Well, it's not wrong to say that it is. However, the focus of the story is not to make you, the reader or viewer, to believe the sci-fi that gets mentioned over and over in the story. but rather, the result, which is a sci-fi survival story set in mars. In a way, the enemy reminds me of the titans in AoT. Numerous, with many abilities, and with so much information unknown about them that it brings about a sense of terror.
Yet, it also reminds me of something like Jojo's bizzare adventure, where every individual has a unique power to themselves, each with their random quirks and uses. The gist of the story is ridiculous, but sets up a simple premise and foundation for the actual meat of the story to flourish: people possessing powerful abilities of animals to a superhuman degree, fighting equally superhuman cockroaches that are as big as humans.
It's definitely satisfying to watch the 6 crews struggle against cockroaches, and how the cockroaches always seem to one up their strategies despite being more primitive and less cunning.
Yet, even amidst this battle for survival, there are betrayals due to political allegiances, and a crew that had a good chance of fighting the cockroaches fall apart due to infighting, providing a good contrast to the bee-like hivemind that the cockroaches have, to the politically driven crews of Annex 1. Despite the story being ridiculous and the powers questionable, filled with plot holes, the political schemes on earth and the proxy wars on Mars definitely are built good enough to feel realistic, yet not too complicated that the action packed story feels dragged down by it.
Overall, a good story. Characters definitely could use some work, and showing the backstory of every other character is kind of unnecessary. There's definitely a formula of a character getting beat up in a life or death situation, them awakening their latent potential through a series of flashback sequences, and powering up and killing the cockroach enemy. I would have liked some more organic development and better chemistry amongst characters. Adolf's arc especially excruciatingly slow and painful to go through.
People say that the second season sucks compared to the first, but as a person that just watched both seasons consecutively, I've got to say, the animation definitely is better. By no means is the second season a masterpiece, but the first season had little to no good action sequences, and a lot of the fights are extremely unsatisfying to watch, the show utilizing a lot of tricks to abstract the fights. Compared to the second season, where yes, some fights are poorly made, but there are a decent number of fight choreography's that aren't choppy at all, and much better than the first season's. I liked the first season's cockroach CGI a lot better, and the details in the cockroach models in the second season only accentuate the poor CGI, as compared to the first, where it was simple, but served its purpose, and there was less of a contrast to the hand-animated characters. The story definitely takes a turn from survival to the aforementioned political proxy war, but that's also part of the manga, so if you don't like the plot, you also just don't like the original story, which is fine, but it's a faithful adaptation, to say the least.
