I have truly mixed feelings about this anime, so... we'll start with what I like about it.
This anime is clearly made by someone who loves mineralogy and is very knowledgeable about it. It's an educational anime about mineralogy. I'm not a mineralogist, but I've watched Dan Hurd on YouTube, and I got Dan Hurd vibes. A lot of the stuff they do and talk about in anime you'll find there as well. So if you want to learn about mineralogy, this is your anime.
And truly, there's nothing wrong with that. It is what it is, and for what it is, it's very good. I could see how some could find it boring, but I mostly didn't. It's about a teenage girl named Ruri who wants to find pretty stones. That's all it's about, but as she learns about stones with her graduate researcher friends Imari and Nagi, she learns far more about, well, pretty stones.
The art is very good... even spectacular in some places. The education is accurate. There is a small amount of entertainment and humor. And that's what you get. (and the OP end ED are beautiful and relaxing)
But now let's get into the reasons why my feelings are mixed.
This anime has the same deficiencies as all of the other educational anime. You don't get to know anything about any character except when they're collecting stones. Ruri is bright and bubbly and cheerful, which is fine, but she's mostly just an annoying barnacle on the life of the extremely patient Nagi and Imari. She ends up coming into her own, but even towards the end she's still just looking for pretty stones. What even is she going to *do* with those pretty stones? Maybe we'll find out. Somehow I doubt it. There are more mines to explore.
Nagi (and to a smaller degree Imari) unsettled me a little. It's their body design. Nagi has large breasts with clothing designed to accentuate them. They're like big, round torpedoes. There's something about the way they drew her that made me think they wanted to add a little ecchi but couldn't figure out how, so they just settled for giving most (but not all) of the female characters large breasts. Don't get me wrong, the design is attractive, but it's... excessive. Especially for a Japanese woman, who are not known for... that. They also somehow figured out how to add cosplay into it, which is kind of an amazing accomplishment when you consider that this anime is laser focused on finding rocks. The fact that they somehow shoved Nagi into a maid uniform just underscored that - they're trying to force a little ecchi where it just doesn't fit.
To their credit, though, such as it is, Ruri is a pretty normally sized teenage girl and there are zero of those moments with her or similarly aged friends. Even when they were wearing swimsuits, they were just ordinary swimsuits. That's okay. I'm not complaining about that, just the obvious fact that they were shoving ecchi in where it didn't belong - even if tame ecchi.
Also... and here's the thing I didn't like the most. What those girls/women are doing is *dangerous*. They could have gotten seriously hurt. In fact, in a few places, they almost did. At one point they were walking along abandoned railroad tracks. There's nothing wrong with what they did per se, but what I didn't like is that the anime made zero attempt to actually show "this is DANGEROUS". No disclaimers, no signs, nothing at all that I could see. Not even a "don't try this at home". I understand that Japanese society tends to be a little more independent that way, but still. There's normal, everyday walk-to-the-konbini dangerous, and there's fall-off-a-cliff or have-rocks-fall-on-you dangerous, and this was very much the latter. I wonder how many Japanese people (or even non-Japanese people) will try to do what these girls do, and end up hurt, or worse, disappointed. Because they had pretty much unnatural success. Fields of opals? Fields of sapphires? A huge nugget of placer gold? You have any idea how many videos Dan Hurd has to make before he finds a piece of gold even one tenth that size?
It's the same problem most of these anime have. They lead to warped expectations in favor of promoting whatever it is they're trying to promote. And I really don't think they even quite understand what they're doing. To them, it's just making good anime. Maybe it is. But someone's gonna get hurt.
So, for that reason, it's mixed feelings. Is it a nice anime? Yes. Is it beautiful? Yes. Does Nagi have big, bodacious breasts and a full bottom? Yes. Is Ruri a cute, bubbly girl who makes everyone's day brighter? Yes. Is someone going to get hurt someday because of this anime? Probably. So... that's my opinion. Watch it, enjoy it if you want, you might find it boring or you might not, but before you get a hammer and chisel and start going out into the wilderness to break rocks and fall of cliffs, please, for the love of all that's good and holy, FIND SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY'RE DOING.
Okay, that's all. Mixed feelings from me. I'll rewrite if my opinion changes over the last two episodes. I don't think it will.
