Review of Astra Lost in Space

There's this episode in an anime from 2012 titled Humanity has Declined where the characters are trapped inside a manga, and they have to act out the panels in order to progress through the pages, rise in the ranks full of other people in the same situation and hopefully finally break free from their predicament. Why am I telling you this? Well a certain character gets the genius idea to keep adding twist after twist at the end of each panel so the readers keep interested in what's happening. It does work for a while, but eventually people get sick of it once they realizethere's nothing of substance beyond those twists and their rank quickly drops as a result

Coincidentally, that can also be used as a perfect description for the space faring adventure, Kanata no Astra. It starts out well enough with an interesting premise as the characters have to scramble for survival, living together for months in this little ship with an ever increasing psychological toll while also exploring unknown worlds, but it quickly devolves into twist after twist each episode until it barely makes sense anymore and all we get when it's finished is a half baked ending that just immediately solves all the mess of a plot at that point and everybody lives happily ever after, since they clearly didn't have the time to deal with even one of the fifty can of worms they decided to open, most of which could be central plot lines for a single show themselves were they in more capable hands

Some say that a good hook alone doesn't make for an overall well rounded story unless it's competently written and the same principle can be applied to twists too, and their overuse as a crutch for an actual story instead of tying all the lose plot threads is a recipe for disaster. One of the worst offenders of this was probably when a certain episode ended with a big twist about their destination, with one character utterly shocked and dumbfounded, seemingly knowing as much about it as everybody else considering their dialogue, but then they proceeded to give everybody a nice expository history lesson for the crew and the audience at the start of the following episode

This could've been a very nice survival show, the habitable planet hoping was a nice idea which also doubled as a means to give some nice variety of environments and scenarios but there's no point in dwelling in what ifs, we have to work with what we got. And what did we get? An average at best anime depending on your tastes, even the planets themselves start to get real boring after the focus shifts to the "twist of the week" style of writing. The characters are a mixed bag with some having simple but consistent and relatively enjoyable personalities and others having many issues and changing at a near moment's notice because there either wasn't any time to develop them or they got hit with the twist + flashbacks treatment which I'm sure is bound to get people at the edge of their seats when it happens for the Nth time