Overview:
In the distant future, a new immortal and genderless life form called Gems populate the Earth. The 28 Gems must fight against the Moon Dwellers, who attack them regularly to abduct them and to turn them into decorations. Each Gem is assigned a role, such as a fighter or a medic.
Being only 300 years old, Phosphophyllite is the youngest of the Gems and has no assignment yet. He wants to help to fight the Moon Dwellers, but is too weak and brittle for battle. One day the master of Gems, Kongou (Adamantine), assigns him the task of creating a natural history encyclopedia.
– from MAL
Review:
From the very beginning this episode is both beautiful and interesting. The premise is odd enough that it draws you in and as the episode progresses small details about the world and the characters are introduced. Never too many that you feel you are being subjected to an information dump, but a steady trickle of ideas that mean that by the end of this first episode it feels like enough has been stated to get the story started.
While not much is known about any particular character at this point, the few we have met have been given definite personality traits that will hopefully flesh out with time. The shared desire to have a purpose in life kind of permeates all the interactions but never feels particularly heavy handed at this stage.
However, where the show shines is in its visuals. While the CG may not work for everyone and the characters move oddly at times, given they are anthropomorphized gems it actually really works and the world we’ve been introduced to is beautiful. Fight sequences are stunning and the entire thing just feels well thought out from a visual point of view.
Really glad I got to check out this episode and looking forward to the next one.
Thanks for reading.
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Thanks,
Karandi James.
This series should be promising since the manga is highly rated.
Nice to see you enjoyed! I’ve been so far absolutely amazed by this series so far, hopefully you will too after seeing episode 2.
Yay! I am so glad you enjoyed the first episode. They have done an amazing job following the first volume of the manga. My favorite character is Cinnabar but I love how sassy Phos is 🙂
Phos’ personality is quite interesting. It will be interesting to see where they go with her character.
She is hilarious in the second episode! She kinda reminds me of myself XD
This really looks amazing, but I have the same problem as Jon, it isn’t available for me either. But I will keep this one in mind though 😊
I can’t help but think of Steven Universe any time I hear the premise of this show. Any way, I really love the character designs for this, especially the hair. I sadly can’t watch it though :/ Glad to hear from so many folks that it is good though.
A shame you can’t watch it. I only got access to this because I decided to give HiDive a go and I’m not sure if I’m going to continue with that or not, but I kind of want to watch this.
Fair enough, I just can’t pick up anything like that until I’m making some money.
It is interesting that HiDive doesn’t do what most other services do with their simulcasts. They don’t make them available with ads even a week or so after release. It is an interesting choice but not one that helps people legally access anime when money is the main barrier and watching ads isn’t a problem.
Yeah, I’m not really a big fan of HiDive. They don’t have a very competitive business model at all. It was kind of dumb of them to back out of a Crunchyroll agreement for it.
The CG here was amazing. This might be the first CGI anime that actually looked good. Did you catch that they used some 2D for backgrounds and faces? That helped a lot.