[Triple_R]

Thanks to 0utf0xZer0, I just watched this. Pretty good first episode, and it's nice to see an anime show of this starkly serious sci-fi style for a change. Lovely character designs and personalities. Excellent setup episode for what looks to be an intense last stand.

Originally Posted by Shimapan

Watched the first episode without prior knowledge of Muv-Luv.

The good: absolutely lovely body suits

Yeah, those body suits are very well-designed.

The bad: Bland and uninspiring background. Aliens attack the earth for the n-th time, and the creators don't even try to come up with a reason, the aliens attack just because they're bored or something.

Well, it could just be basic annexation and cleaning out the planet of its local sapient lifeforms to make room for that annexation. Just straight-up "resource grab" writ large. It's pragmatic enough (totally unethical, of course, but that's often the point with aliens - they often don't have ethics anything like humans do). I'll go with this default position unless the aliens' motivation is ever clearly explained.

We don't get to see the aliens either (not that it would make things better).

I honestly liked that. Adds a certain ominous tension to everything that makes it more of an "edge of your seat" experience. The imagination swirls with what these big, bad aliens might look like precisely because we haven't seen them yet.

In short, it's just an poor excuse to have mecha fights.

What better excuse for mecha fights can you have than saving the entire human race? You do realize that no less an anime than Gurren Lagann was basically rooted on this very premise, right?

I'll admit it's not the most original concept around (kind of like a megalomanical bad guy that wants to take over the world) but at least it's really clear-cut, easy to accept, and quite serious (again, kind of like a megalomanical bad guy that wants to take over the world - there's a reason this is cliche; it's because it's very easy to get and its inherently dramatic).

The ugly: Despair eveywhere. Already the first episode is dripping with despair. It seems this series is meant for psychopaths who enjoy seeing everyone die while fighting hopeless battles, and who get off on "mankind close to extinction"-schemes. Sick.

I certainly wouldn't want every show to be dripping in despair, but in a medium with loads of healing anime and "cute girls doing cute things" shows, it's nice to have something different like this anime every now and then.

Also, some of the fun of a show like this is the sci-fi "What if?" element to it. Kind of like the classic sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes. It can be interesting to see characters try to overcome serious (and nowhere in real life) threats to humanity as a whole.