Momentary Lily

Review Title: A Visual Extravaganza That Strives for Harmony

In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, Momentary Lily combines stunning visuals with an intriguing premise, but its execution leaves much to be desired. The story follows Renge, navigating a desolate city plagued by enigmatic machines. With themes of survival and companionship, it hints at emotional depth but often gets bogged down by uneven pacing and shallow character development.

Studio GoHands brings its signature style with vibrant animations, dynamic camera work, and dazzling effects. However, these same strengths can turn into distractions, making the action chaotic and hard to follow. While the soundtrack adds atmosphere, the ... anime struggles to fully engage the viewer.

This is not a show I’d recommend finishing unless you’re deeply captivated by its visuals. However, for a casual watch to fill some downtime, Momentary Lily has enough flair to keep you entertained for a while.

🟢New anime early NO SPOILERS review
Story:
In a post-apocalyptic world where huge machines erased most of humanity, Renge Kasumi is a lone girl with no memories who's forced to wander the dead streets of a city as she tries to survive. That is until she meets a group of other 5 young girls, the girls welcome her while sharing laughs, tears and food munching. Together the six, armed up with special weapons to fight the machines, are set to move to the next location, but then...

🅾️🅿🅸🅽🅸🅾🅽:
Regardless of what you're gonna read here OR your taste is OR your feelings about this ... anime while watching it, you NEED to watch the first two episodes until the very end, after that the decision to continue watching is up to you.

In terms of format, this is an all-girls type of show, so if you like those type of shows with comedy skits like "Shuumatsu Train Doko e Iku", "Girls band cry", "K-on", "Yuru Camp" and etc, but ever thought what if those cute anime girls had huge ass weapons to fight huge ass machines, well your dream just came true.

Ok, so this is a though one. If you're not familiar with Studio GoHands, they're mostly known for successful popular adapted anime series "Seitokai Yakuindomo" and original series known as "K" or "K Project" which later was adapted to a manga as well, those two series produced many seasons, movies and OVAs. Now here's the problem, this Studio wasn't able to produce its next hit since those two. Their original story writers didn't pay out in both "W'z" and "Hand Shakers", like it did with "K". Same can be said regarding their manga adaptions. As far as their animation goes, it's S-tier animation, top in the business, the fights look like you're watching final fantasy, but what's hurting them is visually. They're adding "rainbow RTX graphic card" effect to every scene, stupid color filtering, weird view angles and spinning POV during fights which can make you nauseous with all the speed and details being thrown at you. Unfortunately even with this anime, it seems like GoHands have yet to learn from their mistakes like so many of us hoped for due to their insane animation skills...

Here's my issue, through watching the first half of the season so far, the anime didn't invest enough time in developing the story. No story-puzzle clue pieces are discovered for the viewers to piece together regarding the Machines that took over the world, what are they, why everything the way it is, what happened to the people that were erased/vanished, Main character's memory loss. It goes like this (obviously no spoilers as promised), episode 3 is about reflecting on past memories, episode 4 is about a problem between two girls, then episode 5 is about a problem between the other two girls and episode 6 is where the writer makes up a dumb "reason" for the story to make sense why the girls need to go to a pool in bikinis for insane fan service in all angles possible, and finally in episode 7 we get action and SOMETHING. So you see from that perspective, basically it was four episodes of nothing and then in episode 7 there's finally story progress. Now, as i mentioned previously, if you're into "Cute girls doing cute things" and lots of funny skits, you gonna love this anime because there's lots of it, however for me, a scene in episode 2 gave me "attack on titan" flashback, it got excited and hooked, and so i waited since episode 3, but the story never took that next step until episode 7.
I'm fine with "cute girls doing cute things", if you throw one episode like that and then go back to the story, but here it's one episode, and then another episode, and then another episode, resulting pushing the story element to the side, forgotten and making me less interested with the show. So in terms of original story, i'm not saying that by the end of the second half of the anime the story will be bad, but they doing really bad job at managing the story progression in the right order, when to do the funny/relax parts and when to do the serious parts, this studio writers just have skill issue.

At last, every girl on the team has an annoying catchphrase they don't stop repeating:
Yuri Says "Don! Don! Don!"
Renge says "Kuppo"
Hinageshi says "Buff" (she always talk gamer language and reminds me Sakura Futaba from Persona 5)
Erika says "here's wisdom from your big sister" or just repeats "big sister" a lot
Sazanka says "really=Maji, or Maji yabai, also Okie-dokie".
Ayame says "guilty" (I hate her the most, because she spams that shit the entire show, she uses that word as much as we use "the" in English, it doesn't even have context, she just randomly says it non stop, JUST SHUT THE F*** UP ALREADY PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU!)

To summarize, i'm enjoying the anime despite everything and i'm hoping the second half of the season delivers on the story, but based on what i've seen till now, it's unlikely to be a hit and Studio GoHands... shit writers, learn how to time when to go off the story and then back into it then repeat, and fix that visual, once again you have yet to learn anything from the past and it's painful for us the viewers, because in term of animations they're so good and they waste it for nothing. I'm giving it a "7" and we'll see where it'll be by the end of the season.

🔥HOT BONUSES!
1. F*** the haters, i absolutely LOVE the 60 FPS spaghetti hair movement, any VRchat players knows what i'm talking about, it's literally what it looks like after you turn the dynamic bones option on LMAO.
2. GoHands once again delivers, with their "Cockroach POV angle".
3. Half of the Voice actors cast only recently started voicing, including the one who voices Erika, that's her first recorded job. Yet here some good ones; Shion Wakayama who voices Hinageshi, is the voice behind Momo Ayase from the current new anime hit "Dan-da-Dan". Miyuri Shimabukuro is known to me at least by her role as Inca Kasugatani from "Fire force". Then you got Misaki Kuno who did Irumyuui and Faputa from "Made in Abyss", and also Hawk! the beloved pig mascot from the Seven deadly sins.
4. Don! Don! Don!

⚠️: I will edit this review at the end of the season with my final thoughts with no spoilers at my "Anime List" on my profile, i will NOT delete this early review. If you want to check the season review or other anime reviews i do, you can check it here: https://myanimelist.net/animelist/Ron014

So... Let's begin this review by making it clear that I am not on the warpath against GoHands;
I personally liked "The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses" quite a bit when I watched it, which was
prior to knowing anything about GoHands' reputation. However, this show has singlehandedly
managed to make me feel like "The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses" must have somehow gaslighted
me into liking it, cause "Momentary Lily" just doesn't work at all.

Though I don't outright hate the character designs and how the characters are animated,
I do think that both of these are distracting more often than not (and that is without going
into the ... ecchi jiggles one character constantly displays).
However, what absolutely does suck in literally every scene is the show's backgrounds which
are so photorealistic in their aesthetic that the characters of the show just don't feel like they are
inhabiting the space they are supposed to occupy. Which again just makes the show distracting
to look at.

When it comes to storytelling, things don't get much better however; the story so far presents
itself as a pretty generic post-apocalypse tale (which is however undermined by the pristine,
photorealistic backgrounds mentioned above) with the group of protagonists traveling an
abandoned city for resources. The twist to this, which initially drew me in by the show, is that
the heroes occasionally spend some time every episode on cooking up meals for themselves.
However, these segments are significantly low-effort and once again just feels like another element
of the show that feels distracting. Especially since the show seems to be trying to take itself relatively
seriously for the most part, having a rather significant "twist" occur near the end of the second episode.
This "twist" however feels completely unearned by the show, even if the show at least does spend the
entirety of the third episode dwelling on this development—which I do think was the right call, even if
the show doesn't necessarily capture an appropriate tone for this development.

Lastly, I want to talk a bit about the characters themselves. This can however be done with rather
quickly, as the entire cast is entirely 1-dimensional and largely just made up of "catchphrases"
that all become tired to listen to within seconds of hearing them the first time. Beyond this, there
is basically little to nothing distinguishing the characters from each other—other than a cooking
obsession in the case of the main character herself.

With all this being said, I hope I've been fair in my criticism of "Momentary Lily" and its shortcomings,
and that this review has been helpful to you as a reader.