For anyone planning to watch this anime, a disclaimer is to be made. Please Save My Earth does not have an ending. The final scene in the 6th episode is a sneak peak of compilation of events that happen in the manga. Basically, Please Save My Earth has a "go read the manga" ending.
Despite such a lackluster ending, you must be wondering why still a 10/10 review? Because this series is a phenomenal piece of work. It an outstanding performance of animation, music and story, and a true testament to what anime in the 90's really was.
Any avid watcher of anime should have experienced the severe redundancy that has plagued anime since the 2000s. Every popular anime has the same tropes, the same melodrama, that same structure, and the same narrative technique. You can talk about how music, story, animation and characters are essential but the truth is there is an abundance of anime that has nailed all those 4 things but are missing a massive element to what makes an anime .. good. Pacing.
When anime is an extremely oversaturated medium with thousands of pieces fighting for your attention, what separates a good story from another equally good story? The answer is pacing. And that is what Please Save My Earth excels at most. The pacing is phenomenal. It grabs you, forces you to provide attention, steers your emotions towards something you didn't expect to feel. Because of it's excellent pacing, it subverts your every assumption of what the show is. The anime is riddled with incredible plot twists, but it isn't just the story elements that make the twists grab at you. It's the way the chain of events is executed in that makes the twists incredible. Even if you have watched innumerable anime and are immune to any attempt of surprise, the anime doesn't care, it will hook you. If not by the story elements, then the technique of presenting the story elements.
As for more on the "go read the manga ending", that isn't a rare phenomenon when it comes to anime. A good chunk of anime, including some of the most titular titles are plagued with this same curse. So while I debated to give this series a 9/10 for the ending alone, in the end I felt the docking a score of 1 undeserved.
To respect the nature of this being a spoiler free review, I won't go much into characters or plot. The music however, deserves nothing less than mountains of praise. Yoko Kanno's most phenomenal work. The music compliments the tone of the story perfectly. Please save my earth has themes of faith, religious turmoil, hopelessness of fate and feelings of misanthropy. Polar opposite themes, but the music highlights those opposites by evoking in you feelings of spirituality and transcendence. Close your eyes, sit in a quiet room, and listen to "Prologue: Time Of Gold Flowing" with headphones on. You will feel like a incorporeal ecclesiastic traversing through space and time, your soul stretched between reality and the realm of divinity. Please save my earth aspires to make you feel like a 4th dimensional entity viewing the timelines of humans in the dimension below you. You feel the despair of being unable to give the characters the prescience you have, but also feeling of peace for the characters, because of your knowledge of the transcendental energy making provision for them. For a series to make a viewer feel so omniscient yet so vulnerable, what can you give it besides a 10.
