Story: Genius 9 year old Memempu dreams of a tower and venturing out of her colony as a Marker, someone that explores their dangerous underground world in a mech, to find it. Her father Gagumber tries to dissuade her, but ultimately realizes he's fighting a losing battle and goes along as her partner to protect her. Whatever promise you think this idea contains, I can assure you that the show wastes it. It goes off the rails early, with Memempu's friend Lynda and her dad Walsh being incinerated by a random kaiju literally falling out of the sky and landing on them at the end of the premiere in one of the most unintentionally hilarious cheap shock deaths you'll ever see. It's clearly meant to show the viewer that this adventure is dangerous and death can come at any time, but the show fails to follow that up with any actual peril for the characters. Not a single other named character in the series dies or is really ever even in what feels like serious danger.
But that's really not the worst thing about the plot in this show. The thing that absolutely kills this series dead is the way it just spins its wheels without doing anything. The writing is embarrassingly sloppy and it actually feels unfinished in spots. Like someone wrote an outline for a script and then never actually wrote the rest of it. Lore elements like "towers" and "princesses" are introduced as mysteries and then simply never explained, not even by the end of the series. Characters are vaguely gestured at being evil but then the show just forgets to show them actually doing anything evil or explaining why they're bad There's no forward momentum to the plot, the characters just fuck around doing side quests in various nearly-identical looking colonies, which makes the adventure part of the series seem aimless and uninteresting. By the end of the series, nothing has been resolved or explained since the series wasted its entire runtime on irrelevant side stories that had nothing to do with the main plot of Memempu seeking the tower. After 10 episodes of doing nothing, it eventually drops the entire plot on you all at once in one of the most graceless infodumps imaginable, involving the characters literally sitting in a theater and watching another character give a powerpoint presentation about the main conflict that had been lightly teased a few times in earlier episodes. The final battle is resolved by Memempu crying a bunch and making the villain feel bad so he just leaves and it ends on a screen that might as well say "please buy the light novel" in all caps. It's a complete, irredeemable mess from start to finish.
Audio: The only positive thing I have to say about this entire series is that OP slaps.
Visual: It actually looks pretty good in a few spots, especially the last episode, but the lack of creativity in the writing leads to boring scenery and backgrounds, and the CGI for the mechs and kaiju ranges between "barely acceptable" and "low poly PS2 graphics".
Characters: It's pretty rare to see a show where every single major character annoys the hell out of you, but Sakugan manages the feat. The series leads, Memempu and Gagumber, spend the overwhelming majority of the series bickering with each other like children and I spent entire episodes just wanting to scream "shut the fuck up" at both of them through the screen. They are so hateable that I couldn't get emotionally invested at all in the father-daughter relationship that it tries to make the heart of the series. Memempu is a precocious and arrogant brat and Gagumber is an idiot manchild who's even less mature than his 9 year old daughter. Far from wanting to see them grow and understand each other as people, I instead wanted a falling kaiju to take them out like Lynda and Walsh so I wouldn't have to listen to their shit anymore. Zackletu and Yuri are also there, but have very little personality and contribute even less to the story, mostly getting sidelined any time there are plot developments or major scenes. Merooro is the closest thing this series has to a good character, but he appears too infrequently and the series is too invested in keeping him and the Bureau of Regulation shrouded in mystery to do anything interesting involving him. The story is bad, but the awful characters are really what elevates this from being a standard mediocre anime into one of the worst things to come out in 2021.
