Despite everything, that opening is a bop. Goddamn. And the characters designs? They're completely fantastic. The animation is solid, the fights are cool, the song they use during said fights is great. There's so many good ingredients in here... Except for much of the actual story and how they try to execute it across just 13 episodes. It's just falls short on that end, and I wish they had more time to think about the story. But more than anything, I wish the show itself had more time and more episodes to "waste" on the characters and the setup, it's obvious strengths.
And it kind of does do that in it's first half, but obviously much, or not well enough for that to stand out against the rest of the story, especially the back half that's all about what they're trying to do in there. Which is uh, flawed, mediocre sci-fi with twists that are more predictable than fun. And again, it's all kinda poorly executed. As you can see what they were going for, in a lot of ways and tons of times throughout the show.
And you just have to make some kind of peace with that in order to enjoy the cool and neat shit that surrounds the writing. (And clearly I'm struggling to do that even now that it seems to be done.) But it's harder to pretend that it's just a dumb fun thing when the show itself is trying
— very awkwardly—to be more than that.
And maybe that's all just my opinion on a thing that I found out wasn't 100% for me. Like, I'd still recommend giving it a shot despite everything. And I'd absolutely be down for more of it because there's still a lot to like and that I'm glad they tried this in the first place.
Maybe I'll make another post about the specfic parts of the plot that suck or need work, but I think that's enough circling the drain and trying to get my basic point across for now.
At the end of the day, the show has neat characters, and some of them turn into cool robot armor people who fight good. And a detective guy who's too old for all this shit. Damm. There's so many neat characters in this. I forgot what else I was gonna say. Anyways, if this gets another season, or a movie, or even merch, I'll be there day one.
