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I was skeptical of this anime, mostly because I don’t care for mixing traditional and CG animation too much (call me old-fashioned), but it completely blind-sided me with an interesting plot, fun characters, and great voice acting. There were times when I thought, “gee every character has a tragic past,” though, and that did feel like an overused plot device, but it wasn’t awful. It was interesting to see how each character coped with this past of theirs, not everyone was depressed about it or what have you. The basic plot reminds me of X-Men in the sense that there’s people with powers (NEXTs) who are being bullied or worse as kids, some of them resolve to use these powers for good, but others… not so much. There’s even a villain in the first season that is very much like Magneto in the sense that he thinks NEXTs are evolved humans and should therefore be treated as gods and that regular humans aren’t worth saving. I feel like these kinds of stories do put into perspective a very important point: don’t bully others just because they’re different, because you never know what they might resort to because of it.
The series had some great music, I especially liked the 2nd opening theme “Missing Link” by NOVELS and the 1st opening, “オリオンをなぞる” (Orion wo Nazoru) by Unison Square Garden. My favorite characters are Kotetsu T. Kaburagi, Karina Lyle, and Nathan Seymour.
