Summer Time Rendering is ultimately a grab bag of fun sci-fi for young adults mainstays, *rendered* in as cheap and juvenile a way as you possibly could. There is no point throughout the show where you will not be held by the hand, with CONSTANT over-explanation of everything: not only pertaining to the mystery at hand, but all aspects down to every thought of, well, not even just the protagonist, literally whoever is the current PoV will be monologuing at you. The show does its damnedest to make sure you don't have to worry your poor little head with things like interpreting what is going on or even how our characters feel. And almost like a rhythm to the show, when the monologuing and exposition dump dialog stops, that means it's time for some not-so-tense suspense. The show betrays any inkling of tension in several infuriating ways: it firstly has prevailing tonal inconsistency, flip-flopping between wacky anime gags and ecchi humor, and turning the corner sharpish into stone cold life-or-death seriousness. At the drop of a hat, you will have characters confessing love and Dr. Slump style gag faces into someone getting stabbed in the head. It's hard for the "oh shit" moments it's going for to have any impact when they're prefaced by grating "comedy" bits, themselves things you'll have seen a million times before. It's less "OMG" and more "finally, we can get back to the story." It gets even worse as it establishes this rhythm, making the literal out of nowhere twists somehow anticipated. Even when the gag stuff isn't groan-inducing, it still somehow always feels out of place in the context of the story. Going beyond this, as I've said before, it's very overt in its presentation, and it frequently slides out of mystery/investigation into thriller chase/run/fight, the latter becoming basically the entire back half of the show, culminating in a climax reminiscent of Hellsing of all things. It was loud, it was lights and noise and disintegration of anything you probably came into this show at full force. Many of the sci-fi themes Summer Time Rendering plunders from more thoughtful peers and predecessors end up being rather shallow explorations, often ending up simply being used once to explain or handwave away why something else is the way it is. The more integral sci-fi ideas the show is built on fare a little better in that they are more fleshed out, but the development of this ideas is pretty linear and only serves to progress the narrative, rather than offer any deeper open-ended implications, let alone anything applicable more broadly to life or humanity at large. There aren't any moral questions to leave with, there are no hypothetical worlds to explore on your own. It's a closed system of unoriginal concepts used to deliver a rather cheap narrative. And God forbid I mention the tired old NON-sci-fi conventions.
Cheap drama, flimsy motivations and back stories, a story that rips the thrills, suspense, and interaction straight out of your hands make this an extremely unsatisfying experience, one that has just enough ingredients to not be an absolute failure, and a few things it does well enough that I didn't credit here because they ultimately pale in comparison to all it does wrong preventing it from going to "it's a story" to "it's a good story." If you're 14 and have literally never engaged with any sci-fi before, you probably would like it, I'm sure this is going to be influential in many little zoomies' lives, but if you're any more mature than that, just skip this. Anything you see in the synopsis that makes you think you'd like this, I guarantee there is a better-rendered ;) story somewhere else.
