[relentlessflame]

Spoiler for Episode 1:

First, I have to say that the entire way this episode was done reminds me exactly of D.C.S.S., which isn't surprising given the staff overlap. The storyboarding, shots, dialog, and everything... you can definitely tell that they're emulating that model for the show (as opposed to some of the more recent works this director/writer have worked on).

That aside... I have to admit that it wasn't all that exciting mostly because they spent the whole episode doing setup. Plus, the pacing was very fast -- it almost felt like they had a checklist of things they had to work through before time ran out, and they were worried about fitting it all in. This makes all the more certain that this is only going to be a one-cour series, which is to be expected, but still too bad.

Spoiler for Comparison to game & manga:

This probably covered about 2 hours of game content, I'd guess, and the next episode will probably cover everything up to the end of the demo/prologue.

The main difference here is the third-person perspective, which means that they reveal a lot more stuff right from the get-go (including a bunch of things in the OP), so there isn't quite the same sense of "mystery" that was very prevalent in the game. I would almost say that they're trying to tell the story from both Kouhei and Erika's perspectives at the same time, which may actually work out pretty well (though the game did some of this too with the "another view" mode).

The story also makes it very clear what path it's following, which is probably the same path as the manga... which is also to be expected, I suppose, if you only have 12 episodes to work with.

I liked the OP and ED, but the illustrations in the ED in particular were quite nice.

So I have to admit that I wasn't quite as "grabbed" as I hoped I would be based on my experiences with the game, but it's just a setup episode, so we'll see how they handle things going forward.