The art is great at times with barely passable budget cut animation at others. The sound design, while not outstanding, works well and does its job. Music is probably one of the strongest suits of Kanata no Astra. The OST is great and has several memorable tracks. The story is probably one of the worst parts, but if you can close one eye during the plotholes while enjoying what's executed well on a good premise, it's bearable. The exploration part of the story is the better half when compared to the underlying mainline story half, which gets increasingly more focus as the show goes on. It's very basic and infantile in its philosophies, but not outright insulting.
There are a lot of pacing issues and the quality of the story as well as the budget of the animation. Some parts of the plot could've played out much quicker while others really deserved more time. This show really needed either more episodes or longer episodes. The first episode being double length is definite proof that the show would've worked much better in a 48 minute episode format across the entire season. So many events and character moments that simply needed more attention to detail. So many ideas come across left unexplored. Throughout the show I felt like this could've been the Stargate of Anime, if its potentially was fully explored. Filler would've been right in this show.
Regardless of all its faults, I never felt like dropping it. In fact, I wanted to finish it as soon as possible, ending up in 10+2 episodes marathon over 2 days. I still got a lot of enjoyment from it, maybe thanks to my bias towards space operas like Crest/Banner of the Stars. Yeah, probably that. I hope this review helped and if you plan to watch, I recommend letting a little loose on cynicism during the watch.
