This is because it has an alluring premise: a derelict city scarred by nuclear disaster, overrun by wilderness with a few human survivors scattered about. There's plenty interesting about a setting like this, and Go Hands does such a great job on the scenery porn that I am currently using a rotating cycle of background shots from the show as my wallpaper.
Unfortunately the characters who populate that setting are not interesting, nor is anything they do. The writing for this show is crap, plain and simple. Setting aside the issue of the Coppelion being teenage girls (standard anime conceit), the whole Coppelion project seems half-assed and directionless with no clear goals despite the apparently huge amount of time and money spent on developing these super humans. Ibara's unit stumbles blindly from one rescue to the next with no plan besides wandering the ruins of Tokyo with a magic Geiger counter that mysteriously led them to humans or sometimes to animals, as the plot required. Virtually every "mission" they acquire is something cobbled together at the moment, a response to some random survivor's plight. But I've watched shows with worse plots (or no real plot at all) and enjoyed them. What keeps that from happening here is a dearth of likable characters.
Let me start out by saying I liked the Coppelion girls at first. I liked Ibara's tough compassion and Aoi was adorable. Taeko didn't stand out much, but that ended up helping my opinion of her in the long run, since I came to greatly dislike both Ibara and Aoi by the end of the series. I found Ibara's compassion to be a very sympathetic trait in the beginning, when it was directed toward the truly pitiable and desperate, but it became grating as the series wore on and she indiscriminately bestowed compassion on even the most psychotic people she encountered. It just didn't sit right with me, it made her seem naive and a supremely bad judge of character. She is not a pacifist, she can't pull off the Jesus thing, so her compassion seems arbitrary and forced when it comes to sparing the lives of homicidal lunatics. Aoi is less a hypocrite and more useless baggage. Her shining moment of the series is running away from people who bullied her in school. I wish I was exaggerating here, but I'm not. To be sure the show tries to dress it up as something heroic, but Aoi is a hysterical coward to the very end. Taeko at the least shows some grit playing the mid wife, though most of it is skipped over in favor of Aoi and Ibara using non-lethal violence against homicidal lunatics.
And a word about these lunatics: even these characters are not satisfying because they are none of them committed to their goals. Virtually every antagonist except for the shadowy foreign waste disposal companies is redeemed by episode 13, and that whole subplot about the waste dumping was forgotten halfway through the season.
So nobody in this series is really interesting. They lack conviction. Not the antagonists or the protagonists. The people rescued either gratefully go along or die. I lost track of how many times a side character took off their mask dramatically and then had a tearful goodbye, I imagine their deaths were to make a point about being the only characters in the show with an ounce of conviction in their beliefs. And lord were there tears. Ibara's toughness is apparently only skin deep, because she cries almost every episode. She cries when a person she just met dies, she cries when a person she just met leaves the city, she cries because something vaguely sad was just told to her. Aoi is even more emotional, but on her it works and doesn't seem to conflict with any of her other traits. She's a hysterical coward, so crying over every little thing is practically her job description, it's honest of her.
The wishy-washy, directionless writing aside, the show is technically mediocre. The one redeeming factor is the art assets, which are fantastic. The animation is mediocre and the sound is poor. The music was forgettable, the main problem I had with the sound were the effects used for various weaponry, which were jarringly bad, and I'm nothing close to an expert on military weapons.
I wouldn't recommend this to anybody who's got better things to be doing. Backlog it for a particularly boring stretch of time off if you think I'm exaggerating.
