Explorers travel on a floating island to discover the end of the world! For some reason they bring along a bunch of kids with them.

This show should have been everything I liked about anime. An exciting, fantastic world! Adventure! Airplanes! Romance!

Instead, we got a pile of rubbish. The setting makes no sense and they do the most half-assed development ever. We never even get to meet any of the enemies they fight against, except in the last episode for no reason. Every exciting unexplored land they discover looks like a shimmering rainbow. Ooh, exciting! The creators love to trigger lots of death flags in characters with no development whatsoever to make them die tragically. It relies on the most hackneyed of tropes (You’re you, you!) as its main message. Every adult character is a complete moron. Not to imply that the children are any better.

To make matters worse, if you stop and think about it for a split second, our heroes are actually the villains. They’re invading another country with an enormous flying fortress and not bothering to even talk to the people whose land they’re invading. Then at the end of the show the main character begins a world war to get his girlfriend back.

Yeah… It feels like very little thought went into this show at all. The only reason it doesn’t get an F is because it has airplanes, and airplanes are cool. Even if for some reason these airplanes fight by having somebody sit on top with a shotgun.

• Storytelling – F – Makes no sense. Poor pacing (an entire episode devoted to cooking ramen? And then the story is never even resolved at the end).
• Voice – D – It has airplanes and rainbows.
• Characters – C – For the most part, Ka-el and Claire (the main leads) are okay. They have some decent potential for a good romance. But this is never capitalized on. And all the side characters are crap, most of whom exist solely to tragically die and then cry about it.
• Attention Grab – C – With a couple exceptions, mostly kept my attention. Although it’s more of a “what braindead thing will they do next?” kind of thing.
• Production – D – Not great.
• Overall – D

Recommendations – Simoun, Last Exile, Sky Crawlers