First Impressions: Date a Bullet: Dead or Bullet

Without much of an introduction, Kurumi, the girl in the red dress, begins fighting Queen, the girl in white dress/military uniform in a pretty cool-looking church with vitrals. Our protagonist uses guns and a giant magic clock, Zaphkiel, while her rival uses a sword and her own magic clock, Lucifugus. It seems that the girl in white deems the world hers to destroy, and Kurumi opposes this. Acceleration, location swapping, impossible jumps and magic words are exchanged (“Aleph!”), and Queen wins with a final bullet to the eye, shaped like the sphere of a clock, which then starts turning backwards. And thus, Kurumi is sent to a high school where the heaven above her head is a multi-coloured galaxy, and other schoolgirls with different superpowers are going to begin fighting a battle royale. This is the afterlife, we are told, and they are Spirits or Quasi-Spirits, godlike entities and demigods. The winner will have a wish granted to her. And as it turns our, Queen is one of the participants, too.

So, what was that? On the one hand, these are cool visuals, the girls seem to have colourful personalities and there are echoes of Angel Beats and the Fate series, or even Madoka. I´d say there is potential here. Kurumi wants to fall in love again with a specific person in her next life, her ally wants to achieve the resurrection of a friend and Queen just wants to destroy the world (and, interestingly, deems Kurumi “a sacrifice”). On the other hand, there was way too much exposition and concepts which were not fleshed out. Things kept piling up: Spirits, afterlife, superpowers, strange clocks, magic, wishes. It looks like the story part of a videogame. I like battle royale just fine, but I need some more grasping of what we are fighting for here. But for now, I find it intriguing, and the multi-coloured sky is cool. Let’s see where this goes.

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