I'm just coming right and saying it, this is one of the dumbest shows I have seen in a very long time. At first, it started so wonderfully stupid it was kind of enjoyable, but that charm wore off by the third episode. This is, by and large, going to be a bit of a ranty review as I don't have a whole lot of positive things to say about this one.
The premise of the show is a bunch of people is selected to be given the ability for undisclosed reasons and forced to fight in a competition. Our lead character was bored of life because he was just so much smarter than anyone else so welcomes the challenge. The power he was given is really where the show starts to fall apart, and by the third episode, it feels like they are stretching just to make use of this ability. His ability is whatever the other thinks his ability is. So he has to convince the opponent of what his ability is to be able to do anything. The show quickly runs out of ways to make this work, so focuses on the wording of 'The Other'. Turns out 'other' refers to anyone he is engaging with in some manner. For example, at one point he is being monitored by people who believe he can turn his arm into a cannon, so because they are monitoring him he can use the cannon regardless of what his actual opponent thinks.
This gets convoluted when he lets someone else know what his power is. In theory, you would think when someone knows this, effectively he has no power, but you would be wrong. So long as she tells herself what his power is, so long as she can effectively visualize how the power works, he can now use that power. I am sitting here wondering how by the show's internal logic, she couldn't just grant him the power to explode people's heads with a thought. Or you know, if you don't want to kill them, give him the power to render people unconscious with a thought. It's an extremely easy power to visualize, and frankly, no one they have encountered would be able to counter an ability like that. The only thing stopping this entire thing from being a cakewalk is the chance the two will somehow be pit against each other at some point, in which case the lead has no way to grant himself an ability against the one person who knows what that ability is. Weirdly, the lead character has to be portrayed as incredibly smart and clever to make this ability of his work, but once all this is established he seems like an idiot for not just winning with the little effort he is capable of winning with.
It gets really weird when there is a period he is having to play mind games with another opponent. It becomes a game of each person going 'Well I knew you were going to do this, so I did this!' and the other guy responding 'Well I knew you knew that, so I did this!' and repeat this back and forth until the writer gets bored of coming up with excuses. I don't know how many of you saw the end of Deathnote, but that show had the same issue. I bring it up because this scene was so much worse than that.
I don't want to do nothing but shit all over this show, but there are some highlights. There are a lot of fun and interesting fights that the lead character isn't involved in. It can get pretty goofy and clever at times, like the fight between a guy who can create a sword that can cut through anything, and another character with a slingshot who can alter the size of marbles. Not the best fight, but a good example of how the show can be fun to watch. The show is a lot better at being silly than being convoluted.
Characters are a bit of a mixed bag, but overall they are fine. It tends to give every single character some kind of backstory to justify why they are the way they are, even characters introduced purely to showcase another character only to never appear again or be relevant. It's a lot of unnecessary padding.
After twelve episodes, I still have no idea why they are supposedly testing out these abilities. That's the main issue here, I don't know why any of this is happening, all I know is the main character want's to get the chance to beat the weird sadistic cat-girl magician who orchestrated all this. That isn't enough to build interest, you got to give me something to sink my teeth into.
The best way I can think of to describe this show is a bizarre combination of Law of Ueki and High School of the Elite but without the charm and fun of Ueki or the utter commitment to the ludicrous situation presented in High School of the Elite. It's a show that feels like it thinks it's more clever than it is and doesn't have enough highlights to compensate. Don't get me wrong, you get some great moments like the cat girl who is dressed like a stage magician shooting a cannon into a man's chest and calling it her Bullet Catching Trick, but there are far too few glorious moments like that to justify sitting through the rest of the show.