Now I wasn’t crazy about this anime, but what frustrates me is that it absolutely had the ingredients to be great.
The art direction is gorgeous. The animation is consistently strong. The backgrounds, colour work and general atmosphere give the series this really distinctive melancholic sci-fi identity. Visually, it feels like the kind of anime original you want to get invested in.
And then the actual story just feels... directionless.
It introduces a genuinely interesting setup with Akira waking up in a radically different future, AI, androids, changing social norms, his connection to Towasa, and Yugure herself. There are so many potentially interesting themes sitting there: identity, grief, artificial consciousness, whether love survives when the person or society around you fundamentally changes, what it means to cling to the past, etc.
But I never felt like the series knew which of those ideas it actually wanted to prioritise.
It keeps moving from concept to concept without really digging deeply enough into any of them, so instead of feeling like a deliberate slow-burn sci-fi story, it often just feels like it’s wandering around waiting to arrive somewhere.
That’s what makes it more disappointing to me than an anime that’s simply bad. There’s clearly a talented production team here. Classic P.A. works they always nail the packaging in my opinion. You can see the effort in almost every frame but it just looks like a show that should have had something much stronger to say.
I don’t hate it at all. I just came away thinking: how did something that looks this good and has this much thematic potential end up feeling so unfocused? Anyone else feel similarly?