Ingress: The Animation

I really enjoyed this series. I am not familiar with the game it is based on and it seems that you don't really need any previous knowledge of the game to enjoy the show.

The animation, story, characters, world-building, are all solid. It's an easy to follow story that focuses on just a handful of main characters. I've noticed a trend of recent Anime series focusing on dozens of main characters without much focus (e.g. Seven Deadly Sins) and it felt good to focus on about half a dozen characters, each with their own story arcs and character development. All of the main characters are well-rounded with motivations that make sense and some possible plot holes are explained and fixed as the series progresses and gives the viewer more information, which I think is a nice touch. While it isn't necessarily groundbreaking, it is a great series that hits the mark more often than not and is another solid addiction to the Netflix Anime collection.

The story as follows

The story follows special police investigator Makoto, who has the power to read the memories of objects he touches. While investigating a laboratory explosion that was researching an unknown substance called "XM", he touches the ring of a woman who was the sole survivor of the explosion and sees a horrifying vision that embroils him in a massive conspiracy.

I found the animes story a bit confusing to follow but i thought it was still very different then what i am normally watching.

Also it had good visual with a pretty good dub.

If you want to watch a decent CGI anime this is available on netflix both dubbed and subbed.

At first, I thought it was amazing. The plot starts out pretty strong, I was enjoying the mash up of matrix/ghost in the shell-ish vibes but I'd in the final quarter of the show, the plot kinda went a bit off the reservation.

Without going into details, I felt like the plot changed direction too quickly and started taking you down a road that was a bit cheesier than what I'd initially expected. The story pretty quickly wiped out a bunch of the central plot points and pretty much regrouped with something a lot more bizarre and harder to support.

They also started succumbing to cheesy gimmicks and events to drive the story forward that I felt were a bit misplaced. I know believability isn't a big deal to an anime dealing with such odd themes but there did come a point where I felt they pushed it too far. The whole world uniting to defend against evil sorta thing.

The beautiful visuals, it's really cleanly animated and I always enjoy when a show gets a soundtrack right. Quite a fun mix of edgy sounding techno and dramatic electronic.

On the whole, worth a watch. I struggled with the final few episodes but by that point my heart wasn't in it anymore.

The tale has been told many times before, and much better. I won't get into spoilers (although doing so would make this review much easier). Suffice to say the animation is mediocre, the story line done and done before, a basic "hero needs to save the world from evil overlord" type scenario (however that is accomplished). I found myself yawning halfway through, and still yawning at the end. Ho hum, yet another good guys vs bad guys gun battle-- and another-- and another. Throw in some mysticism hokum just for kicks along with some global-scale explosions. People with super powers yada yada.

Suffice to say there's nothing new here, move along, move along. Thus the "mediocre" 5-star rating. People who give such animations 10 stars are either associated with the film or don't have a clue about rating cinema. Just so it's said: 10 stars is best of the best, astounding film making. 1 star is gutter trash Z-class no-redeeming-factors slop. The extremists need to learn there are rating stars in between-- and need to learn how to better judge where a film belongs in that 10-star range. Giving this level of film 9 & 10 stars is the same as saying, "I don't have a clue how to properly examine and review a film."

In short, it was an unimpressive presentation throughout. Even adrenaline junkies likely will be giving this one a thumbs down.

I started the series because I played Ingres back in the days. The show captures the feeling quite well and has a good "old-school" drawing style (akin to Ghost in the Shell, Akira, ...). The music is quite good and the first couple of episode are interesting and push you to watch more. And here comes the but: As the show progresses I got the feeling of watching an ad for Ingress and Android Phones at some point. The characters where just not written well enough (the good youngster, his powerful damsel-in-distress love interest, the tough support, the sadistic antagonist) to maintain an innovative story line and thus it got quite linear and predictable. Overall a series to watch if there is nothing else to watch. But otherwise again a Netflix production which overpromises. If you are looking for a good anime series on Netflix, watch Castlevania instead.