Wonder Egg Priority | Anime Review

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When you’re presented with the following;

Following the suicide of her best and only friend, Koito Nagase, Ai Ooto is left grappling with her new reality. With nothing left to live for, she follows the instructions of a mysterious entity and gets roped into purchasing an egg, or specifically, a Wonder Egg.

Upon breaking the egg in a world that materializes during her sleep, Ai is tasked with saving people from the adversities that come their way. In doing so, she believes that she has moved one step closer to saving her best friend. With this dangerous yet tempting opportunity in the palms of her hands, Ai enters a place where she must recognize the relationship between other people’s demons and her own.

As past trauma, unforgettable regrets, and innate fears hatch in the bizarre world of Wonder Egg Priority, a young girl discovers the different inner struggles tormenting humankind and rescues them from their worst fears.

Written by MAL Rewrite of MyAnimeList.net

To me, Wonder Egg Priority felt and had a similar vibe to something that the mighty Kyoto Animation would give to the world. An original story that felt like it was written by the studio itself and an art style similar to their famously recognizable style. I couldn’t help but feel intrigued. What could come of this anime? When I read the synopsis, I had an idea that Wonder Egg Priority would be covering topics that aren’t talked about typically, especially in the form of an anime, like suicide. However, I didn’t know nor would have ever imagined that this anime would cover a lot more than just the topic of suicide. But it would cover a bunch of terrible deeds committed by the various evils in our society.

When you’re presented with a show, where our four protagonists are given missions through ‘Wonder Eggs,’ their mission different from the last, their mission to save girls who had already committed suicide from their own monsters; while they themselves dealt with their own. These monsters cover various topics from, abusive teachers both physical and sexual, molesters, their insecurities etc. But why? The obvious answer is what I’ve mentioned previously, to save these girls from their evils so that they could pass on properly and without fear. But the real answer is, it’s because our protagonists wanted to bring back someone close to them, someone who, like all the other girls, had committed suicide. These ‘wonder eggs’ created by Ura-Acca and Acca were given to Ai, Rika, Momoe, and Neiru under the premise that if you complete enough of these missions, you can bring back to life that person you lost due to suicide.

That forms the basis of Wonder Egg Priority‘s story, and it’s a fascinating one for sure. The prospect of bringing someone back after they had committed suicide and all you have to do is save other girls from their demons. All that being said, as these missions take place in an alternate reality different from the real one, any changes our characters make (saving them), only is applied within an alternate reality and not in real life. So at times, I found myself questioning the whole purpose. Why go through all this work if the person you want to bring back, in the end, doesn’t actually happen? It seems like there’s something behind it all.

The last few episodes, episodes eleven and twelve to be exact, are where this anime loses me. I’ll gloss over the recap episode, which didn’t add any substance to the story and that, at times, there were several points throughout the anime where it felt sort of slice of life-esk. When an anime is genred as a Drama, Fantasy, Psychological, I expect it to constantly hit you with waves of emotions every episode. I want to feel the tense moments; I want to constantly be on the edge of my seat. This is something Wonder Egg Priority didn’t always provide, and to me, that was disappointing. I thought it was disappointing that from episodes one through nine, we as viewers learn more and more about these eggs and their wonder missions. We learn about their purpose and what they could do, and the potential prize that could come of them. So when episodes ten and eleven hits, we’re given something extra.

We find out why Ura-Acca and Acca made those Wonder Eggs, and we’re also given a little bit of a background story to go along with it too. Long story short, these two numbnuts decided to create a daughter-like AI figure and gave her (Frill) emotions and programmed her with flaws. What could go wrong? One word, everything. We later find out that Frill murders Acca’s wife because she was carrying his child, then we find out that later on, when Acca’s child was in her teen years, Frill had killed her too by tempting her to commit suicide. Then somehow, Frill is linked to two other figures in the anime that we know nothing about; their names are Dot and Hyphen, people we see in the final few episodes. I think they are supposed to represent death because they’re tempting our protagonists to accept death whenever we do see them.

In short, Ura-Acca and Acca created these ‘Wonder Eggs’ because they messed and created a monster who uses Dot and Hyphen to tempt other girls to take their own lives. Instead of solving the problem themselves, they have others ‘take’ care of their dirty work, but preparing the girls who do these missions for the fight against the monster that Ura-Acca and Acca created in the first place. Pretty shitty.

And when you provide a backstory such as the one with Frill, I would think that the next logical route would be the ‘final boss fight’ where Ai and company fight against her or maybe Dot and Hyphen. Nope. That didn’t actually happen. Instead, episode twelve presents a whole new and confusing aspect to the show. Apparently, these Wonder Eggs aren’t just missions based on the present reality but can also be missions from alternate realities. As shown by Ai’s mission to save her younger self, who had committed suicide even though the Ai doing the mission is presently alive and well.

Then when Ai saves her younger version. The younger Ai says something along the lines of “I’ve decided to become a Warrior of Eros,” then gets killed by Hyphen immediately afterwards. While that happens, we see the older Ai watching on, but then it cuts back to her in real life huddled on the ground saying “Sorry,” which added even more confusion. Why is the older Ai saying sorry to her younger self? Maybe because she wasn’t able to protect her alternative self or lacked the strength to fight Hyphen. I personally don’t know.

Unless they plan to make another season, or if the studio is going to rectify the major holes and questions left by Wonder Egg Priority. Then without a shadow of a doubt, the ending to this anime was downright terrible. It honestly killed the entire atmosphere this anime had created and nullified everything I thought I had known about the premise itself and what capabilities imaginable by these ‘Wonder Eggs.’ It’s a shame because up until the ending and the recap episode, Wonder Egg Priority was so good. The latter half of the anime has definitely been an extreme disappointment, and I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is.

Overall, Wonder Egg Priority is a great anime, one I think you should definitely watch. However, I suggest going in with low expectations because I feel like the latter stages of the anime would only disappoint you. I hope that the ‘special episode’ that will be airing later in June will make up for the shortcomings of the anime because if it doesn’t, then man. Kind of shitty.