You get settled in, enjoy whats shaping up to be a great series, look forward to seeing what happens with the characters once they’re introduced … aaand the writing trips over it’s own feet and faceplants into the ground like so many defeated enemies.
What’s the worst one out there, and what happened to it?
This is probably far from the “worst” example, but the most prominent and notable example for me is anything from the FATE series–Stay Night, Apocrypha, Zero… Really, pick any of them. I don’t know if they’re “bad,” but the drop in writing between the first half and the last half (and last handful of episodes particularly) is so consistent across the series that I just go into any FATE show expecting that it’s going to fall off to varying degrees by the end.
That’s so odd, one would hope the writers could learn from their mistakes … but I’ve felt like this is such a recurring problem that I wonder if written narrative structure simply isn’t a big deal in Japan