Clockwork Planet's premise is, indeed, pretty cool: The planet Earth was fucked up so hard that it looked like humanity was going to become extinct, long ago. A supergenius only known by Y proposed and performed a massive operation to replace the planet, piece by piece in its entirity, with a world made out of clockwork, gears floating in space. And he managed to do it. A thousand years later, we live in a world of gears where clockwork machinery is an every day part of life, and main character Naoto Miura discovers RyuZU (yes, the caps are meant that way), a clockwork automaton made by Y.
This is a fairly solid start, right? We've got potential mystery of the past and present, if you like cute girls its got a robot, the other main character Marie is also presented as facing a crisis with one of the city's main gear towers, giving us some instant suspense. So, sounds like a good start for a series, right? How does it shape up?
Haha, it is TERRIBLE. First off, the plot and backstory is all but irrelevent. Very little of the show couldn't have just been set in a somewhat future world and been almost the same. Marie's plot with the military is one of the most obvious and yet blundered plots I've seen in a while: The "villain" is utterly incompetent both in terms of in character and how they are provided, for example, and the logic of it is quite absurd, I'm trying not to spoil it but...look, its like if you tried to cover up killing someone by going out and bombing a police station. Yeah, great, people might not investigate that murder, now you're on the hook for something more! They later do try to do a single thing with the Y backstory, but its so poorly communicated that it ends up as very muddy and simply doesn't go anywhere, creating a villain with essentially zero motivation.
That's another thing about this series that sucks. There's a few villains who are even named and all of them have either cardboard cutout or non-existant motivations, never get to fight and do not perform logical plot functions. Instead, 90% of enemies are nameless mooks who are supposed to be good fighters, but get mowed down by the dozens until they are little more than speed bumps on the path of the heroes. When the game makes it out like they are actually a threat, it doesn't feel tense or believable, because we've seen these exact enemies get simply flattened previously, eliminating the suspension of disbelief.
Characters in this series tend to end up with boring or inconsistant characterization. Naota has any potentially interesting gimmick in how much he is just a huge gear fan in this world, buuuut that mostly goes nowhere and he ends up being the generic main character surrounded by waifus. RyuZU has is oveprotective but it seems very selective when she is and otherwise is kind of just...there, it is hard to say she has a very defined personality, although that to an extent has a point due to her robotic origins. She does have one good quality, especially in a show full of not very likable characters: She's programmed to phrase her compliments in the most biting manner, resulting in her cutting down character's for their deserved stupidity repeatedly.
I hold a particular dislike in my heart for Marie, though, whose character was terrible and incoherent throughout the entire piece. The show really doesn't know how to portray her. Sometimes she comes across as incredibly hot headed and arrogant, other times she is over the top depressed about her abilities. Most commonly, she seems to take whatever extreme that Naota isn't taking, in order for him to take the reasonable viewpoint and come out on top of her, which also makes stuff of the finale seem rather out of place in the series. Her super speed repairing powers seem quite random and are generally poorly animated, she generally was very badly done as a character, including a worse "hidden identity" than Clark Kent, which also ends up being thrown out in like 3 episodes anyway so WHAT WAS THE POINT. TELL ME YOUR SECRETS, SHOW.
You also get Halter, who is...generic bodyguard basically. AnchoR I can't talk much about for some spoiler purposes, but she too is quite bad, and in particular has some icky stuff where the show really doesn't seem to want to know if it wants to take a romantic rival or daughter situation with her. The results are as squicky as you might imagine.
AnchoR is a good anchoring, hehe, point to talk about the shows AWFUL art and sound design and direction. The art is the far worse of the two: AnchoR's hair frequently looks like toothpaste on top of her head and character's outfits are frequenrly drawn in an odd and improper manner, making it look almost more like a paper doll with clothing that is a part of them and shifts awkwardly. Expressions do not always properly follow moods, often if animation is repeateded, such as Marie looking confidently annoyed at Naota in a scene where she is clearly in great distress. Animation of characters often is flimsy during talking or still shots, making characters look uncomfortable and blob-like, with machinery having uninspired designs and backgrounds being sparsely detailed. AnchoR frequently gets it the worst due to her dress and hair, making her stand out as being unrealistically poor in the crowd.
Sound design is similiarly poor, with uninspired voice acting with the exception of Halter who has a kinda cool older guy edge to him, entirely forgettable and drab in-story soundtracking and lacking sound effects for various things, although it often more skirts to forgettable than horrible in comparison to the art. I gave it a 2 simply because the OP is decent enough, especially with the clock effects in the background, and because of a handful of good mechanical noises in the finale, putting it above the true dredges of the world in that regard.
So, ultimately, the thought of this show should be rather obvious: It is dreadful. The plot is poorly paced, with filler slapped in at random and utterly drama breaking comedic moments hampering a script full of obvious stupidity and little tension. The art is some of the worst I've seen in a while, unless you are a huge fan of Colgate making some hot new anime. The sound design is poor and uninspired and the characters have difficult defining their personalities or otherwise are extremely inconsistant and poorly done. Battles are extremely disappointing, with action scenes largely consisting of stomps or boring fights against mooks, with no true villain fights even, eating up runtime as little more than filler. If you consider yourself a connoisseur of bad anime, then give Clockwork Planet a look, as it has plenty of material to mock with your friends. But if you want a quality anime, avoid Clockwork Planet in its entirity: You miss nothing but terrible spins on pre-existing concepts and an infuriating inability to do anything with its core concept.
