So, like, we all know at this point that as a series, Conception is just bad, right? Like, the games are genuinely mediocre at best and boring at worst, and the whole thing comes across as strange, creepy fetish wish-fulfillment.

That’s certainly still true of this adaptation. Like, the main couple are abducted by some magic portal and transported into a weird cavern, and they both declare that this situation is less important than talking about the heroine being pregnant, which is a contrived setup because she’s gonna have her magic demon baby right there and then, in one of the most hilariously poorly-animated scenes I’ve ever seen. The demon is defeated, and suddenly neither of them feel the need to talk about the fact that a giant monster just emerged from the heroine’s mouth.

In short, these characters make no sense. At least they protest the suddenness with which they have the fate of the world thrust upon them, but the fact of the matter is that this show was pretty much doomed from the start. It’s nice to see sex-positivity in anime, but the strange, alien way this show treats sex, along with the fact that it essentially treats the heroine as a waifu factory, kind of washes that out.

The pacing is also ridiculous, which is because in “obscure” JRPG’s like this one or Etrian Odyssey, the setup is given to you all at once at the beginning, and this one couldn’t adapt properly if it didn’t present everything in this episode at once.

That being said, the fact that Mahiru is essentially forced into sex regardless of how she feels about it is creepy as hell and sends this show into a realm so schlocky that I honestly feel like Conception would have been better adapted as a six-episode hentai OVA or something. It’s a level above the 1/10′s I’ve given thus far, but it also looks utterly awful, so I’m not okay giving it anything higher than a 2/10.