Caution: This review contains spoilers for this predictable show. I have specifically and very clearly marked the spoiler sections there arent as many as you think only 3 paragraphs worth so you can still easily read my review and do not need to worry. As for the fans of the show enter at your own volition since you will not find this review to exalt it in any manner so to those who consider FranXX a 10/10 keep your temper in and lets begin. If youre a regular reader please carry on : FranXX was hyped a lot. And thats just the short of it it had a huge marketing campaign and had a huge amount of anticipation with people calling it the Next Evangelion or a Spiritual successor to Eva and so on and so forth. The legendary Yabuki Kentarou was signed on doing the art for the manga adaptation for this unoriginal original and as a matter of fact thats how I found out about the show in the first place and went in expecting the amazing show the marketing had me believe. Result? Well I cant surprise you since you might have seen the score I gave it. Yes. A mess. A terrible mess. To begin with the main part that is the reason fans gloss over this show the characters. They are given little to no backstories and their roles to play are very less. Squad 13 mainly served as a bumbling group of teenagers hmm why teenagers in particular? who dont know jackshit except for the so called fact that they must pilot the mechs known as FranXX and defeat these blue magma lover monsters called Klaxosaurs. Let that seep in. Why children? Most likely because they wanna appeal to the target audience of the show teenagers. Unfortunately that doesnt seem to be as fruitful as A1 and Trigger thought it would because when youve got an idiotic group of teenagers who contribute nothing to character development I dont think you end up with teenage viewers going crazy over a show. I mean yes teens in real life arent always smart but if given the chance Im sure theyd do something sensible when they need to but we dont see such a thing at all. Why? All we see is random blushes and such stuff. I mean these teens are acting like everyday teens yes thats fine but is this the premise to do so? A place where people are bombarded by the constant threat of Klaxosaurs? Kids are supposed to have fun yes but not when youre literally guarding human lives from danger. 720https://images5.alphacoders.com/896/896569.png To move away from the characters for a moment we move to another problem with the show its connection. And dont you dare justify it by telling me its an episodic anime because it sure as hell is not. In reality its just mixed up completely and had too many ideas to implement together and instead of choosing one idea to go with they probably chose all and excellently failed at all of them. Why? Poor connection. To hold up a plot you need connection FranXX didnt offer any of that at all. It just dragged on and didnt leave any mention of what happened before and most importantly WHY the situation happened before. What could possibly be the reason behind this? Simple. Bad direction. All it takes to destroy the whole hard work of a show is bad direction. In fact about 90 of the issues with the anime can be traced back to bad direction. If the show had a good director I suppose the show would have a direction to follow but this being FranXX it had to follow all the directions it could and then ended up nowhere. In the first episode I had the show at a shocking 9 and if you look at it now its fallen pretty spectacularly. This is because of the shows bad direction events were unconnected and an irritated yours truly almost smashed his screen onto the floor . Random stuff happening here with no explanation and then random stuff happening there without explanation was this anime devoid of sense or something? Because I did not find any of it anywhere. And then weve got the problem that follows that the story was unexplained. Why did this happen? Why did that happen? How did this occur? Where did this issue first occur? There were many questions asked by fans and the answer is that it was clear both studios didnt want quality they wanted the And thats me trying to be positive we got zilch as in reality but eh gotta act positive. Needless to say apart from a cliched mess of a story its disappointing in almost every other regard read on for further explanation serving as a reminder that it only takes one big mistake to spoil the whole effort put into an anime or anything for that matter. Speaking of mistakes we come to another part that had the cosplayers fan artists and others crazy the romance particularly the romance between Zero Two and Hiro. First off our two MCs. Zero Two was introduced as a waifu like character which immediately took the undeserving deconstruction tag which was ripped off from Eva surprise surprise FranXX ripped off a show while giving us another useless MC who went by the self appointed name Hiro. Their romance was unexplained until way later into the series an episode which even I liked episode 13. They were largely unexplained for most of the animes run and it was only in the first episode of the second cour episode 13 that tried to remedy this. Result? Thankfully good. Episode 13 was regarded as an excellent episode by even the harshest of critics since it explained a lot of the stuff between Hiro and Zero Two and obviously it was a flashback episode yet despite being a flashback episode it was done well surprising since this is FranXX. But the problem came afterwards after that episode was done we saw a lot of crap follow it in the form of the team getting mad at Zero Two for hurting Hiro for over dramatic effect and to make me sympathise with the characters. Why would you drag through 12 episodes just to see the one episode that seemed half decent and it goes back to its shitty formula? I loathed it even more.The episodes were cliched unconnected messes with absolutely no relevance to the plot just serving to pass time either to focus on Hiro or to make the fanboys go crazy over the fight scenes which were nothing more than one hit kills and random dashes. Moving on from there all we got were cheesy half hearted lines like I wanna be with you forever and all that teenage fantasy severely paraphrased for ease of comprehensive analysis and pointless romantic moments that dont have much to do with the plot. Why am I crushing the romance here even though Im a romance fan? Its because FranXX deployed this romance at the wrong times I cant even say Im surprised anymore at this kind of problem. Then we go to the other cast Ichigo is a character that served as a reminder about the stupidity of fanboys since her voice actor Kana Ichinose received death threats just because of her work as Ichigo. Anno would be proud. Ichigos character though wasnt fleshed out to say nothing of the rest of the cast especially Ikuno Zorome and Miku and her actions were basically Im jealous because I love him but cant reveal it to him because Im shy and that time when she DID do it it was enough to even send non romance fans into a fit because it was done in a dare I say it? slutty way cause teenagers? I do not know. Then we come to the signature part which had many people divided as well Kokoro. To delve into this horrible character we must enter minor spoiler territory so if you cant handle looking at a good character being turned into a whore please skip the marked spoiler section. 720https://images2.alphacoders.com/901/901307.png Skip this paragraph if you dont want spoilers about this side character and want the relationship as a surprise. Spoilers begin: Kokoro was paired up with Futoshi who liked Kokoro a lot but suffered from the same problem as Ichigo. However since hes male the fanboys didnt take or notice much issue perhaps also because Futoshi wasnt made as a cockblocker character and instead was of the Ill protect her than a I want him to love me instead only thing is that Kokoro turned out to betray Futoshi and instead go for an unlikely character who was largely ignored throughout the show Mitsuru. She suddenly developed feelings for him and even kissed him for no concrete reason apart from taking the show into an extremely shitty direction because guess what? She wanted a baby. Why? Freakin teenagers this is the worst way to relate to them. Then Kokoro went from a I am not in love with Futoshi but hes a kind person to an I want Mitsurus inside me. Im not even joking. This LITERALLY happened. Why am I rambling on about this? Because thats definitely not how you make a show about teenagers because thats not at all representative of the majority. Anyway then they suddenly want to get married ? and we see other crap follow as well without explanation or reason they just wanna fill time at this rate. With what? Throwing in the notion that Kokoro is pregnant later on. Teenage pregnancy a very common thing in teens nowadays amiright? Wrong. And you know what worse? The fact that the folks at FranXX.inc pulled the WORST cliche to go with this. Both of them are caught and are brainwashed and their memories are stored somewhere. If VIRM didnt want to let them regain their memories then why store them in the first place? Why not delete them into oblivion? Plot armour I say. Convenience too this makes many viewers realise that the episode was just existing to pass time and fool the viewers into thinking their time into the episode was worth it? Spoiler end This brings us on to the next point underused characters. Namely Miku Zorome and Ikuno. Not to mention Goro but he got a little bit of a focus so Ill give him a brief look later. Miku and Zorome were shown as characters who had a rivalrylove which seemed fresh and interesting but that was pulled down along with the anime because they didnt focus on these two at all. What made them attracted to each other? Why are they paired up together? These questions were never answered and I was left hanging which was disappointing since Miku apart from sharing the same hairstyle as the superstar with the same name my profile picture character to those of you nonVocaloid fans she was one of the few characters who was believable as a teenager. Many people wouldnt notice that these two werent given enough focus and that was sad because this fresh idea could be explored a lot more and I wouldnt be surprised if I found their rivalrylove better than the two main characters and dont forget I liked Miku as a character as well. Leaving us with the last two Ikuno and Goro. Ikuno was mainly used as fodder for Mitsuru to frown upon so that he could get hooked to the resident slut Kokoro I dont think I should call her that because she didnt like Futoshi but considered him kind but then Im disappointed because like Miku I liked Kokoro only that love turned to hate since FranXX ruined her and Ikuno was ignored for the rest of the anime she wasnt given lines and that one I want a baby episode scene where she DID say something it wasnt explained WHY she stepped forward and did her act. My guess is because since she didnt have any lines the show didnt want to make her look like a dumbass so they forcefully gave her lines and that was all. Then we enter spoiler territory yet again because Ikuno was given that small 5 minute focus in a later episode. 720https://images2.alphacoders.com/915/915661.jpg Minor Spoiler Begin: Since Ikuno wasnt given a love interest the folks at FranXX.inc thought its a good idea to introduce some Yuri at the worst possible time and in the worst possible way as such the result was never spoken of again which pretty much explains how the affair went. Needless to say this was a last ditch effort to save her character and it served as the final nail in the coffin for Ikuno. Minor Spoiler End We then come to the last character Goro. Apart from being mildly explored he served as the third wheelish character who was later shown as being in love with Ichigo unsurprisingly unfortunately he as mentioned wasnt explored much and so was thrown into the sidelines to focus on our main characters yet another character thrown aside who had a lot of potential to do great things in this mess of an anime. I havent spoken of any villains yet as this important role was destroyed by the Iotas who were like every other thing in the anime unexplained unwanted and irrelevant. They served as somewhat of a backstory to Zero Two despite not going into detail at all. As mentioned above there was no proper backstory to Squad 13. Some people said its because scifi shows dont need backstories. This is plain wrong because if you dont have backstories of your character there wont be any depth to them see the word depth again and imagine if theres no backstory theres no depth which means the characters are shallow and when the characters simply dont develop at all during the course of the anime you end up with flat characters who fall on their face to the plot. Why am I saying this? Hiro and the others didnt change at all mentally from the first episode to the last. Some might say Hiros infatuation with 02 makes him a developed character but his rejection of his other members in Squad 13 proves that wrong. Others say that characterisation is excused in a scifi anime. At first it seemed as a joke to me but when people seriously started talking about this as a defense I got concerned and felt I needed to clarify this. Take arguably the best scifi show as an example to that statement: SteinsGate. It definitely has development throughout the series. How? Okabe starts to realise he cant do anything and tries even harder Makise realises she cant do things alone Mayuri does more tuturus because people around her are sad or to move from the joke Mayuri realises that she needs Okabe and he needs her this is what development in a scifi is. FranXX on the other hand didnt have any development to the show its characters or anything. It felt more like characters felt less real each time they appeared and Im not talking about them being realistic and humanlike since thats not what an animes main target is everytime Im talking about them being acceptable as a character which wasnt at all seen. No characterisation is only excused in slice of life anime since were understandably looking at the lives of the characters and so theres no plot and therefore no development. FranXX isnt a slice of life its terribly weak progression proved that. 720https://images.alphacoders.com/908/908032.jpg Moving back to the MC of our wonderful series Hiro. I hadnt given him enough attention and will do so now. From the start he was unexplained. Why was he a prodigy? What was he doing before meeting Zero Two? What made him so special? To stand out from the rest of the cast you need distinctive qualities that set you apart from other characters Hiro had none of that. He was plain and boring. Many may point out that him being in love with 02 would mean that it makes him different from other MCs but thats wrong because apart from his love for 02 nothing else was brought into his character. Although towards the end it was shown that he had become selfish and cared about 02 more than his squad who cared about him it still isnt the kind of development that makes you go Oh that changed my view of him positively and if you read that line again youll probably understand why too. Then we come to the point that he named everyone else which was revealed early on. This surprisingly is a good thing I saw. He named Ichigo and named other parasites as well which gave it a childlike feeling perhaps the only successful childlike/teenage feeling that was executed properly throughout the anime bear in mind this flashback was 2 minutes long although it wasnt explained at all I still felt an iota of warmth. And nothing else I suppose. Going back to the other villains the Iotas. Since they came in at random times and with random half baked reasons unsurprisingly they served as yet another thing that was meant to be loathed in the anime. Another irritating thing is how they suddenly became buddybuddy with Hiro and team in the final arc. I suppose now that FranXX has exhausted whatever little creativity they had they wanted to end with a shounenesque everyone bands together to fight the enemy? I mean not complaining about the trope but was there any sensible stuff going on beforehand? Speaking of insane stuff going on beforehand FranXX was said to have been in a post apocalyptic world all of a sudden which we were given hints of in the beach episode for about 20 seconds and then later shown in detail I dont even know why Im so generously awarding that word when its meaning wasnt followed at all in episode 19 which to FranXXs favour was a decent episode. But until then for the first 18 episodes it remained largely unexplained and I dont think I can award a show a point for revealing something so important when its finished about 80 of its run. Not a good practice and it returns more harm than good which by now is definitely not what I need to calm myself down. Oh youth. But then wait Youth reminds me that I should yet again cover another important part about the juvenile aspect of this show. Spoiler Paragraph or Spoilergraph for the final arc below. Skip this paragraph if you dont want spoilers for the final arc. If youre okay with them then please continue : Spoiler for last arc begin: The most frustrating part of FranXX is by far the last arc. After pointless teenage melodrama the FranXX team thought of what ideas can be added to save the anime and they did what every laughable show tries to do as a last ditch effort. To take the battle into wait for it SPAAAAAACEEEEEE. Yes. FranXX pulled THAT trope. What an insult to Star Wars and Star Trek. Anyway back to this show the sudden shift in tones first a teenage melodrama then a clone war then a space war? Is this a tutorial on how NOT to make Star Wars ripoffs? and extremely convenient and unexplained reveals more on that in a bit coming out of nowhere? I dont think that makes for a coherent plot at all. Add to that another desperate added shounen trope where the enemy suddenly becomes your friend??? And he sacrifices his life for you just a while after you rescue him??? The Klaxosaur Princess was set as the antagonist at around the third quarter of the show and she suddenly joined Hiros side and sacrificed her life for him? What happened to her people the Klaxosaurs? What happened to saving the world? And then suddenly VIRM puts themselves as the villains despite the show trying to establish the Klaxosaurs as the villains and then the aforementioned Klaxosaur Princess as an antagonist? And then their boss is a Power Rangers ripoff??? What even was that last arc? The industry can do without more Dadolf Scmitlers you know Weve seen enough of this trope Like when theyre losing Papa and the others suddenly give the order to destroy Earth? Nanja sorya??? And then if you thought all this stupidity wasnt enough we suddenly see YET ANOTHER problem with the show surface Plot armour. If I hadnt explained this before FranXX suffered from yet another plot hole in the form of plot armour. The Iotas lost a few of their members but Hiro and team were left unscathed the only injury being Ikunos hair being turned white Throughout the course of the show Squad 13 was met with life or death situations but I was confused since no one died. It cant be a life or death situation if everyone survives or at least when you have so many life or death situations and no one dies even once I think thats authentically bullshit. Why fill it to the brim with Deus Ex Machina crap then? In the last 3 episodes we saw Hiro and team suddenly band together and go to space but then the pathetic dialogue in the previous episodes of the anime became even worse when theyre in space theyre going Were really in space huh? And Mitsurus reason for staying being I wanna stay because I want to? Even the dialogues took a huge hit and fell even further Add to that the pointless Mobile Suit Gundam I ripoff battle except FranXXs was much worse because everyone survived??? Not to mention Zero Two eating Hiro through her teleport to Hiro fro Earth directly in front of Hiro and she eats him and takes him to the dream world only to play hard to get? If youre not understanding at all then you have common sense because no sensible person could understand WHAT happened and WHY. Lets not add to that horrible reasons to horrible dialogues such as bringing up love when your Squadmate is suffering? And then Hiro and Zero Two immediately go leave the Solar System and the others cant tag along because its not possible? This is the limit of cliches but the studios broke it long long ago. And I want to skip over that last episode since that was the only remotely decent ? part of this arc but the means done to achieve it wasnt and I spoke enough on that... Spoiler end 720http://chinafilminsider.com/wpcontent/uploads/2018/02/1724503LatvianShowDetailHeaderDesktop2b57c7692df6e7118175020165574d09e15184506448991024x716.jpg FranXX tries to show us that adults are somewhat tyrants and displays the childrens struggle to gaining independence even though theyre perfectly fine with their lives with no issues. But you know what they say if youve got no issues you make them and thats EXACTLY what FranXX stayed true to. Trying to show us that our teenage cast is growing by acting mature with examples as wanting to have babies and doing the kitty dont search up on that last one both of which are related and were attempted by Kokoro and Mitsuru. Yet again you ask. Why? I do not know why the show did it. You cant even tell anymore who theyre trying to make the show relatable for. Then we have to look at the teenage drama as well that follows that I covered above. Spoiler Paragraph or Spoilergraph about a range of questions on things that were unanswered throughout the course of the anime below. Skip this paragraph if you dont want spoilers on these questions. If youre okay with them then as expected read on. Spoiler questions begin: FranXX as mentioned tried very very hard to be edgy by leaving out some socalled mystery feel by not answering the most crucial questions many had throughout the course of the anime. Although episode 13 answered the questions many people had in the first half there was no such plausible explanation for the second halfs stupidity. What makes me say that? We got weak explanations or no explanations. For example why was the enemy VIRM all along? What was their purpose? Why does Hiro not care about the rest of Squad 13 who hes lived with all his life and why is he so attached to Zero Two despite the above problem? Why are the problems for the characters happening? Who is to blame and why? Despite this being answered VIRM there was no proper explanation as to WHY the villains did it? What was their purpose? Why is Ichigo the leader of the group? Why is 02 not explained properly? How does she looks human and how did it happen also why does she have pink hair when she was a clone of one with white or blue hair? How are the rejected people treated? What happens to them? What about their memories? Although their memories as mentioned were stored in some place theres no explanation as to why theyre stored. Why am I asking that question? When VIRM doesnt want their puppets to regain their memory why store their memory? And how is the memory stored anyway? Why are teens chosen to pilot the FranXX? Dont tell me its because their sex organs are most prominent because the teenage years is not the age when this is so. Why are pregnant girls not able to pilot the FranXX? How did the Iotas suddenly be able to join Hiro in the last arc? Werent they broken or something? Why do Hiros group care and still chase Hiro despite him having rejected them for his one true love Zero Two? What was the bullcrap about them going to space and space being the important stuff? Like what was that cop out explanation about VIRM and the enemies being the aliens? Who and what was the Klaxosaur Princess? Who were the Klaxosaurs? No detailed explanations were given. To cover the villains one last time VIRM. We look again at the Dadolf Scmitler trope that FranXX.inc deployed. To viewers of Grancrest Senki who arent familiar with the Dadolf Scmitler trope VIRM is basically the Mage Academy for the first 20 Episodes we were focused on only one villain but suddenly that villain changes in around the 20th episode and they tell us the real villains were someone else all along? Surprising how both shows deploy the same cliche in the same episode number. Coincidence? I think not Why is this bad? This is bad because it makes the viewer question if the time they spent on the first 20 episodes even worth it. I mean if you really HAD to do this why do it so late? And instead why not just make an OVA of the last 68 episodes and treat it as the same thing? Im sure it would get a higher score from me and other disgruntled people if they did this instead because our time was wasted Spoiler questions end 720https://pm1.narvii.com/6728/90e5386006429c64a1d6082af45a181d406e3763v2hq.jpg With all thats said eagle eyed readers might have noticed that I havent trashed the art or the music. Thats because it isnt shit. And continue to find out. Since it was a collaboration project with A1 and Trigger and later Cloverworks because budget issues? many expected the art to look amazing and it did actually. They tried to make a world that looked beautiful and mostly succeeded in doing that but you cant award points to a show for looking good as with what the mainstream gaming critics like IGN often do CoD a 9/10 because it looks good? Have you even seen what theyre doing now ripping off Fortnite? so though the art looked good thanks to the colourful backgrounds and eyecatching scenery from time to time it was in vain as the show couldnt manage to utilise it well into its plot. Another thing that the show did good was the sound. Even though Ive been rightfully trashing the show left and right I have to give credit where its due FranXXs usage of synth tracks are rarely seen in anime and obviously serve for something really good in terms of listening especially when youre using headphones and not streaming the show. Then we move onto the OP/EDs selection I felt that the show went lazy and just changed the OP a bit and passed it off as an OP 2 but the EDs were great. If only FranXX used those EDs more in the second half and dont abruptly end the episode Id have a positive opinion of the show. But Im guilty of singing Torikago from the show so gotta give a point to that I guess? But oh wait they underused all the EDs anyway. Overall FranXX is a mess which was over hyped and tried its best to stay relevant by throwing in useless storylines all of which were riddled by plot holes and Deus ex machinas which were unconnected and not to mention completely unrelated events and random crap here and there from teenage drama to Star Wars to Power Rangers? MASAKA??? to remain positive towards the end I only ever found the two caretakers Hachi and Nana especially Nana interesting and likeable since they had an aura of mystery and the 30 seconds they appeared in their few episodes were all great. Miku and Goro too were characters I pretty much liked but werent explored well since they were thrown aside for Hiro and Zero Two unfortunately. If the show had good direction Im sure it would have turned out to be one of my favourite anime of all time and for many other disillusioned fansturnedcritics as well. FranXX sadly will always serve as a reminder to how one big mistake in the form of bad directing can jeopardize the whole premise of a show. Special thanks to TheCobraSlayer for proofreading the review. 1080https://images2.alphacoders.com/901/901312.png Story: 0.5 Animation: 5 Sound: 5.5 Character: 1 Enjoyment: 1.5 Overall: 2.7