THE ANIMATION! 4/5
I -am indeed shallow enough that I have a mental prettyness scale and abuse it relentlessly, it's true there's no denying it - but it would be criminal to ignore the stunning visuals in this show!
The only part of animation I didn't like was the character design.The features, posture, clothing none of it was likable for me.
The backgrounds were the best part, the water and night scenes were especially nice.I often find it hard to follow an anime when the darkness engulfs everything, Gargantia manages to present the night scenes with noteworthy clarity.
The movements and visual effects were good , I found Chamber's movements were especially fluid and was a little disappointed that didn't carry on to the rest of the characters.
THE CHARACTERS 2.5/5
Seeing how even though I enjoyed the show (for the most part) I must admit the characters kind of sucked.
Ledo, our trusty protagonist falls to earth with a very serious, assertive military mind set.He is
a particularly gung-ho individual in terms of killing off an entire race of mysterious alien creatures "Hideauze", and has very little social skills. However,vigilant he is often distant and odd in the midst of other people.He has trouble communicating with the humans on Gargantia who speak an Earthen language,further alienating him.The residents of Gargantia are a naturally free-spirited and care free bunch,a harsh contrastto Ledo's serious and relatively strict behavior, he often has trouble understanding their feelings and way of life
.
Throughout the first half he slowly adapts to life on the ship Gargantia. He was for the most part and okay character,but seeing as to how the entire plot revolves around him,he was a little underwhelming and entirely predictable. Also I found him very similar to Eureka from Eureka 7 .The similarities were hard to look past and I found it hard to think of this as an original story with so many similarities.
Chamber,an artificial intelligence created to aid Ledo,was probably my favorite character.
He was much more productive than his pilot that's for damn sure.
Apart from them the rest of the characters fell into a clump of shells.I found nothing original about any of them and none seemed to have any distinctive personality that felt natural consistently.
Amy was perhaps the one exception though she didn't really go past her love fro her brother and bubbly nature.
There were almost no developments in this matter.
THE PLOT 3/5
I wonder when they were roughing out the plot for this how they went about it.
I believe it went something like this
PART ONE- Ledo will stop being such a hard-ass and make friends.
PART TWO-Total chaos and random drama shall take over everything thus completely ruing our eazy-breazy plot thus far.
Like what?
The plot was pulled into two completely different directions and while some may have thought 'oh what a pleasant surprise' others were mostly baffled.
I enjoyed the first have very much.I found it refreshing and even if not flawless it was enjoyable. PART ONE 4/5
After that things got way out of hand and frankly very out of character for everyone. The last half alone was also not 'bad' on its own.If the story had carried out a single theme from beginning till end it would have been great! Where things went wrong was when they couldn't stick with one concept and tried to throw in the second.
PART TWO-2/5
THE SOUNDTRACK 3/5
- was passable and voice acting was average.The sound effects were actually well timed ,dare I say 'good'. Along with that was some un-noteworthy background music leaving me with a 3/5.
Overall 7/10
I did enjoy the first half very much and found it very refreshing.Through the entirety of the show there is minimal character development and later on it has trouble keeping consistency,both in the plot and character personality.
If you don't an out of the blue urn-around and don't mind walking into a predictable character then you would enjoy this much more than I did.
