Qualidea Code
Genre: Action, Drama, Sci-fi
Fanservice: Beach episode, some revealing clothes
Premise: Extradimensional beings simply called "Unknowns" suddenly invade earth (and more specifically, Japan, of course). Helpless before the surprise onslaught of alien technology, the Japanese put thousands of their children into cold sleep deep underground. Unknown years later, the few surviving adults who have established a small safe zone in Southern Kanto begin to bring the children out of stasis - and find that as they are revived, each child has a unique superpower. Thus they are conscripted, and with their help, the humans start to push back and turn the tide against the Unknown agressors.
This series has a very interesting hook and a lot of potential that just got absolutely squandered. Despite a good premise and some interesting plot twists, there are way too many problems for this to be an enjoyable anime.
First and foremost, almost all the characters are irritating. They're either dysfunctionally overconfident, irretrievably stupid, or just straight up one-dimensional tropes. At no point in this series do you really develop any kind of attachment to any protagonist character. Indeed, the antagonists are actually much more interesting - but we don't even really get to meet them until the last few episodes of the series. Almost all the protagonist dialog is either cringey or insulting (to the viewer's intelligence), and too much of the plot is moved forward by stupid people doing stupid things that should have been no-brainers to NOT do.
Secondly, quite often the artwork or animation takes a huge quality dive. A lot of the artwork gets sloppy. There's tons of panned still frames and low framerate sequences. They were really trying hard to make this a series about set pieces and spectacle and combat sequences, but they really didn't put in the time or effort to wow anybody watching.
Thirdly, this series is so far up its own ass it's practically a human pretzel. It takes itself WAY too seriously and shows absolutely no self awareness or irony - it thinks it is SO COOL and wants you to see how COOL everything is and how COOL and EDGY all the teen protagonists are and it just comes off even more eye-roll inducing than trying to put up with all the worst elements of, say, the homestuck fandom. This is a great show for reminding people why nobody actually likes teenagers in real life.
It's not the worst anime I've ever watched, but it is one of the most irritating. It's way down there. There are a few interesting tidbits that could have made it a better show, but they were not leveraged and the series becomes equal parts tedious, irritating, and cringe. I recommend avoiding it.
Verdict: 1.5/5.
