First off, lets start out with the parts of the show that I thought were good. The final episodes, though not perfect were better than the excurciatingly slow beginning/middle of the anime. The final episodes, starting realistically from somewhere around episode 10 is where the real shocking part of this show surfaces. It starts to become incredibly disturbing. Now while, yes, the things shown were disturbing, I ultimately felt there wasn't much point to them by the conclusion of the story or atleast the conclusion of this season. But, nonetheless these moments were exciting in a sort of horror movie jump scare type of way. But, the show could've focused more on stuff like this than what they were showing in the beggining of the show.
Now, the bad parts of this for me can be summed up in it's bad/mediocre animation, boring/muddy artstyle, and the character dynamics between RIko and Reg (the main characters). The animation for one thing is incredibly inexpressive. Shows that I would consider expressive would be shows like Death Note, Hyouka, Zetsubo-sensei, Konsuba, and many many more. The things that these shows have is differing animation for different moments. Sometimes the characters might become chibi or they might get more detail for some effect or maybe there would be a close-up with increased animation for a movement or some stretch in the body for comedic effects or whatever. But Made In Abyss, this isn't the case. It felt the same whether they were fighting, hugging or whatever for a majority of the show. One example would be when they have this big haggard looking guy that comes looking for them and when he hugs them goodbye, I didn't really feel any emotional impact because I don't think it was expressed through animation in any meaninful way. Anime like Wolf Children, Garden of Sinners, and even World God Only Knows has better emotional hugging from the animation.
Now, the artstyle too is just boring. It's pretty much just this dirt color with character designs that are extremely simple, even all the adult characters. When I first saw Riko's mother, I was frankly dissapointed. The simply artstyle is used well in other places like Madoka Magicka where there are scenes where it becomes much more abstract and the character designs then are in comparison fine (still not a huge fan though of the character art in Madoka)
The characters are also a big problem. Riko is just unlikeable to me and her personality and her drive to go to the abyss seems artifical, like the writers needed her as a conduit to move the story forward and thus any scene with her felt kind of weird, cause I don't really see any chemistry between the heroine and the other characters. Now, disliking Riko is something that might just be personal to me. I don't know why but I don't like her positive attitude and the weird ass motif of her wetting her pants (I get it, this show is realistic and abrasive and all that but you don't have to keep showing it if there's no real point to it) and her obsession with the abyss. I found one character, Nanacci to be pretty decent (though not her design) and probably would've been better for the story if more of the focus was on her, atleast for more episodes. Another character that felt like bait to the viewers to sympathize/like was Ozen. I bet some people liked her and all that but like every other minor character, she just felt like filler to try to move the characters/story smoothly to lower levels of the abyss.
I find there's so much just small things about the show that I had issue with while watching it and after finishing it, i'm incredibly compelled to write my opinion, regardless of how unpolished or unpopular it is simply because I don't think this is a special anime by any means. There are shows that are more philosophical (Kino no Tabi, Serial Experiments Lain, paranoia agent), there are shows that are more disturbing (Kaiji, Madoka Magica, Kakegurui,berserk) and there are many many more shows with better pacing and plot.
