I'm gonna have to repost this once we get a discussion thread in the actual animation subforum, but here's what I got so far:

- The visuals are great. It's well directed and well-animated with fluid designs and a strong sense of movement throughout the editing.

- The voice acting works perfectly fine. People were concerned about Toby Fox (who is not a career actor, obviously) as John or about Dave being annoying, but Toby does a good job and Dave is definitely SUPPOSED to be annoying. The scraps of Rose, Jade and Karkat we got were excellent.

- The narration does not work. It sounds like it's the guy from Digital Circus (It's fucking ONEY?!), but every time he showed up, not only did it feel like a drain on the pacing, but it also took things to a place where they're way too self-referential, with characters briefly acting totally aware of the narration.

- Sylladexing is in, and I think it shouldn't be. It was dropped as a video gamey mechanic before the halfway point of the comic anyway, and just having characters able to carry shit around (even if they still use inventory cards) would be way better than this, where it's literally exposited to the audience at a breakneck speed.

- Similarly, the pacing (especially with Homestuck-specific mechanics in mind) was REALLY fast. I truly, truly wish they'd been able to adapt all of act 1 into a 22-minute episode, because this only serves as a tiny taste and only makes it about halfway to the first meteor, ending with John starting SBURB.

- The dialogue got a whole lot less "it's 2009 and I can say the word 'retard' as much as I want" and a lot more Hazbin Hotel. This is good, in that Andrew Hussie can't write naturalistic dialogue to save his life, and bad, in that the numerous swears lack any particular creativity. They're just kinda...in there.

- Apparently, the success or failure of this to become a full show is dependent on showing merch sales to investors. If we need normie attention to get those sales, this project is doomed. It's just too niche, they didn't dumb it down enough.