This is a solid series despite setting itself up to fail in a couple of ways.
The first is the flash-back intro. It begins with a character who, without context, appears as a cocky punk you couldn't care less about who gets caught doing crimes. Then, as he is questioned, you get obnoxiously vague exposition that finally leads to the flashback where the actual story is.
I personally benched the show for months because of this intro. I only finally finished the first episode because it is my personal rule to give any show one full episode to prove itself. This being my introduction to the game, which I later played, it also made for a very slow, weak un-engaging start to the game. Clearly, the developers were banking on the built up good will from previous iterations.
Flashbacks/forwards are only ever a cheap, detrimental story device or essential enhancing element with no middle ground. It's obvious which category this falls into and very unfortunate that it continues to punctuate the series.
The second way the anime shoots itself in the foot is content packaging/episode release. The packaged 26 episode anime doesn't actually finish the story. Without the final episodes, which you must know about and then hunt down separately, the putative ending from the first 26 is just a pointless slap in the face.
I never quite know who anime adaptations of games are for.
For those who played the game they are usually judged against game negatively as an update of the olde timey complaint wherein the book was better than the movie instead of judging each according to the genre of which it is actually a part.
If one is taking this apples/oranges approach wouldn't the anime, unsurprisingly and necessarily, be lesser since you are passively watching a truncated version of the game with no new story elements?
Yet, conversely, for anyone who hasn't played the game such adaptations are usually unwatchable exactly because they 1. Are set up such that they depend on you already being familiar with the game and 2. Are too much like a game, making for awkward and clumsy anime.
This adaptation also occasionally trips up from being too much like a game, e.g. Distracting bits of dead-end plot that only exist because they are translations of game elements, the main protagonist being unnaturally mute and un-reactive because that is the de facto for first-person RPGs, etc. But these are comparatively minor and might go unnoticed by many viewers.
So I am marking this pretty high because it actually stands up pretty well on its own with serious and relevant plot elements, flushed out characters, good world building and intriguing neo-noir type mystery.
