Make My Day

Outstanding example of how to write characters and character arcs. Professional, committed English voice acting.

A well-written original story is the big asset here. Less violence and action than most animes. The very unusual writing highlights the redemption of several unsavory characters, using forgiveness without violins or abandoning its gritty sci-fi genre track.

The eight episodes don't culminate in a tight third act. The story was designed to continue if there was a second season. Still the ending works well enuf to satisfy.

I think this is computer assisted Blender animation, nicely done. Not flashy yet not trashy in any respect.

Congratulations to all who created this.

The basic premise of the show is 'big bugs discovered on an icy mining colony start eating everyone'.

The first two episodes were interesting. I thought it was some kind of animated spin off from the Lost Planet series of videogames and I was waiting to see bigger and more crazy looking bugs show up (which they never did). By episode 3 the plot had descended into badly written, non-stop, cringe inducing dialogue about emotions and how people should help each other with very little action to keep me entertained.

The bugs quickly became boring and each new character that the story introduces is more irritating than the last.

The animation is pretty good. Similar to Arcane but not as colorful and smooth.

After episodes one and two the series isn't worth watching. I watched the dubbed version because I was tired and too lazy to reach for my glasses. This was a mistake as the dubbing is possibly the worst I've ever heard. It might be slightly better with subtitles but not by much.

In summary, avoid.

Initially it looks good but after 2 episodes it is ruined! The creatures are never explained, but they float and are hungry.

If you get it in original dub, japanese, you feel like watching a drama, to much emotional, about stupid people doing a service to save a young woman giving birth to a baby. Forget the scifi context.

But... If you are watching in Brazilian dubbing, you have to hear that bad accent of Alexandre Moreno crying as dr. Boyd. Be careful, it is hateful.

This episode 7 could be cut off and nothing would be missing at the whole story.

Sometime animation get slow and tedious... Everybody is just chatting useless speech while trapped againg at some base, alone, as all others already have flied.

Then they get runing again to other place, just as before, very easy to find a truck or new ship.

Maybe the original japaneses mangá drawing is a bit more interesting...

The visuals here are bold and interesting, a mix of traditional hand-drawn backgrounds and prop art, and stylised cell shaded CGI characters, not entirely unlike Arcane.

But not very much like it either, and this suffers badly by comparison. Bold and interesting doesn't imply success: the characterisation, clumsily keyframed facial expressions and frame rate are all sub par here - this is practically a slideshow.

The other thing that you could compare the character animation to is the Sims, and again, not particularly kindly.

The plot feels gamerish too, like watching an endless cut-scene for a 2010-era survival horror, where the unexperienced but spunky young protagonist in his exo-suit battles alien tentacle-bugs.

And that really is all we're getting here, an inexplicably hyper-militarised convict mining operation versus bad-touch space tardigrades. Nothing that we haven't done seen before - many, times - and better.

At eight 20 minutes episodes, you can rip through it quickly enough, although even at that length I found myself skipping some tedious flashbacks, and cringe inducing attempts at forcing pathos and drama into later episodes.

The plot, such as it is, reveals itself fully by episode 3, but with a whopping great contradiction in it. What we're told differs from what we've just seen, and there are constant reminders of this that make our protagonists' peril more than it needs to be.

Our main protagonist Jim doesn't have an arc so much as a flipped-switch, again in episode 3. Paired with the uninvolving animation and strictly workmanlike voice acting that quickly dissolves into the tedious anime "Oh!" and "Aaargh!", it makes it hard to take any of this seriously.

Perhaps that's not a bad thing. Sometimes you just want to watch space bugs eat faces and blow up, and you get a fair amount of that here. Not really enough to justify the tedious talky bits in between though.

Watch it, or skip it and forget it, your life won't be different either way.

I don't get why they made this into an 8 episode series. There will be no season 2, there's A LOT of filler, even in the short 20-minute episodes, and whatever air of "mistery" there is at the beginning it's gone by the third episode.

From then on it's basically a survival video game sprinkled with lots of useless, nonsensical dialogue. Half the characters are basically plot devices and mostly everthing they say is exposition.

The pacing is really, really bad. Characters stoping to have long discussions about every little thing undermines all the sense of urgency and chaos of the events going on around them. After a while you just don't care anymore, as there are no consequences from any of this.

The premise is interesting, but it gets smothered in such bad writing it's a shame.