Story: 7
Hear me out. The show's story revolved around a group of high school girls (who go to school on some sort of floating town carrier ship?) as they try to win the tankery championship. This sounds completely ridiculous. It is. Yet, the staff managed to weave this completely...inconceivable...and ill-developed story into something that seemed fully plausible. By the end of it, I felt like I was watching any regular sports anime. I found myself invested in the concept of the story by one simple line in the first episode that goes something like, "It's a bit weird to think of a guy doing tankery. It's so feminine!" It dragged me into this world where nothing was really explained, and tankery was somehow exclusively female (like American football, I guess). I give this a 7 because the show managed to leave me thinking about tankery like it was an average sport, never mind the weird floating ships of schools. It was such a uniquely weird topic, that I became invested in learning about tanks, which I knew nothing of before. I paid attention, I learned, and I was dragged in.
Art: 7
The dimensions on the girls' faces when side-facing annoyed me to no end. Other than that, the art was generally moe. I would give it a 5 or 6 if I wasn't so impressed by the movements of the tanks and how they were animated. Seriously, I found myself staring at their almost-meticulous detailing rather than the girls' faces.
Sound: 4
I hate moe soundtracks, and that's exactly what this had. It was a bit forcedly feminine, but neither the OP or ED were what I'd call "bad." They were average. The background music throughout the series was also average. The only thing I found remarkable was this kind-of weird rendition of some characters singing a Russian war song...alright.
Character: 6
The character developments were all completely predictable. Common family in-fighting, get's resolved, everyone's more or less content. Some crying here and there. There were so many girls in this show, that the 12 episodes couldn't really explore any of their personalities or backgrounds in depth other than a few main characters. Even those were pretty surface level. Honestly, only one of the main characters stood out to me (the poofy-haired one), but I can't even remember her name, because, at the end of the day, the show threw so many names at me that I only remembered the protagonist's name. The protagonist, Miho, was a fairly average trope, but I enjoyed her more than I thought because the show didn't resort to all of the typical cliches with her, and she displayed great battle acumen by the end of the show.
Enjoyment: 9
I KNOW. A 9. UGH. This seems uncalled for, and it is. The story really, seriously, drew me in. I ended up on, like, 20 tank Wikipedia pages and was Youtubing videos of M4 Shermans firing by the end of the show. The fact that I was pulled in from the beginning into treating the show like a sports anime made it, honestly, insanely fun to watch matches. I knew what the outcome of each of them would be, but the team who created this seriously researched their military stuff. The tactics were fun and realistic, the tanks moved in a captivating way, and the enemies were all unique. I felt the care that went into production for this show, and I loved watching it all unfold. This show presented a unique combination of something like a soccer anime and a historical war anime, and had me smiling in every match.
Overall: 7
Ultimately, though I seriously enjoyed it, the I think that this show failed to expand on the possibilities that it had to work with. The characters lacked depth, and the outcome of everything from the character drama to the match outcomes were highly predictable. Nothing was really outstanding other than the unique story. Still, the weirdness of the story managed to pull everything else up with it, and I found myself at the edge of my seat for the matches, even though I thought this would be some moe sports anime that was meant to appeal to military-game fans.
Receiving a solid 7, I recommend this anime for anyone looking for a unique and somehow refreshing mishmash of sports, military, and moe.
