Review of SSSS.Gridman

Just personal scratch. Advised, possible spoilers. Opinion & Informal Art: 6/10 Art was mixed. The anatomy and proportions of the human characters checked out and the non-human characters looked pretty neat too. The kaiju looked cheesy but they fit well with the style of the show. I thought the art was mixed because the quality could vary between below average and pretty good-looking. Zoomed out shots of characters looked pretty bad honestly (worse than what you'd expect is what I mean): dots for eyes, minimal detail and coloring, etc. Closeups of characters, however, looked good. There was a lot of detail in closeup shots that I appreciate. The luminescentand detailed eyes, the hair-work and facial expressions looked nice. The environmentals and supporting details looked good. Panoramic shots added a lot of atmosphere to the narrative and the fact that they looked good too is a plus. I gave this area a 6 because the clear drop in quality in often-enough select moments bothered me.

Animation 7/10
Animation was good. Action was thrilling and created hype. Character movements such as walking, running, and gestures looked believable and were fairly crisp. Impact sequences had a drop in detail but looked nice. CGI elements and sequences didn't look weird and hit their mark. There was some select-framing in anything that wasn't cgi, but it's fine. Not too many shortcuts taken such as dropping frames.

Characters: 8/10
Characters were great. The character development is what I liked most about this show. The particular events of the show somewhat make up for the lack of development and presence of some of the characters such as the Evangelion crew, Utsumi, and even Yuuta. Akane's development more than made up for my few gripes about the time spent on the rest of the cast because this show was more or less Akane's story.

Plot: 6/10
The slow and vague plot setup this show decided to go with really isn't my style when it comes to world-building and narrative but I eventually grew into and and began to appreciate it by the end. At first I was a bit annoyed, asking myself lots of questions: Who is he? Why haven't I been hinted at why Yuuta has amnesia this far into the show? Why hasn't Calibur been explained or why was just shoe'd in so nonchalantly? What's up with those giant kaiju statues? I wasn't really into how the show refused to address a lot of these questions for quite some time, but by the end the narrative direction from start to finish really played out well so I don't think of the vague startup as too much of a negative anymore.

Development: 8/10
The development was all worth it. I enjoyed the action, but I really bought Akane's development. It was really neat when events slowly lead to the shift in perspective; that the whole thing was an exercise in Akane gaining the confidence to leave her imaginary world behind and take the "first steps" towards opening that "door."

Music: 5/10
Mostly the same theme song during almost every fight. No sound design to note. Soundboard was fitting as well. OP and ED were cool. Favorite was just the main theme song which was pretty catchy.

Overall: 7/10
I'm happy that TRIGGER went with something more story-driven this time around rather than their usual shounen-esq formula. I saw a lot of nice-looking animation that I would expect from TRIGGER, but there were cases of "quality" art that bothered me. This is worth picking up for the neat narrative direction.