Wonder Egg Priority [SUB] (2021) Review

 Wonder Egg Priority [SUB] (2021) 6.5/10

Hello everyone and welcome to a very unconventional anime: Wonder Egg Priority. This show first aired from January 13 - March 24, 2021, with the show running at 12 episodes. There is an OVA that serves as the series' ending, but I didn't bother with that for reasons I'll list here. So I want you to imagine if Persona and Life is Strange had a baby. That's what this show is. A weird cross breed between the two. I had fairly high hopes for the show. Besides seeing a couple of screenshots and minor details about the show, I went into this almost completely blind. So you know how in health class, sometimes they'll give students eggs to look after for extra credit? That’s what I thought this show was going to be about. Yeah that's NOT what this is. It's something completely different. Let's jump into this weird mess cause I have a lot to talk about. I'm gonna try and keep this spoiler free too.

Our story follows Ai Ohto, a 14 year old introverted middle schooler that has heterochromia (two different colored eyes). Because of this, she gets bullied a lot. One day, a new transfer student joins her class. Her name is Koito Nagase and she becomes Ai's first friend. Eventually Koito will commit suicide at the school and Ai will harbor regret for "betraying" her. Because of this event, Ai won't go to school, wallowing in her own depression. Now this is where the story gets convoluted. This is the story of Ai and three other girls (Neiru, Rika, and Momoe) becoming friends and saving girls who have killed themselves and helping them move on to the next life. To do this, they have to crack these Wonder Eggs in the Egg World (basically dream world). From an egg emerges a girl that was a victim to suicide. In order to clear the mission, the girls have to protect the person from Seeno Evils and defeat their Wonder Killer (the source of their trauma that drove them to kill themselves). While each person has a person that they want to save (such as Ai wanting to save Koito or Neiru wanting to save her sister), Ai looks into the reason why Koito killed herself. As the series continues, we will get further development for the rest of the cast on how exactly this whole Wonder Egg process works and how it all started.

This is one of the most unique shows I’ve seen in a while. The overall plot for this is very interesting and has a lot of potential, but it’s execution sucks. When the show started implementing parallel universes, even more confusing plot lines, and more story elements without fully explaining what was already brought up is when it started to fall apart for me. Just like with Life is Strange, the potential for this show was EXTREMELY high but they went way too deep with this. It has a lot of interesting concepts (topic of suicide, literally fighting your personal trauma, and helping those who died pass on to the next life) but it’s execution of these topics should’ve been handled better. There’s a reason why I had put Orange on such a high pedestal because that show handled these topics with the utmost care. Not dissing this show’s discussion of these topics. I welcome it in fact, but I feel like Wonder Egg Priority held its punches. The same issue with Life is Strange.

So how is the show that we actually got? It’s okay at best. One of my major issues with the show is that it doesn’t explain exactly how this works until halfway through the season with the recap episode and even then the explanation left out a couple of crucial pieces of information. There’s so many other plot elements that were brought up but never fully explored. The only characters I really enjoyed were Ai and Rika. Everyone else either started strong but then fell flat, was only there to blue ball you for plot reasons, or overall someone that I didn’t really care for. Ai is a precious bean that needs to be protected and I was actually surprised at how interesting Rika came out to be.

The art direction is easily the best part of the show. The show looks great and is one of the best looking shows of the 2020’s I’ve seen in a while. I love the character designs for a majority of the characters (especially Ai). I also like the designs for the trauma monsters. Reminded me of shadows from the Persona series, especially the bosses for P4 and P5. The animation is top quality too. The fight scenes had no right looking that well. Cloverworks did a fantastic job with the show's art and animation direction. Even more so with the fact that there was no manga to base this off of.

The music is great too. The OP is good and fits the show very well, but I’m not going to go out of my way to listen to it as opposed to some other anime.

The voice acting is great here. So at the time of this review, only the first two episodes have been dubbed. I enjoyed the voices for the characters up to that point (with Ai being perfectly casted by Mikaela Krantz). The rest of the show I watched in the JP dub and it’s good too. I enjoyed the voices for everyone, especially Acca and Ura-Acca.

Overall, the show LOOKS great, but it’s symbology bullshit with hardly any substance. The only reason why I can recommend this is for the art direction and the few pieces of excellent story points. There’s obviously a lot of passion put into this project, which I respect, but it just wasn’t executed in the right way. Honestly, I feel like my original hunch for what the show would be (actually taking care of eggs for a class) would’ve been better. And of course there is the OVA that I did not watch, which apparently completely soiled whatever good the show did. So yeah, I’m glad I didn’t bother with that. Until my next review, stay frosty and remember to seek help if you feel you need to.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.