Leviathan

I actually feel bad for not giving a better rating for this series because it is technically flawless and it is clearly visible that the entire staff poured their heart and soul into it. The animation is great, the voice actors - in the English dubbing at least - are well-casted and the action scenes are great.

Basically, my concern about this series that it shouldn't have been an anime.

This pairing simply doesn't work. Keith Thompson's extremely atmospheric and unique illustrations replaced by some generic anime scenery just takes away something from the book trilogy's essence. You listen to the Scottish Deryn Sharp singing 'Anime Opening Song #536' in Japanese puts me out of the vibe.

I am really sorry for having to say all this, because the idea of spreading the popularity of Scott Westerfeld incredibly original and clever book series with an adaptation sounds good on paper... just not in this genre.

There was something of a show here. The revisions to history were alright, not the best. The animation is top notch, deep and beautiful. My biggest complaint and ultimately what stopped me from finishing the season were two things. First, the writing, just bad, the story is boring. It just meanders on its revised historical story with Darwin and mechs and ugh.. it just didn't hold up. Second and still with the writing, is their obsession with making Sharp say "barking" all the time, every sentence she say starts with "barking"! It made her time on screen just silly. Lots to pick apart on this one... barking stay away from it!

This show had a lot of potential with the subject matter, setting and being somewhat steam-punkish right around WW1. I had high hopes for seeing how it could go.

Another reviewer pointed out some of the flaws about the walker having a large luxurious bedroom inside, airships being taken down with one shot, and other flaws like that.

Those are all correct, but some of the biggest issues is that the main character(s) just aren't relatable. The main character is naive and well-meaning to the point of being painful. Like he will see a ship of his nations enemy suffer a crash and his immediate reaction is "I can't let them be hurt, I must go help them!". He'll ignore *all* advice to not do it, then when he gets up there he'll drag the secondary main character out of immediate danger, drop a med-kit at their feet and be like "ok I'm done bye!" without any effort to go help anyone else and is surprised when they in turn capture him.

Then he'll give up his most valuable resource for his own needs to rescue several troops of nations enemy *again*. It takes the anime good guy trope to a painful extreme.

Beyond that, in this show Germany is portrayed as the ultimate evil who is out to get everyone including their own allies and is not at all genuine to the WW1 timeframe; taking the cliche "Germany bad" mindset. Worse they make them seem incompetent and helpless, with their opponents able to one-shot multiple of their heavily armored units while being unable to inflict even minor damage to their opponents. It gives you the sense that Germany should have been steam-rolled in WW1 and that their steam-driven machines are weak to small bombs dropped by eagles (I'm not even exaggerating that's literally how it went).

To conclude, this anime focuses too much on unlikable main characters, ignores a lot of historical facts, and introduces way too many shortcuts for the "heroes" to the point you don't have any sense that they were ever in real danger.

The animation was insane, so was the voice acting, character development, and storyline! I like how such a historic moment is captured in some steam punk world, and The storyline is full of suspense. Alek goes from being this wimpy prince to a hero, which is a huge character development. Not to mention "Dylan", and her pretending to be a boy. It could sometimes get hilarious. I really hope there's a season 2!

This is so typical for these anime stories; the most important persons are involved in war, but how much hurt do they really get? It says it all.

I get so tired of these "war stories" that don't really show any dangerous conflict they way it should be shown. This story could be about anything really. The reactions from the two most important people after a long involvement in war, is shrugging and making small surprised sounds? They look so cute both of them that one understand that their looks are more important than the story. Boooh! Boring. That is why, at the end of the series I don't really care for any of them.