I came into watching this thinking it might be an unsung masterpiece—certainly it has a devoted mini-fanbase on MAL and elsewhere. The beginning is strong, then by the middle it's just okay, and you ride that lukewarm okayness to the end for a stretch of about 16 episodes, a few of the reveals are kind of not too appealing, but all the writing comes together, full circle, and the end is decent and even satisfying—it could have been better, had the writers done more with the middle section. It's often said in pedestrian HOW DO I WRITE threads that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end—they should have just cut the middle out. There was a pretty good movie here, but as a series, it's on the mediocre side.
The animation is consistent but mostly unexceptional. The direction, background art, and composition are all very solid in the beginning and fair throughout. While the character art is decent, it's mostly Ryu that stands out, and the characters tend to be missing their noses. Sometimes they don't even have a line or nostrils. Frank's design is great with its asymmetry, but all of the other aliens have one boring design.
The real problem has everything to do with the aliens. There's a mystery as to why they want to head to Pilgrimage Point, but the main problem is that the series devolves into a monotonous monster-of-the-week show. Yes, Evangelion utilized this formula, but they made it work by crafting less repetitive stories around each angel event. The angels looked incredible, and as the show progressed, they tended to become more and more abstract and unsettling. The aliens of Argento Soma and their one design only contain any variance by giving them different abilities and forcing our protagonists to cook up special ways of beating them, but it's just doggerel. It's very apparent this was on the low-budget side.
They could have set time aside for the characters to develop (and they really needed to here), but they repeat the same tedious formula instead. Either they needed to pad this series out for time, or the writer ran out of ideas—perhaps both. One good aspect that sets this show apart from other shows with the same formula, would be Ryu acting as a spy and a bit of a saboteur. Aside from trying to kill Frank a few times, he doesn't really do much other than leak information, and this had a lot of potential for greater drama, but it kind of doesn't go anywhere. I barely feel like he's an undercover agent at all, in fact. There's no sense of risk involved.
Where the authors seem to lose track of where they were going with the script is seeded at an early point. A mysterious man appears before a recuperating Ryu. He looks a bit like a rejected villain from an already cancelled Yasuomi Uemetsu hentai (seriously, he looks like the guy from Kite), he has a sinister persona, and he's one of those characters where half of his lines are quotes he memorized from Shakespeare or other writers. This guy's character and motivations completely flip, and it appears they intended to make him a figment rather than real at first.
Writer: I know we wanted to do that edgy sequence where Ryu's eyes bug-out and we find out he's insane, and the camera is all shaky during the hallucination scene, but it's not working.
Director: Eh, let's just make this guy real. The audience will wonder if he's in Ryu's head. We'll slowly unveil he is real after faking the audience out the whole show. Don't worry about the fact that cameras would have spotted him by this point and that he's under house arrest or the unlikelihood of this guy being able to manipulate so much from behind the scenes on his lonesome and that none of this makes sense. It'll make him seem like an enigmatic mastermind. The audience will eat it up.
Writer: Your rewrite of the script makes him seem like a completely different character. We alluded to him being the devil, had Ryu entering into a Faustian bargain with him, gave him all of these "I'm a bad dude" faces, and even had him splatter his pumpkin-sized tomato all over Ryu's apartment. You're going to just randomly rewrite him as a good guy?
Director: Who cares? No one is going to remember after all the filler in the middle. This is deep art, and it will be ambiguous and probably seem symbolic. Plot holes just make it more nuanced and fuzzy, they add pizazz and spice, just like real life. It's like Cinéma vérité, you know?
Writer: I don't think that means what you think it means...
Most of the themes are established in the opening episodes. The debate between the main character and the professor is a lesson on life, and the super-genius Ryu Soma is a bit slow on the uptake. The themes about connecting with others are handled in a fashion very similar to Evangelion, as this is a mech show that's a bit metaphysical. Except instead of being the no. 1 wimp in the world, Ryu is moody, aggressive, and maybe a little autistic? He'll just as soon spit in your face or insult you before going "..." but that's one feisty iteration of the most classic line in anime.
The only two characters who have any development are Ryu and Maki—I mean Hattie. Instead of the development being gradual, it's all saved for the end. Ryu is one of the better sadsack and introverted mains I've seen in recent years, and he certainly has an interesting design, what with his scars and fancy hairdo and his accident-induced heterochromia (how on earth does your eye become blue after an accident?). Hattie is 13—going on 6. I get that she spent five years in a coma and also has PTSD, but it's a bit much having her behave so childishly for almost the entire series. Then she has sudden awareness towards the end of the series and acts like she knows everything about Ryu's past relationship with Maki (what she says only makes sense if she has seen the episodes along with us) and also knows him better than he knows himself.
The rest of the cast are likable enough, but only two of them have vaguely outlined backstories, and none of them develop at all. It's incredible to see a cast interact for 25 episodes and still seemingly not know each other. The butch Misato clone gets a few decent zingers about gender dynamics, and she semi-adopts Hattie and they live together, but unlike Evangelion's slice of life bits with Shinji/Asuka/Misato... we never see them together at the apartment—or at all, to be honest. The black guy is the dependable 2nd in command, and like the 1st, he's there for delivering exposition.
Sue is about as childish as Hattie, and to contradict the beliefs of others, I think it's very accurate that she behaves this way. America now must have the lowest standards of entry into the military for a "developed" country—it's basically McNamara's Morons 2.0. I though she was supposed to be half-black and half-white, and she just happens to have silver hair (ANIME) and puts some black warpaint under her eyes, but in the last episode, she has skin as light as most of the other characters and red hair! What the hell? So she slathers on makeup and dyes her hair the entire series, then just doesn't do it at the end?
Production staff: Sir, that character is from your other series!
Director: Whatever... just leave it as is. It'll seem avant-garde or something. We're making art here. It's about emotion, not logic. Our fans will be talking about the deep symbolism of this character's transformation for years to come! As we astutely declare in the script: "It's no fun when the mystery is spoiled."
Production staff: What mystery? It's an error.
Guinevere pretty much just flirts with everyone, and she'll say stuff like "Are you just jealous? ;)" to trigger a reaction and embarrass the other characters. She also spits in at least one person's mouth. Dan (his awful British accent makes the dub unwatchable) is the rival, but he's kind of low-key about it—aside from getting irate because Ryu was hogging the computer for too long—and there aren't any homoerotic buddy-buddy scenes to break the ice between the two. The scene where they're both in the brig is basically wasted.
It's not like the writer/director lacked the ability to churn more out of these characters. I was surprised by how impactful one of the later episodes was when Ryu is reunited with an old friend. You get a little backstory and characterization in that self-contained episode, but that character already felt like he had more depth than the rest of Ryu's crew, and he went out with a bang—whereas if the same happened to Sue, Dan, or Guinevere I'd probably laugh.
The whole show after the solid beginning that leads to Ryu and Hattie being pulled into Funeral's (NERV knockoff) orbit goes like this:
Ryu: Maki, I'm gonna kill Frank for what he did to you!
Butch Misato: Psychobabble, exposition, blah blah, beep, boop.
Ryu: FRANK!
Devil: *Quotes Shakespeare and smashes a tomato in Ryu's apartment.*
Ryu: ...
Hattie: Mr. Fairy, I love you!
Ryu: Maki, is that you?
Hattie: I'm not Maki. You're a bad fairy and a liar.
Ryu: Oh, Hottie. ;)
Sue: Keep it to your perverted Japanese cartoons.
*Ryu throws Hattie in a jet and flies off*
Dan: Hey, are you going to stop them?
Black guy: I don't know. Whatever, lol.
Butch Misato: Jargon, jargon. I hope to have a really nice rose garden someday.
Guinevere: *Makes a noise indicating she's pooling spit in her mouth.*
Ryu: Maki, why don't you say something? How am I going to understand if you don't say anything!?
Hattie: My name isn't Maki, you mean stupid head!
*Time passes.*
Ryu: Are you okay, Ma—I mean, Hattie?
Hattie: I'm okay... because I'm with you. *Blushes*
Okay, obviously he doesn't hit on her, but the way he says her name often does sound like Hottie rather than Hattie... but it's just a back and forth about Maki and Frank, stuffed between battles and irrelevant segments with the other characters. Everything that happens is woven into the core concept to a frightening degree, and the occult phrase as above, so below, definitely applies here (in this instance, understanding something small, leads to an equivalent understanding of something much larger). It's kind of satisfying once the end rolls around, and I basically like what they do with it, but I'd be lying if I didn't say this show runs out of gas and is towed along to the end by the execution of the premise alone. I can almost see the ridiculously funny Evangelion ending coming up with all of the characters laughing as our smart blockhead of a main has an epiphany and says, "OH, it was all just a misunderstanding." *Ryu places his hand behind his head in embarrassment.*
