the same and that the character and storyline both mature.

The spider isekai is another case of trying to subvert a few things, only to fail in the longrun because you focus on the wrong things. One twist the anime went for was about having two storylines developing independently while at the same time feeding off each other. In one story you had the main heroine getting reincarnated as a spider and having to survive in a very dangerous cave, and in the other story it was about her fellow students reincarnating as various people and monsters in the human world where they are given proper upbringing and military training. The antithesis of seeing the spider having to fight hard in order to survive while the humans are having a mostly easy-going life was funny for a few episodes. Another twist in the second half of the show is the characters helping out the demon lord. Instead of having the heroes being the good guys who are gradually leveling up in order to defeat some distant evil party, in this show they become the evil party. With proper presentation, the anime could have been a very good subversion of a done to death formula. But as I mentioned already the presentation was far from perfect for the following reasons.

1) The production values are not very good. The CGI monsters are standing out too much and that takes you out of the experience. The artwork is also getting worse after awhile, resulting in the final episodes where things get more serious and should be given more attention to come off as very ugly to look at.

2) The tone shifts are not transitioning well. When the show wants to move from comedy to tragedy, or from lighthearted moments to more grimdark ones, it usually does it in a sudden way, which again takes you out of the experience. For example, the spider is constantly joking about things that a second later will try to kill her, and that can be very jarring.

3) The storylines are uneven. Instead of being treated as equally important, the spider side of the story is far more interesting than the human side. Every time the scene changes to show what the humans are doing it can be very boring since it comes off as a generic fantasy adventure with way too many bland characters who are doing close to nothing. As a result, you never care about the humans as much as you care about the spider, which means half of the show is very bland.

4) The videogame terminology is off-putting. Since everyone has levels and skill trees, you get this constant narration of an AI telling you how many experience points you earned and what skills you unlocked. If you are not fine with everything playing out like a videogame, you are not gonna like the show. In traditional stories you learn something new by studying or training. Over here it just appears as an extra ability in your mind because you did something. It’s artificial since it doesn’t happen in an organic way and it’s always followed by huge infodumps and statistic screens.

Thus, despite its good intentions, the spider isekai is another failure of an anime that doesn’t improve the image of isekais as overused, badly written and badly presented escapism.

• What a cursed period Winter 2021 was! In the same season, three awful anime series with horrible animation quality started airing. The worst was Ex-Arm, with a CGI animation so bad nobody could actually watch it. There was also Redo of Healer, a very badly animated rape fantasy targeted at incels. And lastly, there was Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?, or “So I'm a Spider, So What?” in Shakespeare’s language, the train wreck of an anime that I’m reviewing today.
  The premise
  This is yet again another “isekai” (or should I say, “shitsekai”), that is to say, an anime where the protagonist is transported to a parallel world. In that case it’s the whole classroom – teacher included – that are reincarnated as newborns, and the parallel world is a RPG-like fantasy world featuring elves, demons, monsters, and also tons of video games mechanics. Our protagonist is a girl who is reincarnated as a spider in a cave full of atrocious CGI creatures, and must fight them to survive and get experience, levels and skills. That’s the spider arc. Then you have the generic isekai arc which follows the boring adventures of the rest of the classroom, who got the chance not to be reincarnated as ugly monsters.
  One of the ugliest shows
  The spider arc is mostly animated in CGI, and oh boy does the CGI of this anime sucks ass. It is ugly, badly animated, and the movements are very jerky. Most of the spider arc happens in a cave, so the backgrounds you get to see are boring 3D backgrounds that look less detailed than the caves in The Battle for Middle-earth, a real time strategy video game that was released in… 2004. The spider looks very ugly, too. With her human eyes and her spider body, she looks like one of those abominations I used to make in the video game Spore when I was 10. The other CGI monsters look even uglier than the spider, and when these cursed creatures fight it is hard to understand what the heck is happening on the screen.
  The animation of the generic isekai arc isn’t better. In the first half of the series or so it consists mostly of 2D animation, but as the series progresses there is more and more CGI. Just as in the spider arc, the CGI is very ugly. It is not an overstatement to say that the 3D hentai game Koikatsu Party looks better than the CGI of this anime. Some characters such as Sophia or the demon lord are made out exclusively of CGI, and you often see 2D characters and CGI characters on the same image. CGI is also used for monsters and armies, not just for background crowds. Towards the end of the series CGI is used in all fight scenes, making them look like utter shit. This is supposed to be the climax for god’s sake! Oh and did I also mention that the ground looks uglier than old video games’ textures?
  The 2D animation is also very bad. Character designs are comparable to those in The Irregular at Magic High School – they are generic and soulless. 2D backgrounds look like they come from a low budget visual novel from the 2000’s. There is little actual animation, and most of the time it is jerky. 2D fight scenes don’t look good and consist for the most part of static images with movement lines. Not only this, but as the series progresses, the animation gets even worse! There are more and more face inconsistencies, with ugly faces and characters’ eyes looking in two different directions. In the second half of the series or so, there are entire scenes with absolutely no goddamn animation. Characters leave or appear on the screen with no actual animation as if it was a shitty PowerPoint presentation! There are some episodes where the animators tried very hard to spare effort by hiding the characters’ mouths when they’re talking, for example by putting a character in front of them, or by showing static images of silent characters.
  In short, the animation of this show is so ugly it’s near impossible to take the story seriously.
  The most insufferable protagonist ever created
  There are three things that make the spider insufferable. First, as I mentioned earlier, she looks ugly. Second, her voice acting is extremely annoying. Third, she can’t help complaining and yelling all the time with her irritating voice. Since for most of the series she is alone in caves, she is always talking to herself, describing what’s happening to her, reading stats and skills’ description, talking to the AI, making cringe-worthy jokes and references, and so on. And this is what makes her insufferable: she is always talking. When the spider appears on the screen you should have your Paracetamol ready because her high-pitched voice is going to give you a goddamn headache. And if her dialogues aren’t enough to make your ears bleed, do not worry: she also sings the ending song!
  The rest of the cast sucks ass
  The rest of the cast on the generic isekai arc’s side is a bunch of stereotypical and soulless characters. There are too many of them to remember about and I will not waste my time describing why they suck. In a nutshell: there’s the generic anime main character who is kind, brave and whatnot, and the bad guy who is mean and pretentious. Oh, and the demon lord is a little girl with a cuteness fang, how original. With the former teacher there’s a failed attempt at character development which can be summed up in this: “I wanted my students to like me so I studied video games and light novels”… absolutely ridiculous. The only thing that’s good with these people is that they are less annoying than the spider.
  The story is nonsense
  The first thing that’s wrong in the story is that it follows two arcs – which are actually two different timelines – at the same time, making the show confusing. To my knowledge, it wasn’t the case in the light novel or the manga adaptation.
  The spider arc is about accumulating experience, leveling up, getting new skills and evolving. It has everything a MMORPG has, including skill points, MP, HP and SP. There’s tons of talk about skills and other video game mechanics, lots of annoying terminology, and walls of text that are unreadable. Video-game skills play a huge role in the story, but they also make the fights unfathomable. Stuff happens on the screen (stuff meaning orgies of bad CGI), that’s all. There’s no real tension because you know that the spider is going to win any fight thanks to some skill she pulled from her ass.
  The generic isekai arc is about generic isekai stuff. In the beginning of the series the characters are in a generic magic academy where they do nothing relevant to the plot. Then there is a conspiracy and they are forced to leave the academy to fight the demons in atrocious CGI battles.
  As the series progresses the story gets more random and ridiculous. There is an “administrator” who talks to the spider with a smartphone and gives her overpowered skills, there are elves with mechas, there are clones, there are computers, there is future technology… And in the last episodes, which is supposed to be the climax of the series, we get to see disgusting fight scenes between ugly CGI models and mechas that have nothing to do in a medieval fantasy universe.
  Sound
  Perhaps the least failed aspect of the show, but it’s still horrible. The quality of the background music ranges from meh to alright. The voice-acting is meh, as the lip-sync is sometimes badly done, and as I said earlier, the spider’s voice is insufferable. The openings and endings are also very bad and skippable.
  Verdict
  One of the worst anime series I have seen in my life, both in terms of story / characters and technical value. The only reason I give it a 2 instead of a 1 is because Ex-Arm exists. It is absolutely not enjoyable. Avoid it at all costs, it is not worth your time or the money spent on Paracetamol.