The plot has a great premise. There is a flash of green light and everyone is turned to stone. Roughly 3700 years pass before some of them wake up, and now they're living in a stone age. It's up to our characters to survive in this new world.They accomplish this with scientific advancements. Still, the series is at it's best during specific flashbacks, which has some nice world-building and lore.
The protagonist is intelligent, unlike the majority of shonen protagonists who are usually morons (incidentally, kudos to the series for initially fooling me on who the protagonist was). It's great to see a protagonist who handles conflicts using his brain. As a result we often get satisfying climaxes.
However, it becomes apparent that he is too smart. He can make and do just about anything possible in the stone age, despite being a high school student. Why wasn't he a billionaire scientist somewhere? Oh who cares, this is shonen. Logic need not apply. Add in a stupid hair style that would make even Yugi Motto jealous and you've got your shonen recipe. I also wish he had more character depth other than "super smart guy." No romantic/sexual interest, no character motivations beyond helping everyone...he doesn't have a lot to him right now.
The antagonist is another young man who can punch lions to death, crush statues with his bare hands, and catch crossbow bolts out of the air....because shonen I guess.
Scientific explanations and project building can drag on and on, making large sections of the series boring. Some of these are not realistic anyway, particularly given some of the time constraints. Even a dozen Einsteins wouldn't be able to manage some of these feats...Oh who am I kidding? This is Senkuu. He's smarter than at least 20 Einsteins.
The problem with all of this shonen nonsense is that it doesn't fit with the premise of the plot. The story should be a gritty, "overcome the stone age using my brain" story. Not a borderline super power fantasy which has no relation to the rules of the everyday-normal Japan universe it has.
As a whole though, the characters are definitely interesting. I like most of them. But like Senkuu, they lack character depth at the moment. Here's hoping for that in future seasons.
The art is fine, as are most character designs (Senkuu's hairstyle is still really dumb though). But the OST is bland and forgettable.
Many anime would be so much better if they understood the artistic value of subtly. Dr. Stone is a prime example of this. It has a great premise and solid characters, but the story is marred with dumb shounen bullcrap, the 'science building' has a tendency to drag for several episodes too long, and a forgettable OST does it no favors.
Hopefully future seasons are better, because this series has a lot of promise despite the problems.
