Story: The plot of this series follows a middle school girl named Yumemi who sees floating islands in the skies and eventually a godlike figure named Munto who tells her that he needs her help to save both her world and his. This is because the flow of "Akuto", a sort of magical resource or energy made from the hopes and dreams of humans that Munto's people (known as the Heavenly Beings) need to live and use magic, has dried up after an eternity of wasteful overuse by Heavenly Beings drunk on their own power. Yumemi is the only one who can restore the flow of Akuto, but any questions about how or why she can do this are simply ignored. Yumemi can do it because she's The Chosen One and that's that. You will never get a more satisfying explanation than that.
The plot itself is a disaster. This series was a near shot-for-shot remake and continuation of a 2 part OVA series and they didn't bother trying to change the structure for a 9 episode series as opposed to 2 movies. The result is horrendous pacing, irrelevant subplots that are dropped cold when that particular movie's arc is finished, and an awkward break in the series after episode 3 (where the 1st movie ends) where it looks like everything has been resolved, only to suddenly pick back up and keep going for 6 more episodes. The romance parts feel like they were tacked on as an afterthought, and the "you can do anything if you believe in your dreams" ending was corny and far too vague. In general, the story relies far too much on characters overcoming their struggles purely through the power of self-belief, which allows them to simply do whatever they want with magic to achieve the desired result. It's almost childish in a way how the show explicitly rejects (through a Yumemi monologue late in the series) the idea that you would ever need to make tradeoffs or sacrifice something to achieve a goal. The overall message of the show seems to be that you just need to believe in yourself and you'll magically achieve the perfect outcome every time.
Audio/Visual: Can best be described as "inconsistent". The voice acting is just okay, some of the VAs have the annoyingly high pitched child voice going, and Yumemi's VA occasionally has problems where she slips into a normal woman's speaking voice instead of her usual helium-filled schoolgirl voice. But for the most part, it's fine. Likewise with the visuals. They look fine, if a bit dated to my eyes in 2021, but it varies widely throughout the course of an episode. The backgrounds look gorgeous and the fight scenes bring out the style and visual creativity that you'd expect from Kyoto Animation, but other parts look shockingly unfinished, especially characters that aren't in the foreground of a shot. Character design can also be an issue at times. Most of the characters suffer from Code Geass syndrome and are far too long and skinny, especially the Heavenly Beings. The worst offender is Munto's character design, looking like a red-haired Goku that's 6'+ tall and maybe 90 pounds at most
Characters: In writing this part of the review, I am trying to think of a single interesting or good character in this show, and Ichiko might be the only one. Yumemi and Munto, despite being the main characters of the series, have very little in the way of interior lives and zero romantic chemistry with each other. Yumemi's friend Ichiko has the most compelling storyline of the human characters, struggling to support Yumemi as she deals with something Ichiko can't see or understand. Suzume gets the worst of it, shoved into a deeply uncomfortable and completely irrelevant romance subplot where she, a 13 year old girl who looks and acts only slightly older than a toddler, gets married to a college student named Kazuya, and this is presented as a heartwarming story of how her innocence and support healed him, rather than child grooming. Fortunately this subplot is dropped and barely even referenced again after episode 3, but it never should have been included in the first place. Part way through the series, they attempt to shoehorn a male character named Takashi into the group of 3 girls and act like he was always one of their group, but he too doesn't matter even a little bit to the story, and has even less personality than the others. Outsider Gass has a compelling story and personality, but the series leaves it entirely up to you to figure it out on your own rather than delving into the actually interesting questions about why he sacrificed his status as Outsider. As a whole, the characters are mostly uninteresting, and the few that have potential are mostly sidelined with their stories left untold.
Overall, this is a series with an interesting concept and very poor execution, badly marred by terrible pacing, dead-end subplots, and boring characters. You could probably reassemble the pieces here to tell a really good story, but what they actually released is a total trainwreck. Don't waste your time with this series.
