(Just a heads up I sometimes say some bad words here, I don't think anyone cares but if that is against some policy, just remember the review guidelines didn't say anything so sorry(?), also sorry to people who don't like that) All right bois, I'm gonna say it: The CG in this show is actually pretty good. From the tiny amount of research I did, and by that I mean I listened to a friend of mine while he researched, the studio responsible for this minor war crime, A-CAT, has done a lot of work doing CG for other anime and games,so it makes since since they probably have experience and can make something that at least doesn't look terrible, but also I don't know for sure if that's how anime production works since I think animators are contracted, so I dunno. That doesn't matter though, because even if the CG animation in this show isn't insulting my eyes, everything else around the CG animation in this show is insulting my eyes, including the direction of such animation.
If you are a fellow like me who is into the EDF franchise of video games, and saw the first episode of this because you found out this show existed and thought it would be funny to watch it, and thought, "This is kinda cool in a B movie kind of dumb way which reminds me of Earth Defense Force," don't make the same mistake as me and keep watching it until you are so far into it you basically have to finish it to not feel like you wasted your time. The show constantly switches from trying to be a tense dramatic tale of once normal people ripped from their comfort to fight in a war, to a slice of life anime about the problems of making friends in a new environment. Either or both of these might actually work if they had the time to make them work, but neither really do, not in a actual quality sense, or in a campy B movie sense.
The dramatic action moments of this show never actually feel properly dramatic. They either feel like they have had the stakes taken out of them, or you are so used to the stakes being taken out of them that you don't feel like the show has the balls to actually do something significant. Surprisingly though, the show does kill someone once, but -a) its hard to take the moment seriously because you can see their JPEG body just spinning and flying into the sky in the silhouetted shot, and -b) like less than a minute later, they switch to slice of life mode, forget it ever happened, and never bring up the death even though it happened in a pretty fucked up manner that would normally be some kind of a plot point. I guess the action doesn't look bad, so if all you are looking for is just some dumb action to put on in the background, it might work, but then again it wont be very consistent due to the constant switching to slice of life mode, which, on the subject of that-
The slice of life parts are also kinda shit. This is partially because the seem to forget the terrible crisis the world is in, but also due to terrible direction, poor clichés, poorly defined characters, and conflicts that are contrived far beyond what one normally puts up with for slice of life anime and manga. Like with the action drama part of the show, I do remember one episode of this part rather clearly, probably because it was better than most of the slice of life portion. That said, the episode mostly boils down to a character is being kind of an asshole because they are a bit tired from the whole end of the world situation, so they just need some time to themselves. Still not handled that well, and if that is the highlight episode of the show, just imagine how boring the rest of it is. It also seems to like the show is trying to be a tour guide of Japan despite it taking place in a world that they clarify at the beginning, doesn't really reflect Japan. I imagine that the writer really wanted time for a vacation, and used the plot as an excuse to go for a paid vacation to get material. If this unlikely scenario was the case, good for you random guy or girl, I hear anime industry workers are overworked as hell so you can probably use that.
To be honest, I feel like this anime had the first episode storyboarded by one person, then they got frustrated with the higherups or something and left the team, so someone else had to come and anime-original-ending the next 11 episodes. This might not have happened, and probably didn't happen, but the appearance that it did is still not a plus to the anime. There are a few examples of situations like this, but the easiest to explain is the car-truck-tank-thing they drive. It comes with 6 pods where the LBX girls transform. At the beginning there are 4 LBX girls, leaving 2 empty pods. They then get another member like 4 minutes later, so they now have 5 of 6 pods filled. So if you are using your math skills and your story predicting skills, you probably think that they are going to add another character to the squad right? No, they never do. It feels like that will happen, but it never does. WASTE OF RESOURCES I SAY! This may seem like nitpicking, but its just one of many things that make a lot of the episodes feel like they aren't connected to what happened previously, making the whole show feel like it was winged.
I've already written way more than I planned to write, seeing as I really was just gonna make this a brief "this show kinda sux heer be wai" thing, but even now I still feel like I've only scratched the surface of how this show is just constantly disappointing me despite my low expectations. That said, I do think I have somehow named every possible positive thing I can say about this show, so take from that what you will. To end this I will simply give an overcomplicated analogy: Watching this show is like seeing a garbage fire, and thinking "that looks like fun, lets see how this escalates", so you watch to see what happens, then a cook comes by, and uses the fire to cook a chicken. This cook then feeds you the chicken and since the fumes of the garbage got into the chicken, it just tastes kind of like shit. Its not like the situation didn't get wilder like you expected, but now you have lost all of your enthusiasm. That's what this show is like.
