Review of Astra Lost in Space

I can't recall the last time I saw an anime with as inconsistent writing quality as Kanata no Astra. I swear, this anime flip-flops between being really cool and being downright stupid every five minutes. It makes for a very strange viewer experience but if nothing else it sure keeps you curious. I'll put it this way: the actual premise and setting of Kanata no Astra is really intriguing. Space anime that aren't mecha are rare enough to begin with, but to on top of that make it a sort of survival story with a great deal of exploration of the unknown celestial bodies of spaceis a great combination. You can also definitely tell that the author had a clear idea of how the story would finish before he started writing it, and as a result the overarching main mysteries of it all are quite interesting and a bit surprising as well. You'll be able to guess some of it but certainly not all of it, and those surprises might just be all you need to make it a worthwhile viewer experience.

But on the other hand, where Kanata no Astra really suffers is more in the details of it all. Anyone that actually pays attention will notice lots and lots of minor things throughout the story that either just plain don't make sense or feel way too dependent on random coincidences. For starters there are the planets that the characters end up visiting throughout the series which somehow all end up feeling about as one-dimensional as the procedurally generated ones in No Man's Sky. It's all one big biome with an ecosystem that is seemingly very small but still filled with nothing but over-the-top fantastical organisms, not to mention they're still conveniently edible for humans (not to mention the device that measures the level of organism edibility). Then there's the pacing which feels very jumpy considering that there are several weeks in-between every planetary stop for our main characters, yet they seem to always pass by in a breeze as if nothing of note happened meanwhile, even if some massive plot point had just been brought up in the past episode. It's not like the travel time is the same as going through a loading screen in a video game but it often feels like the plot treats it as one. It just doesn't really make much sense.

Sometimes the author does try to come up with an explanation to make an otherwise one-in-a-million coincidence plausible, but it still often ends up feeling rather forced. For example there's one episode where he clearly wanted the main characters to randomly come across a certain object on a planet they were visiting, so thus naturally on this particular planet it just so happened that only a very thin strip of land around the equator was actually habitable, and it just so happened that on a certain part of that strip there was a bunch of hazards which could cause you to crash your ship, and it just so happened that the characters not only do so but then also end up disembarking and walking to the exact they needed to find the object in question... etcetera. Like it's not illogical but it's just layered coincidences upon coincidences to force the plot in a specific direction rather than feeling like an organic universe and as a result it just doesn't come across as natural at all. Now the mysteries in Astra that are more closely tied to the main plot are eventually explained further down the line, albeit some in more satisfactory ways than others, but again it's the details along the road that are not really properly addressed.

The characters themselves are also a bit of a strange bunch. Some of them are supposed to be geniuses but sometimes they end up doing some really stupid decisions anyway. But either way I still consider them an enjoyable group in the context they're presented, and when all is said and done and you know the truth behind their respective pasts, it definitely gives them a better outlook than it does at first.

At the end of the day, the idea of exploring the unknown in space has always excited me and honestly that's still the main reason why I enjoyed this anime despite everything. For the most part, Kanata no Astra doesn't have the best writing and there's no way around that fact, but it still has its moments where it shines. More importantly though, in the end I'm not sure it really matters. Yes, it could potentially have been a really great anime if it had been better researched and polished, but it is still an enjoyable anime in a very unusual setting and that also has a proper conclusion. That's a lot more than can be said for most anime. I think the best thing you can do is to simply try to not take it more seriously than necessary because if you can look past all the triggering little details spread out throughout it then you should have a much better viewing experience.