So, a few of the shows this season don't have threads, but I need to post a scathing review of hate on one so that people know better than to watch it.
Divine Gate. 3/10.
Easily a contestant for the worst anime this season, competing with Koukaku no Pandora and blowing past Phantasy Star Online 2 in their mutual race to the bottom. I managed to actually make it to the end of Divine Gate, while I relegated KnP to my "marathon if I'm bored" list.
The reasoning behind this as one of the worst anime this season isn't hard to understand- Divine Gate is a 12 episode commercial for a Cellphone Pay to win gatchapon game. The plot can be boiled down to "Strange mind games that make no sense" and fails to deliver on any of it's promises.
Over half the cast dies? They get better. King Arthur gets mind controlled by the norse god of chaos and lies? It's okay, Santa Claus will try to hit Loki in the face with Excalibolg a baseball bat full of nails. The main characters are about to be brutally murdered by a bunch of nameless gods? The Wizard of Oz will fix it all. At one point the characters get thrown in a jail where loli-shakespear can control their bodies with her magical quill pen as she writes weird stories. There's a bunch of things here that a good writer could have used, but this story managed to make everything look like last minute randomness.
The most coherent message in the story is "The world has to change" and they beat you over the head with things that make you agree- parents abuse their kids to try to make them stronger elemental magic users since the entire magic system requires despair as a starting point for magic powers. People live in absolute poverty for no explained reason. There's an entire race of half-breed monsters whose story I don't even remember because the designated goodguys killed them all a few minutes after they showed up for a half explained reason. Eventually it's all passed off as "The gods like to see man suffer" and when our protagonists are given the chance to fix it all with the divine gate, they shrug, decide they suck, then throw away the omnipotent wish machine and go back to the effed up world they were just trying to change.
The most noteworthy thing Divine Gate has going for it is the artwork, a reasonably well done blend of 3DCG and digital frames that is completely wasted on the writing. It actually has a pretty interesting retro-throwback style, making use of rich black shading in a way that meshes nicely with the 3DCG. You can identify the Elemental spirits from ordinary people by their outline color, while otherwise looking completely normal. (The kind of thing I thought I'd only ever see in Pixiv CGs and the occasional Web manhwa.) There's quite a bit of artistic prowess being shown off in this show, but it's totally wasted on it.
Review of Koukaku no Pandora will come when I actually watch it, I decided I wasn't going to watch it weekly after the second episode when I realized the lead girl masturbating the supporting lead girl as part of the transformation scene was going to be a recurring theme.
Phantasy Star Online 2 still has an episode left, but really cannot redeem itself after that Ethernet rant by Rina, and after managing to stretch 5 minutes of plot across 8 episodes, it's safe to say it didn't even try.