...

As I mentioned in another post, I loved AINI. I think it fucked and frankly people who dunk on it are making mountains out of molehills. I do still have a few minor gripes with it, and the main one is this:

I don't care for Tearer.

Yes, yes, he has a tragic backstory, and his concept owns on paper, but... I find him boring. He's just not interesting to me. And the reason why is simple: homeboy has Aizen syndrome. He can somehow know enough to be able to hack Tama and the Wadget System in like, a day (you know, the super state secret AIs so much advanced than regular computers.) He fucks around with Bibi with his balloon scavenger hunt knowing exactly that she can see thermally. He has special hired assassins and a wealth of human & physical ressources to do his bidding. He comes across as way too overpowered to me, less of a character and more of a static object for the protags to get over. He gets shot by Date I guess, but thanks to his superhuman resistance to aenethesics it barely affects him. His sole moments of weakness involve Amame, which is not enough for me to care.

Meanwhile, Saito absolutely sucks. He fucks up all the time! In the righ-side routes he gets in a literal car accident. In the left-side routes Ota sees him driving a car. He gets flagged as the criminal anytime a murder takes place- Renju is the main suspect of Shoko's murder, Iris is the main suspect of Renju's murder, ect. He doesn't have a sixty-steps plan to destroy us all. He is, however, really good at improv, which makes him much more threatening and real. He's not a villain with plot armor, he's an actual guy whose thought process you can follow the whole way through. That makes him much more believable to me than any tragic backstory.