Obviously, the backgrounds in the show are stunning to look at and incredibly detailed. If you're here for its reputation for eye candy, it absolutely delivers there. The character designs did nothing for me, but they were mostly an excuse for bad things to happen to children, so whatever. They can look bad and like they're squishy aliens in this hyper-detailed world and I can deal with that.
But, ffs, the story and the world building, which were supposed to be the main draws other than the art, were so basic. The only thing that separates this from any other shounen-ish battle anime is the rougelike-inspired aesthetic of how the Abyss's levels work, which could not carry it through interminable episodes where not a whole bunch was accomplished. It's both unsurprising and sort of disappointing that most of the reason this has such a "mature" reputation is because they puke, talk about dicks sometimes, and pretty bad things happen to some lolis. For anime, this is practically normcore.
But then there's certain things that happened in the second half that were devastatingly well-directed. They are individual scenes in episodes that, yes, are otherwise bad, but they were absolutely diamonds in the rough. Was it cheating because they were bad things happening to cute people? Perhaps. But I went from not giving a shit about the characters overall to actively wanting them to come out alive from those scenes, and I think the effect was worthy of a score bump.
I'll probably end up watching the movie at some point just because it's there and this show doesn't have an actual ending, but I'd say "Made in Abyss" is easily skip-worthy.
