We had mentioned in our first impressions that the anime was off to a bit of a rocky start, with its plot being similar to Mirai Nikki and the weird obsession with Power Ranger suits that Platinum End seemed to embrace. While the initial episodes set up a good protagonist, the plot doesn’t sustain it well enough. Mirai goes from wanting to die to wanting to live so that he can find happiness but he’s also stuck in this battle royale between the god candidates. While this seems like a perfectly reasonable plot, Platinum End fails to execute it well.

With the kind of character that Mirai is, he doesn’t want anything to do with the battle royale because his mom taught him that only if you live, you can find happiness. That means he shouldn’t kill people. This means that the plot comes after Mirai instead of Mirai simply being in the plot. In the stadium scene against Metropoliman who is set up to be the villain, Mirai is bothered by Metropoliman killing people but he fails to do anything about it. There’s no ‘bad decisions’ that the protagonist will regret later. In fact, Mirai seems like a bystander in the anime more than the protagonist who’s experiencing the anime.

Here’s the most annoying thing about Platinum End: Mirai doesn’t have any depth to him. Like we mentioned earlier about the plot, Mirai doesn’t have enough motive to be actively involved in the plot. He has no reason to win this battle against the other God candidates because his goal can be easily achieved outside of the battle royale.

The villain, Metropoliman, seems like a great villain at first but he has no basis for doing what he does against the other God candidates. He’s simply twisted with not enough explanation as to why he’s twisted. The side characters, Nasse and Saki are also reduced to stoic characters who contribute very little to the overall plot. In fact, Saki barely does anything in the first half of the series, other than serve as Mirai’s weakness. Nasse says some things that are particularly questionable for an angel to say but this is not questioned by any of the characters or shown to be even a little significant to the overall plot. Overall, the characters are unrealistic because they either have very stoic and generic responses or some extremely intense emotions that are very jarring.