Make My Day

Ah where to begin. Two episodes in, I was like, oh yeah! Lots of military scifi action. Animation is bad. Not really my cup of tea. But the premise of the story/plot is interesting.

Then the next couple episodes. The main character is weak. Though has tremendous potential. As always in japanese animé. Then the huge drama that comes with the Marnie character. Boy! This girl can cry! Again, thats japan for you. Want to inject a much needed drama? Make one or more characters wail and scream as loud as she can an cry an ocean of tears in the longest possible scene. I hope she gets eaten. But nah. She's the drama.

Then the rest of the episodes. Which are just filler episodes. Not much fun for me. But if you're a fan of extended loud crying in a very dated animation style, still a big no.

I don't get why they made this into an 8 episode series. There will be no season 2, there's A LOT of filler, even in the short 20-minute episodes, and whatever air of "mistery" there is at the beginning it's gone by the third episode.

From then on it's basically a survival video game sprinkled with lots of useless, nonsensical dialogue. Half the characters are basically plot devices and mostly everthing they say is exposition.

The pacing is really, really bad. Characters stoping to have long discussions about every little thing undermines all the sense of urgency and chaos of the events going on around them. After a while you just don't care anymore, as there are no consequences from any of this.

The premise is interesting, but it gets smothered in such bad writing it's a shame.

Outstanding example of how to write characters and character arcs. Professional, committed English voice acting.

A well-written original story is the big asset here. Less violence and action than most animes. The very unusual writing highlights the redemption of several unsavory characters, using forgiveness without violins or abandoning its gritty sci-fi genre track.

The eight episodes don't culminate in a tight third act. The story was designed to continue if there was a second season. Still the ending works well enuf to satisfy.

I think this is computer assisted Blender animation, nicely done. Not flashy yet not trashy in any respect.

Congratulations to all who created this.

The visuals here are bold and interesting, a mix of traditional hand-drawn backgrounds and prop art, and stylised cell shaded CGI characters, not entirely unlike Arcane.

But not very much like it either, and this suffers badly by comparison. Bold and interesting doesn't imply success: the characterisation, clumsily keyframed facial expressions and frame rate are all sub par here - this is practically a slideshow.

The other thing that you could compare the character animation to is the Sims, and again, not particularly kindly.

The plot feels gamerish too, like watching an endless cut-scene for a 2010-era survival horror, where the unexperienced but spunky young protagonist in his exo-suit battles alien tentacle-bugs.

And that really is all we're getting here, an inexplicably hyper-militarised convict mining operation versus bad-touch space tardigrades. Nothing that we haven't done seen before - many, times - and better.

At eight 20 minutes episodes, you can rip through it quickly enough, although even at that length I found myself skipping some tedious flashbacks, and cringe inducing attempts at forcing pathos and drama into later episodes.

The plot, such as it is, reveals itself fully by episode 3, but with a whopping great contradiction in it. What we're told differs from what we've just seen, and there are constant reminders of this that make our protagonists' peril more than it needs to be.

Our main protagonist Jim doesn't have an arc so much as a flipped-switch, again in episode 3. Paired with the uninvolving animation and strictly workmanlike voice acting that quickly dissolves into the tedious anime "Oh!" and "Aaargh!", it makes it hard to take any of this seriously.

Perhaps that's not a bad thing. Sometimes you just want to watch space bugs eat faces and blow up, and you get a fair amount of that here. Not really enough to justify the tedious talky bits in between though.

Watch it, or skip it and forget it, your life won't be different either way.

On a frozen frontier planet, criminals sentenced to hard labor and their guards have to fight off hardy creatures who feed on their power source.

The first thing I noticed was that the art was pretty good. Then I noticed that a lot of it was in a rather stylized computer-generated style. It's not bad, but it gives faces and hair a plastic-like appearance reminiscent of older, cheaper video games. Sometimes it looks nice, but the plastic faces can be a little off-putting at times, especially when you compare them to screenshots of the newest games.

The monsters are reminiscent of tardigrades, probably to explain why they're living on a frozen wasteland with poisonous air. They're initially presented as immortal, but the protagonists soon figure out some weaknesses. There's a little more that gets done with the creatures, but that's pretty much it. The science fiction elements a bit minimal and mostly provide some quick world building.

Our protagonist, Jim, is a likeable sort though a bit of a generic everyman. He's an artist who has ignored his dreams and is too shy to tell his friend how he feels. There aren't really any surprises in his character arc, but you may be surprised at how much of a fearless and badass soldier he is. It turns out that all you really need to reach your potential is a lot of heart and maybe a training video or two.

Jim's new best friend is a criminal who repeatedly shows courage and honor. When Jim finally learns his crime, it introduces the core theme: redemption. Most characters are a bit cliched, and some don't really have any defined personality beyond "Jim's love interest". However, their flaws and redemption arcs can give them a bit more depth than you might usually see. It's a mixed bag that may work as long as you're not looking for something grimdark.

I had to fast forward through a couple scenes because they were just too long and boring, which is very rare for me. However, one of them was a scene where Jim's girlfriend, a surrogate mother, gave birth. It felt like it went on forever, though it might have just been my annoyance with having to listen to all that yelling. Overall, I thought the pacing was fine, but the series probably didn't need to be quite this long.

If you don't mind your science fiction being a bit generic and lawful good, it's pretty watchable. It's better than some of the stuff I've seen on Netflix.