“Be forewarned that what’s to come isn’t a very pleasant story.” So says Goro, a blue-haired schoolboy who is about to tell us how he became…God? We meet him as he admires videos of idol singer Honoka on the rooftop of a school where the students wear ridiculous shirts without sleeves. I’d be sad, too! Enter an orange-haired, red-eyed jokester with pointy teeth who looks like a zombie. Having convinced Goro to film him, he pretends to jump from the building, but thankfully it’s all a prank done in bad taste. But hey, it leads to Goro helping a beautiful senior girl with her phone! Coming home, however, a cat is run over by a car; Goro could have saved it if he hadn’t thought that someone else would do it until it was too late. At home, when Goro checks his phone, there’s a message: he has been selected for the God tournament and may record a wish with his camera. He says he would have liked to fool around with the senior girl. He probably wasn’t considering that she’d go all yandere on him and pull him into a full-fledged battle royale.

Well, well, well…this show certainly has some things going for it. There are imaginative elements. The music can be unsettling. The cat scene felt relatable. And the final fight actually looked cool. There were all those intriguing questions that arose about Goro, too, like why does he need to go to the hospital? What is going on with his mum? What’s with all those soda bottles? Lastly, his final choice, which I won’t spoil here, was pretty unusual and left me wondering. Unfortunately, all these intriguing elements are overshadowed by the cringe-worthy, disturbing, or just plain terrible ones. Though there are times the 3D doesn’t look too bad, for most of the episode it is really, really distracting. The uniforms are ridiculous. The orange-haired boy looks like a movie monster. The senior girl jumping on Goro felt all the more unsettling because the show was trying to be comical. And the concepts are big, perhaps too big for this series. Overall, KamiErabi GOD.app feels like it is biting off more than it can chew; I found episode one more disturbing than entertaining, and I won’t continue. I was forewarned, I guess.

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KamiErabi GOD.app can be streamed on Crunchyroll.