Thats a very good idea.

If I had to pick one off the top of my head I’d probably say Koi Gaze. Yes the story is disturbing and uncomfortable, but that also makes it work.

I tried to keep it short, here’s part 2:

Repetition can be brilliant.

A recurring pattern can be brilliant.

A formula can be brilliant.

The problem is when I become so familiar with the formula that the formula becomes more noticeable to me than the actual story.

That’s the point where I start feeling like I’m watching the mechanism rather than the story.

It’s basically the same thing as when you watch a horror movie and you suddenly realise:

“Okay, this character has just gone into the basement. They’re not coming back.”

Once you know horror conventions, you don’t necessarily stop enjoying horror.

But you become aware of the convention.

And sometimes the movie can use that awareness brilliantly.

Sometimes it can subvert it.

Sometimes it can make you think you know what is going to happen and then completely screw with your expectations.

But if it just keeps doing exactly what you expected, eventually you’re not watching the story unfold anymore.

You’re watching the recipe being followed.

That’s what I meant.

So if you want the shortest possible version of the answer:

The pattern I noticed wasn’t one specific plot event shared by Re:Zero, Demon Slayer and Mushoku Tensei. It was the repeated use of a recognisable storytelling mechanism. After enough repetitions, I stopped merely predicting events and started predicting the function of the next scene, the next escalation, the next reversal, the next emotional beat or the next reset/development. At that point I became conscious of the recipe itself.

And that’s why I brought up Higurashi.

Because Higurashi is almost the perfect demonstration of the difference.

It repeats itself constantly, but the repetition creates a mystery.

In the other cases, once I understand the mechanism well enough, the repetition can instead make the story feel increasingly mechanical.

So I’m not saying:

“These anime are bad because I can predict them.”

I’m saying:

“Once I can see the storytelling machinery operating underneath the story, it changes my experience of watching it.”

And honestly, that’s something I’ve noticed more and more with anime.

The first time through, I’m watching the story.

After I’ve figured out the recipe, I’m watching the writer make the story.

And those are two very different experiences.

When will I recieve my grade for this assignment?

Well since this seems so important you, sure: I’ll try to keep it short.

Yeah, okay, I understand what you are asking now. You don’t mean “give me examples of anime that are predictable”, you mean specifically explain what recurring story mechanic / recipe I was talking about when I mentioned those shows.

And I actually think the reason I didn’t explain it properly before is because when you have watched enough of this stuff, you start recognising the mechanism almost instinctively. You stop thinking “what is going to happen?” and start thinking “ah, I know what this show does when it gets to this point.”

That’s what I meant.

The pattern isn’t necessarily one single identical plot event in all three shows, because obviously Re:Zero, Demon Slayer and Mushoku Tensei are very different anime. What I was talking about is the way they repeatedly construct situations and then use the same kind of mechanism to get the audience through those situations.

Once you recognise that mechanism, you start seeing the machinery behind the story.

That’s the thing I was getting at with Higurashi too, although Higurashi is actually a really interesting counter-example because its repetition is much more deliberate and mysterious.

With Higurashi, you very quickly realise that certain things are going to happen again. You see the same characters, the same village, the same general circumstances, the same kinds of interactions, the same escalating paranoia and violence, and then things seem to reset or begin again in another variation.

But the important thing is that Higurashi makes the repetition itself part of the mystery.

You’re sitting there thinking:

“Okay, this happened again. Why?”

“Why are these people doing this again?”

“Why does this situation keep happening?”

“Is this actually the same timeline?”

“Is somebody remembering something?”

“Is there something supernatural going on?”

So although you can recognise the recipe, you don’t necessarily know what the recipe is actually making yet.

That is very different from a show where you eventually recognise the recipe and can basically see the next ingredient being thrown into the bowl.

That’s what I mean by becoming aware of a plot device.

Take Re:Zero, for example.

The broad mechanism becomes pretty obvious after a while. Subaru gets himself into an impossible situation, things go horribly wrong, somebody dies, Subaru dies or otherwise reaches the point where the current attempt is unsalvageable, and then the story gives him another opportunity to try to solve the problem.

So the interesting question gradually changes.

At the beginning you’re watching because you genuinely don’t know what is going to happen.

After you’ve seen the structure enough times, you start watching it differently.

You start thinking:

“Okay, this is the bad situation.”

“This character is probably going to die.”

“Subaru is going to reach the point where this attempt fails.”

“Then he’s going to have another attempt.”

“And now the actual story is going to be figuring out how he gets from THIS version of events to the version where everything works.”

That is the pattern.

And that can be very effective. I am not saying it is automatically bad because it is predictable.

The problem starts when you become so familiar with the mechanism that you stop being emotionally surprised by it.

If the show spends a huge amount of time making me care about a character, then kills that character, then uses the established mechanism to effectively rewind the situation and try again, eventually I can start seeing the emotional machinery too.

It’s not just:

“Someone is going to die.”

It’s:

“Ah, they’re deliberately putting this character in danger because the show is preparing another reset.”

And once you start thinking that way, you’re no longer experiencing the story quite the same way.

You’re watching the author move the pieces around.

That’s what I meant by the “recipe”.

Demon Slayer does something similar, although obviously with a completely different mechanism.

The story repeatedly puts Tanjiro and the others into an increasingly dangerous confrontation.

A powerful enemy appears.

The heroes initially appear completely outmatched.

Someone gets badly injured.

The situation gets progressively worse.

Then somebody reveals another ability, technique, memory, connection, transformation, power-up or previously established element which allows the fight to continue.

Then the battle escalates again.

Then another character gets their big moment.

Then another desperate attack.

Then another revelation.

Then the enemy appears to be defeated, except there is another layer to the fight.

And eventually you reach the conclusion.

Again, none of those individual things are necessarily bad.

In fact, Demon Slayer is often extremely good at executing that formula.

But once you’ve watched enough of it, you can recognise the shape of the episode.

You know when the heroes are probably not actually finished.

You know when somebody getting absolutely destroyed probably isn’t the end of their involvement.

You know when a flashback is coming because the story has reached the point where it needs to explain why this character can suddenly do the thing they need to do.

You know that when the situation looks completely hopeless, there is probably another card somewhere in the deck.

And that’s where my “I can see it coming from a mile away” comment comes from.

I’m not saying:

“I can predict every single event.”

I’m saying:

“I recognise what kind of event the story is going to give me next because I’ve seen this storytelling mechanism repeatedly.”

That’s an important distinction.

It’s like watching a magician after you’ve learned the trick.

You can still appreciate the performance, but you are no longer experiencing the trick in exactly the same way.

And Mushoku Tensei has its own version of this.

There the pattern is less about one specific combat mechanism and more about the way the story repeatedly structures Rudeus’s development.

You get a particular situation, Rudeus develops or learns something from it, his circumstances change, he moves into another stage of his life, another problem appears, and the story uses that problem to push him into another period of development.

So after a while you start recognising the rhythm.

Something happens.

Rudeus reacts to it.

He changes.

The story moves him somewhere else.

A new set of circumstances appears.

He has to deal with another problem.

Then the story uses that problem to develop another aspect of his character.

Again, that’s not inherently bad. In fact, character development through recurring life situations is one of the strengths of that kind of story.

But once you recognise the structure, you can start anticipating the kind of thing the story is going to do next.

And that’s really the common thread between the examples I was talking about.

It isn’t:

“All three anime have exactly the same plot.”

They obviously don’t.

It’s:

they establish a storytelling mechanism, repeat that mechanism enough times for the audience to learn it, and eventually the audience can start predicting the mechanism itself rather than merely predicting individual events.

That’s the thing I was trying to describe.

And there is another important part to this.

There is a difference between predictability and recognising a formula.

Almost every story is predictable to some degree.

If a character is introduced as the main protagonist, I can probably make some assumptions about whether they’re going to survive.

If the villain is introduced in episode 2, I can probably assume the story isn’t going to resolve everything in episode 3.

If somebody says “I have something important to tell you” and then the episode cuts to commercial or ends, I know the writer isn’t suddenly going to have them explain everything immediately.

That’s normal storytelling.

I’m talking about something more specific.

I’m talking about reaching the point where you recognise the sequence of storytelling decisions.

You don’t necessarily know the exact line of dialogue.

You don’t necessarily know exactly who will die.

You don’t necessarily know exactly what power will be revealed.

But you recognise what FUNCTION the next scene is going to serve.

And once you can do that, the story starts feeling different.

You start thinking:

“Oh, this is the part where…”

“Oh, this is obviously setting up…”

“Okay, they’re doing THAT thing again.”

“Right, this is the point where…”

And that is what I meant when I said I had become so aware of the particular plot device that I started seeing it coming from a mile away.

It’s not that I have some magical ability to predict anime.

It’s that the anime taught me its own grammar.

And once you understand the grammar, you can start reading the sentence before you’ve finished it.

Higurashi is especially interesting because it uses this exact phenomenon against the viewer.

The repetition is obvious.

That’s not really the trick.

The trick is that the viewer initially doesn’t understand what the repetition means.

So you start recognising the pattern:

“Wait, I’ve seen this before.”

“Didn’t this happen already?”

“Why is this character acting differently this time?”

“Why is this person alive now?”

“Why did that event happen differently?”

And because the pattern itself is part of the mystery, recognising it actually makes you MORE interested.

That’s why I think Higurashi is probably one of the best examples of this kind of storytelling.

It doesn’t simply repeat something and expect you not to notice.

It practically says:

“Yes. You noticed. Now figure out why.”

That is a very different use of repetition.

And that is why I wouldn’t necessarily complain about repetition itself.

(Continued below)

Imagine watching anime on Crunchyhole

Are you serious? I just told you that a moment ago why its not there.

I remember back in the 80s with He-man, he’d always have an afterthought like Jerry Springer, sharing his wisdom with us kids.

There is no one recipe, can’t very well list them all. The recipe differs from anime to anime.

I’m relatively new on the Fediverse, this was a force of habit from image boards who usually force you to post an image with your post. My bad.

haha I’ve never watched House, but if its like that I imagine so!

Thats good advice, I think i’ll start doing that too!

I love slice of life animes, they’re probably one of my favorite genres of anime. In example “Was the order a rabbit”, nothing going on, yet it still manages to stay fresh somehow.

My kids are adults i can weeb out as much as i want.

Are you guys talking shit about mai waifu?

A great tragedy befell all of us when we lost Stanley Rubiks, a man who from humble beginnings selling shoes in Nepal, came to give us many heroes we sing about today. Who could ever forget Captain Planet, Robocop, Punky Brewster, the Power Rangers or Robocop to name but a few? Or the invention of the now popular toy the Rubiks Cube which isn’t just a complicated puzzle box, but makes for a good hiding place too also? Stanley came up with the heroes we love and admire effortlessly and without making any profit from them, he just loved inventing them and giving novelists the idea while still continuing to sell pancakes in Peru to make ends meet. All the while being a hobbyist virtuoso on the nose flute which he played so passionately throughout his life. So today, in his memory, play a song using your nose. Thank you Mr. Rubiks, for giving us so much.

And here’s the frustrating part.

Some of those visual ideas actually work.

Occasionally an image lands exactly as intended.

Occasionally a surreal sequence genuinely creates an emotional response.

Occasionally I caught myself thinking:

“Now that’s interesting.”

Those moments exist.

They’re simply buried underneath so many repeated artistic flourishes that they lose much of their impact.

Like adding too much seasoning to a perfectly good meal.

Eventually you can’t taste the meal anymore.

Why Lain worked

This is also why I don’t believe you can deliberately create “another Lain.”

People often think Serial Experiments Lain succeeded because it had strange imagery.

No.

It succeeded because every strange image served a larger purpose.

Its silences mattered.

Its pacing mattered.

Its mystery mattered.

Even when you didn’t fully understand what was happening, you felt that something was happening.

The world itself had internal logic.

It felt alive.

It trusted the audience enough to leave questions unanswered.

That’s one of the hardest things any artist can do.

Trust your audience.

Don’t explain every feeling.

Don’t overdecorate every scene.

Don’t mistake complexity for depth.

Sometimes less really is more.

Lightning in a bottle

I think that’s ultimately what disappointed me most.

Not that this anime failed to become Lain.

It never needed to.

What disappoints me is that I think it could have become something uniquely its own.

The original game already had an identity.

It didn’t need to borrow another one.

Instead of trying to become “the next Lain,” I wish the studio had simply embraced what made Needy Streamer Overload different.

Because there is a fascinating story hiding inside this material.

A story about loneliness.

About online validation.

About becoming addicted to attention.

About turning yourself into content.

Those themes are more relevant today than ever.

Ironically, that’s already enough.

No butterflies required.

Final thoughts

Perhaps that’s the biggest lesson I took away from Needy Girl Overdose.

Great art isn’t created by copying another masterpiece’s visual language.

It’s created by honestly exploring your own ideas.

Akira happened because everything aligned.

Twin Peaks happened because everything aligned.

The Shining happened because everything aligned.

Serial Experiments Lain happened because everything aligned.

The right creators.

The right ideas.

The right moment in time.

Lightning in a bottle.

You can’t force that.

You can only keep creating, keep experimenting, and hope that one day lightning strikes again.

And despite everything I’ve written here…

…I’m genuinely glad this anime exists.

Because somebody cared enough to try.

Somebody believed they could create something unusual.

Somebody took a risk.

Even if, in my opinion, that risk ultimately didn’t pay off.

Maybe you’ll absolutely love it.

Maybe you’ll think I’m talking complete nonsense.

And honestly?

That’s perfectly fine.

Art doesn’t need defending.

Art speaks for itself.

Sometimes it whispers.

Sometimes it shouts.

Sometimes it completely misses the mark.

But it always tells us something—not just about the people who made it, but about ourselves and how we experience it.

As for me…

I really wanted Needy Girl Overdose to become Lain 2.0.

Instead, I found a fascinating experiment that reached for the stars but never quite escaped Earth’s gravity.

That doesn’t make it terrible.

It simply makes it disappointing.

Final Score: 4/10

An ambitious experiment with flashes of brilliance, buried beneath a mountain of artistic overindulgence. I genuinely admire the studio for trying something different. I only wish they’d had more confidence in telling their own story instead of chasing somebody else’s magic.

I wrote a whole review for it, but if anybody reads this and loves needy girl overdose: again, my goal is not to just rip on this anime, far from it, anyway here goes:

“I really wanted to love this anime.”

Sometimes a review begins with excitement.

Sometimes it begins with disappointment.

This one begins with both.

When I first heard about Needy Girl Overdose, my curiosity immediately went through the roof. Not just because it was based on the game Needy Streamer Overload—which I ended up playing a few times because of this anime—but because the creators openly admitted that Serial Experiments Lain had been one of their inspirations.

Now that’s a dangerous thing to say.

Not because inspiration is bad. Quite the opposite. Every artist stands on the shoulders of somebody else. The danger lies in inviting comparisons to a work that many people, myself included, consider lightning trapped in a bottle.

Serial Experiments Lain wasn’t just another anime.

It was one of those rare occasions where the right people, at exactly the right moment in history, somehow created something timeless. It was deeply rooted in the late 1990s, when the Internet still felt mysterious rather than commercial, yet somehow it remains eerily relevant today.

That’s an incredibly high bar to set.

Still, I wanted to believe.

The first few episodes even gave me hope. Strange imagery. Distorted reality. Experimental editing. Weird symbolism. I caught myself thinking:

“Oh boy… are they actually trying to make Lain 2?”

I wanted them to succeed.

Unfortunately, somewhere around episode seven, something clicked—and not in a good way.

I suddenly realized I wasn’t watching a mysterious story wrapped in experimental visuals.

I was watching experimental visuals desperately trying to wrap themselves around a story.

Those are two completely different things.

Style versus substance

One thing I should probably get out of the way before people sharpen their pitchforks.

I don’t dislike experimental animation.

Quite the opposite.

I wish more studios took risks.

Anime has become incredibly safe in recent years. Too many productions play it by the numbers. Same character archetypes. Same jokes. Same visual language. So whenever a studio says, “Let’s do something weird,” I’m immediately interested.

Experimentation is healthy.

Failure is healthy.

I’d rather watch an ambitious failure than the five-hundredth perfectly competent but utterly forgettable seasonal anime.

So no, my criticism isn’t that Needy Girl Overdose is strange.

My criticism is that much of its strangeness doesn’t seem to earn its place.

There’s an enormous difference.

Take Lain as an example.

Whenever Lain suddenly interrupts itself with cryptic imagery, strange technological jargon, or surreal moments that almost resemble tiny documentaries, those scenes aren’t random.

They’re building something.

They’re feeding the atmosphere.

They’re slowly convincing you that reality itself is beginning to crack apart.

The weirdness serves the story.

In Needy Girl Overdose, however, I kept getting the opposite feeling.

Walls of flashing text.

Flowers blooming.

Butterflies floating across the screen.

Abstract imagery.

More flashing text.

Even more flashing text.

Eventually I found myself asking a question every artist should ask while creating something:

Why is this here?

Not because something has to be realistic.

Not because art has to explain itself.

But because every artistic choice should have a reason to exist.

If I make a music video with Cammy and suddenly insert five seconds of a dog coughing up a bone, I have to ask myself whether that image earns its place.

If it doesn’t tell the audience something…

If it doesn’t reinforce an emotion…

If it doesn’t support the story…

…then it’s just a dog coughing up a bone.

Randomness isn’t depth.

Surrealism isn’t automatically meaningful.

Weirdness by itself is simply… weirdness.

Ironically, if that same dog appeared in a story about someone suffering from an eating disorder—someone desperately trying to remain thin in order to stay popular online—that image could suddenly become incredibly powerful.

The exact same shot.

The difference isn’t the image.

The difference is context.

Artistic merit comes from the relationship between an image and the story it tells.

That’s where I feel Needy Girl Overdose stumbles.

Not because it tries to be artistic.

But because it sometimes mistakes artistic decoration for artistic purpose.

The Curse of the Lain Comparison

Ironically, I don’t even think I’d be making this comparison had the creators themselves not invited it.

Had they simply released this as an anime about modern streaming culture, influencer obsession, online validation and mental deterioration, I probably would’ve judged it entirely on those merits.

Because there actually is an interesting story hiding underneath all the visual noise.

The tragedy is that the anime doesn’t seem to trust that story enough.

Instead of allowing its own identity to grow, it constantly seems to whisper:

“Look… we’re experimental too.”

That’s a dangerous game.

It’s a little like discovering Macromedia Flash in 1999 and immediately deciding your first animation will rival Akira.

Not because ambition is bad.

Ambition is wonderful.

But you’re voluntarily entering a competition with one of the greatest achievements the medium has ever produced.

Very few artists survive that comparison.

Talking…

…and talking…

…and talking.

One of the strangest things about Needy Girl Overdose is how much dialogue it contains.

Characters don’t simply converse.

They launch into marathon speeches.

Every episode seems determined to explain another emotional crisis, another existential dilemma, another internal conflict in painstaking detail.

Ironically, this often makes the characters feel less human rather than more.

The anime spends so much time talking about emotion that it rarely allows emotion to simply exist.

Which brings me back to Lain.

One of the things that made Serial Experiments Lain so haunting wasn’t what people said.

It was what they didn’t say.

Entire scenes pass with almost no dialogue at all.

Silence becomes part of the storytelling.

The audience fills in the blanks.

The mystery breathes.

Needy Girl Overdose, on the other hand, often feels terrified of silence.

Instead of allowing images to communicate, characters explain.

Instead of letting atmosphere build, another monologue begins.

By the halfway point I wasn’t following a mystery anymore.

I was trying to speed-read subtitles before another wall of text exploded across the screen.

Somewhere along the way I couldn’t help but think of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson during one of their Bottom Live performances, where Adrian suddenly deadpans:

“I’m going to fleetingly return to the plot now… if you don’t mind.”

That’s exactly how this anime feels.

Every now and then it remembers there is supposed to be a story.

It throws the audience another tiny piece of narrative.

Then immediately wanders back into another sea of symbolism, speeches and visual experimentation.

And that’s genuinely a shame.

Because hidden underneath all that noise…

…I think there actually was a decent anime trying to get out.

The little engine that couldn’t

One thing I don’t want this review to become is yet another angry internet rant.

There are already enough of those.

Because here’s the funny part.

I don’t actually hate Needy Girl Overdose.

In fact, I respect it.

I respect the fact that a studio looked at today’s anime landscape and decided to do something different. That alone deserves credit. Taking artistic risks is becoming increasingly rare, and I’d rather see creators aim too high than never leave the ground at all.

Unfortunately, sometimes aiming for the stars means discovering just how far away they really are.

This anime reminds me of The Little Engine That Could.

Only this time…

…it couldn’t.

And that’s okay.

Failure isn’t a crime.

Every artist who has ever created anything worthwhile has failed spectacularly at some point. I certainly have. Some of my own CGI projects turned out exactly the way I imagined. Others fell completely flat on their face. That’s simply part of making things.

You can’t schedule inspiration.

You can’t manufacture magic.

Sometimes everything clicks.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Streamers, Influencers, and the Story It Forgot to Tell

One criticism I’d like to clarify is aimed less at streamers themselves and more at the way the anime uses them.

The game had an interesting premise.

It explored online validation.

Parasocial relationships.

Mental health.

The pressure of constantly performing for an invisible audience.

That’s fertile ground for psychological storytelling.

Instead, the anime often seems fascinated with the performance itself rather than the people behind it.

I never felt like I truly knew these characters.

I knew their online personas.

I knew their emotional outbursts.

I knew their endless conversations.

But I rarely felt like I understood the human beings underneath all of that.

Ironically, the internet itself already has enough performative personalities.

The truly interesting stories are the ones that ask what happens after the stream ends.

When the lights go off.

When the audience disappears.

When the performer is left alone with themselves.

Those are the moments I wish this anime had explored more deeply.

The Butterfly drinking game

By around episode nine I found myself accidentally inventing a drinking game.

Take a drink every time:

• a butterfly floats across the screen.

• flowers bloom in slow motion.

• another wall of text appears.

• somebody launches into yet another philosophical speech.

Congratulations.

You’re legally dead before the season finale. (Continued below)

Thats the problem with anime’s like that, when watching becomes a chore instead of a fun thing to watch. Anime should in the very least be enjoyable to watch and not feel like daily homework. I intend to battle my way trough till the end I’ll keep you guys up to date if it was worth the watch for me.

They talk so much its hard to follow anything they’re saying, I’ve become almost an expert at speedreading subtitles. They make the characters from Re:Zero seem short and to the point in comparison. And thats saying something! or saying a lot, actually.

Thats very true and thats also the sense I’m getting from Needy girl overdose. Interestingly the game isn’t like that at all, no weird shots or cuts in it as far as I can tell. So I think they maybe made this creative choice to give it more substance, yet failing at that. I mean you can’t just put some random footage trough a video and then claim its deep, if it isn’t relevant to the story or somehow works to tell the story. If anything the story is very confusing and barely even there, its just teenagers moping and talking about edgy stuff thats 3edgy5me.

With Lain it was different, Lain could have weird cuts, weird in between footage and yet it helped tell the story, there was a much deeper story underneath and it had that substance. Ironically if they tried to take a page out of the Lain book a lot of it was actually NOT talking. There were a ton of long almost uncomfortable silences in Lain, characters not saying a word at all. Sure it sometimes had sort of narratives, but the rest of it was really up the viewer to notice and then interpret. Which was beautiful, Serial Experiments Lain to me truly is art. Wherest Needy girl overdose is just pseudo-intellectual drivel and random imagery and flashing texts pretending to be art.

I do truly appreciate the risk the studio took, but they themselves made this comparison and drew inspiration from Lain and with that they set the bar incredibly high. You don’t just go out and learn Macromedia Flash and then decide hey I’m going to make the next Akira, and not expect people to catch on. It just won’t work, you can’t force magic like Lain to happen, it just happens. The right people, the right time, everything aligned perfectly. You can’t force that kind of magic to happen. It needs to happen on its own.