Léviathan

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 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.

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.

They reimagined the world war I with bio-engineered animals and some walkers, at-at style, plus other kinds of technology.

From the worldbuilding to the characters to the story itself, I really enjoyed the show.

I could get through even though the CGI is, at times, not so smooth; and I'm definitely not a fan of CGI, up to the point to skip a show if it has any, but everything else was so well created and tailored that it didn't bother me, much.

In any case, if you're a fan of sci-fi or alternative realities, give this a chance because I promise you it will deliver, if only due to the amount of imagination involved in its creation.

It's a tragedy Netflix didn't advertise this properly. Seriously no one is watching it. Why spend the money to make something this good? This is the second time they messed up a Scott Westerfeld book series. Anybody who has read his books loves living in the universe's he creates!

I can only comment that I've read all 3 books. They could have made the series longer but I'm astounded at how much detail was involved. Every aspect from the first page of the book seemed to jump on to my TV screen. They didn't miss a beat. I felt like I was watching the books I read. That's extremely rare for an adaptation.

It's not perfect. There are changes to the story I won't comment on. But the dynamic between Alek and Dyren was spot on. And that was a major plot point.

The art and animation was spectacular and went to the core of imagination for anybody who read the books. It was perfect!

People keep calling this steampunk. It's not. It's actually more dieselpunk. Yes there is a difference.

If you haven't read the books it might be slow or strange in some way. But it's extremely close to recreating the source material so I recommend watching it.

My next wish is a live action of "The Risen Empire" Make that happen Westerfeld!😋