A serious, gritty science fiction horror. A touch of space exploration, but mainly based in one frontier space station. A mildly convoluted, dense plot that's initially baffling but gradually clears while continuing to raise mysteries along the way. A touch of chronological confusion, with the first episode being set after most of the rest of the series. Some intrigue, some bleakness and paranoia, some strangeness and just a touch of the disturbing.
With an almost all-female cast who all have breasts the size of their torsos.
An oddity indeed.
The thing that continues to confound me about Divergence Eve is how this happened. The simplest explanation would be that someone wrote a serious science fiction horror, then someone else came along and drew breasts on it. Quite often, a series tries to be two things at once, and fails at both; Divergence Eve doesn't TRY to be two things, it just seems to be two incompatible things haphazardly glued together - and succeeds at both, to an extent. Yes, where series that try hard to meld two elements fail, Divergence Eve succeeds by not making any effort to integrate them at all. Or rather, it succeeds at each one separately, but fails at both together.
You see, if you want to watch impossibly proportioned anime girls bouncing around in impractical faux-military uniforms, getting out of showers and training in their underwear - Divergence Eve will meet your needs. If, on the other hand, you want to watch the aforementioned gritty and engrossing science fiction horror, complete with intrigue, mystery and suspense - Divergence Eve will meet your needs too. But in each case, you need to do your best to overlook the other element. If you want bouncing chests and so on, you may find the involved plot makes you think when you probably don't really want to, and distracts you from the eye candy. And if you want the plot - or get dragged into it against your will - the constant bouncing, jiggling and unprovoked bouts of nudity will grate. If you're willing to concentrate, you can take Divergence Eve on either of its component parts, but not both together.
The series as a whole is reasonably nicely drawn and adequately animated. I don't think I need to say anything about the character designs (or point out where most of the animation happens) but it's worth mentioning the 'outside' bits. Outside Watcher's Nest, the space station, everything goes CG. Sometimes this is really glaring, such as when a character and a CG object meet (which doesn't happen all that often, in fairness) but a lot of the time it works well enough. The Ghouls (which I won't explain, to avoid spoilers) are done in CG and seem a bit woodenly animated, but the CG spacecraft are pretty decent. It's not Advent Children, but it's good enough, and having the Rampart Armours (the characters' individual transports in space) in CG actually lends them an oily, military solidity that fits with the tone of the plot.
Some of the incidental music in this series is quite nice, though not outstanding. The opening theme is probably the musical highlight; a vaguely mechanical-sounding guitar-based chug at odds with the mildly fanservicey images it accompanies. The ending theme, though, is horrendous: a shrill, vacuous noise that can't be labelled 'pop' without offending a great many people. It's awful even if taken alone and out of context, but when it comes immediately after a tense or ominous scene at the end of an episode, it's hideously jarring. At the end of each episode I leapt for the remote, and you will too - to hit either 'stop' or 'mute', depending on whether you want to watch the full-on fanservice montage that is the end credits.
Before we leave the realm of the audio, I'll mention the voice acting. I watched the dub (I usually do, unless it's bad enough to grate - Escaflowne, I'm looking at you) so I can't comment on the Japanese voices, but the English ones are less annoying than you might imagine - and yet more annoying, too. Misaki, the main character, sounds like, for want of a better word, a bimbo. And she is, mostly. In that sense, I suppose the voice is appropriate, but bear in mind that she's meant to be a marine of sorts. Some of the other girls are a bit squeaky or whiny, but not unbearably so - and there's one solitary gem. My favourite voice actor in this is also my favourite character: the girls' immediate superior, another generously proportioned woman by the name of Lyar von Ertiana, who defies the gravity of her chest and acquires some gravity of character. She's voiced by Shelley Calene-Black, who I later discovered again in Those Who Hunt Elves (and it turns out she's been in a few others too, such as Orphen) and while her performance isn't exceptional for anime in general, in this case she's the only one of the female characters to have any kind of strength or distinctive character in her voice.
Now to the plot. I'm not going to describe any of it, since I can't do so without spoilers, but I will say it's the strongest point of the series. It's interesting, fairly clever, dark, and engrossing - but I have a couple of significant criticisms. Firstly, it can be a little confusing. It's some time before anything becomes remotely clear, and you may find yourself going back to earlier episodes to see if they can help you make sense of a new development. Having said that, it's less confusing than the likes of RahXephon, so it's a surmountable problem. Secondly, the plot doesn't finish. I'm not giving anything away by revealing that; I think it's best to go into this series knowing that if you want the rest of the plot you need to watch the sequel series, Misaki Chronicles. At least, I assume Misaki Chronicles actually wraps everything up; I haven't got round to watching it yet, out of sheer terror that it might have been completely overcome by fanservice. Either way, you won't find resolution in Divergence Eve.
All in all, I'd have to say I do like Divergence Eve and will probably watch it again sooner or later, but its flaws are too numerous to make it essential viewing. The acceptable but vaguely annoying voices, the occasionally jarring CG, the grotesquely inappropriate ending theme and the lack of plot resolution would knock this down a point or two anyway, but the most striking and downright inescapable of the faults in the series is the utterly baffling fanservice that pervades everything by way of the enormous, bouncy chests of all the female characters. This really scuppers the whole endeavour by contrasting completely with the tone of the story and forcing the viewer to squint or develop selective blindness in order to take any of it seriously. This jarring contrast is probably easier to resolve if you're only in it for the breasts; you can just press 'mute' to avoid exposure to the plot.
It's a shame, really, because if it had stuck to being drama/horror instead of trying to tack on some Playboy elements, Divergence Eve would have been easy to recommend as a dark, interesting and pretty different take on science fiction anime.
