Overview:
The distant future: Humanity established the mobile fort city, Plantation, upon the ruined wasteland. Within the city were pilot quarters, Mistilteinn, otherwise known as the “Birdcage.” That is where the children live. Their only mission in life was the fight. Their enemies are the mysterious giant organisms known as Kyoryu. The children operate robots known as FRANXX in order to face these still unseen enemies.
– From Crunchyroll
Review:
Well DARLING in the FRANXX doesn’t really do subtle and it isn’t really trying to hide the many other shows that have clearly had an influence. Yet being heavily influenced by predecessors isn’t so much an issue if you can still tell a decent story and the set up in this first episode is decent enough. Though the pair symbolism with first birds and then flowers really was a little bit excessive and hammered over and over as if the audience was likely to forget it.
While I’m not totally sold on the look of the characters here, overall it is pleasant enough to look at and the enemy and robots kind of look cool.
And of course the main character, Hiro has failed at the start of the series and is about to leave when all of this happens. The plot here is pretty straight forward and I’m pretty sure most people could have written out the events of this episode without a lot of prompting. Again, predictability isn’t that much of an issue. The execution is done well enough and the pace of this episode works well. There’s not much to surprise you but all the elements of a reasonable story are here and I’m actually a little interested in the two leads because while we’ve seen both these types before they managed to pull it off fairly well here.
So I’m adding this to my watch list. It isn’t my favourite genre or anything like that but I haven’t watched a mecha since Iron Blooded Orphans so I was probably ready for another series to come along.
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Thanks,
Karandi James.
I love Mecha shows (don’t know if I ever even said thous, but it’s my favorite anime genre next to horror), and I agree with what you wrote. It doesn’t quite reinvent the genre, but it’s so far a pretty good series, with very cool enemies and cool robots. And that’s what I usually care about when it comes to Mecha anime 😊
I’m not much for mecha anime but if the show can get to care about the characters I’ll get onboard and there have been a few mecha series that have really been highly enjoyable. I’m kind of hoping the do something with the characters because they worked well enough in this first episode and they certainly have potential.
Hmm, you might like Macross Frontier a lot then. It’s kind of a reboot for the Macross saga, and it had really memorable characters (not to mention beautiful music). I think (of course I am assuming here), that they will continue with the characters a lot, as they seem to be very important to the story 😊😊