Let's get the positives in first. Genuinely supportive team mates, friends, family and even rivals. Cute flirting scenes. Mild humour. Gorgeous felines. Attractive looking cast.

Some attempts to tackle big subjects such as toxic fandoms and being female gamer in male dominated industry although everything felt a bit too easily resolved.

Ok, now my biggest gripes.

1) Too much assumed knowledge. I'm into games but unfamiliar with Onmyoji Arena. A quick explanation would have sufficed.

"Hey, here's a map, its features, this is the objective and some of the main characters"

They had a beautiful model of the map in the meeting room table, I don't recall them ever drawing attention to it. I couldn't enjoy the nuances of when they ban/chose the players at the beginning of each match, why was that choice shocking? I ended up looking stuff up but I don't think I should have to do that.

2) I wondered if I fell asleep in the first few episodes and missed the explanation, but the fact that my attention was not captured in the beginning shows I wasn't that into the characters personal lives either. I almost dropped the series but fortunately Lu Yue appeared and injected a bit of much needed life into the team.

3) The animated parts were visually beautiful but on occasion, especially group battles, they were wasted because of poor clarity or pacing. I can understand why some viewers skipped them.

Overall, my personal opinion is it was entertaining enough, I didn't hate it but it has unfulfilled potential. Maybe tried to do too much.