The Overwatch anime is a stumble in the series’ narrative ambitions

polygon.com:

It’s really hard to engage with the story of Overwatch these days.

This is saying something, as a person who is mocked regularly by my best friend for rewatching old cinematics and crying, but sitting through Genesis, the three-part Overwatch 2 anime short, over the last three weeks elicited very little excitement from me. Despite it being the first time fans ever saw a pivotal chunk of the series’ history play out, it felt disconnected from where the game is now. Years ago, I would have gotten hyped for an Overwatch anime series — but now, having sat through the 18-minute miniseries hoping to see them building on stilted short stories and scattershot comic issues, I once again feel unimpressed.

Animated by Wolf Smoke Studio (which previously did the Doomfist origin story), Genesis covers an abbreviated look at the Omnic Crisis framed as an in-world documentary. We see events crucial to understanding Overwatch 2’s present-day narrative — the war with the God AI Anubis, the formation of the Overwatch organization, Omnics gaining sentience, and potentially an explanation for the Iris — further fleshed out from the handful of references we had before.

The pseudo-documentary is a pretty common format nowadays, but it doesn’t serve as a compelling method of story delivery here. Fake documentaries, like real ones, all have narratives, but the strong ones take enough time to capture the emotional arc of the subjects involved. Genesis does neither; it has shoehorned a handful of new characters into proximity of the events in question, and they all largely serve to be expository.

The “star” (or supposed heart) of Genesis, Aurora, is the first android of the game’s future Earth to gain Singularity-level sentience. Her creation by