Momentary Lily

Review Title: A Visual Extravaganza That Strives for Harmony

In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, Momentary Lily combines stunning visuals with an intriguing premise, but its execution leaves much to be desired. The story follows Renge, navigating a desolate city plagued by enigmatic machines. With themes of survival and companionship, it hints at emotional depth but often gets bogged down by uneven pacing and shallow character development.

Studio GoHands brings its signature style with vibrant animations, dynamic camera work, and dazzling effects. However, these same strengths can turn into distractions, making the action chaotic and hard to follow. While the soundtrack adds atmosphere, the ... anime struggles to fully engage the viewer.

This is not a show I’d recommend finishing unless you’re deeply captivated by its visuals. However, for a casual watch to fill some downtime, Momentary Lily has enough flair to keep you entertained for a while.

🟢New anime early NO SPOILERS review
Story:
In a post-apocalyptic world where huge machines erased most of humanity, Renge Kasumi is a lone girl with no memories who's forced to wander the dead streets of a city as she tries to survive. That is until she meets a group of other 5 young girls, the girls welcome her while sharing laughs, tears and food munching. Together the six, armed up with special weapons to fight the machines, are set to move to the next location, but then...

🅾️🅿🅸🅽🅸🅾🅽:
Regardless of what you're gonna read here OR your taste is OR your feelings about this ... anime while watching it, you NEED to watch the first two episodes until the very end, after that the decision to continue watching is up to you.

In terms of format, this is an all-girls type of show, so if you like those type of shows with comedy skits like "Shuumatsu Train Doko e Iku", "Girls band cry", "K-on", "Yuru Camp" and etc, but ever thought what if those cute anime girls had huge ass weapons to fight huge ass machines, well your dream just came true.

Ok, so this is a though one. If you're not familiar with Studio GoHands, they're mostly known for successful popular adapted anime series "Seitokai Yakuindomo" and original series known as "K" or "K Project" which later was adapted to a manga as well, those two series produced many seasons, movies and OVAs. Now here's the problem, this Studio wasn't able to produce its next hit since those two. Their original story writers didn't pay out in both "W'z" and "Hand Shakers", like it did with "K". Same can be said regarding their manga adaptions. As far as their animation goes, it's S-tier animation, top in the business, the fights look like you're watching final fantasy, but what's hurting them is visually. They're adding "rainbow RTX graphic card" effect to every scene, stupid color filtering, weird view angles and spinning POV during fights which can make you nauseous with all the speed and details being thrown at you. Unfortunately even with this anime, it seems like GoHands have yet to learn from their mistakes like so many of us hoped for due to their insane animation skills...

Here's my issue, through watching the first half of the season so far, the anime didn't invest enough time in developing the story. No story-puzzle clue pieces are discovered for the viewers to piece together regarding the Machines that took over the world, what are they, why everything the way it is, what happened to the people that were erased/vanished, Main character's memory loss. It goes like this (obviously no spoilers as promised), episode 3 is about reflecting on past memories, episode 4 is about a problem between two girls, then episode 5 is about a problem between the other two girls and episode 6 is where the writer makes up a dumb "reason" for the story to make sense why the girls need to go to a pool in bikinis for insane fan service in all angles possible, and finally in episode 7 we get action and SOMETHING. So you see from that perspective, basically it was four episodes of nothing and then in episode 7 there's finally story progress. Now, as i mentioned previously, if you're into "Cute girls doing cute things" and lots of funny skits, you gonna love this anime because there's lots of it, however for me, a scene in episode 2 gave me "attack on titan" flashback, it got excited and hooked, and so i waited since episode 3, but the story never took that next step until episode 7.
I'm fine with "cute girls doing cute things", if you throw one episode like that and then go back to the story, but here it's one episode, and then another episode, and then another episode, resulting pushing the story element to the side, forgotten and making me less interested with the show. So in terms of original story, i'm not saying that by the end of the second half of the anime the story will be bad, but they doing really bad job at managing the story progression in the right order, when to do the funny/relax parts and when to do the serious parts, this studio writers just have skill issue.

At last, every girl on the team has an annoying catchphrase they don't stop repeating:
Yuri Says "Don! Don! Don!"
Renge says "Kuppo"
Hinageshi says "Buff" (she always talk gamer language and reminds me Sakura Futaba from Persona 5)
Erika says "here's wisdom from your big sister" or just repeats "big sister" a lot
Sazanka says "really=Maji, or Maji yabai, also Okie-dokie".
Ayame says "guilty" (I hate her the most, because she spams that shit the entire show, she uses that word as much as we use "the" in English, it doesn't even have context, she just randomly says it non stop, JUST SHUT THE F*** UP ALREADY PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU!)

To summarize, i'm enjoying the anime despite everything and i'm hoping the second half of the season delivers on the story, but based on what i've seen till now, it's unlikely to be a hit and Studio GoHands... shit writers, learn how to time when to go off the story and then back into it then repeat, and fix that visual, once again you have yet to learn anything from the past and it's painful for us the viewers, because in term of animations they're so good and they waste it for nothing. I'm giving it a "7" and we'll see where it'll be by the end of the season.

🔥HOT BONUSES!
1. F*** the haters, i absolutely LOVE the 60 FPS spaghetti hair movement, any VRchat players knows what i'm talking about, it's literally what it looks like after you turn the dynamic bones option on LMAO.
2. GoHands once again delivers, with their "Cockroach POV angle".
3. Half of the Voice actors cast only recently started voicing, including the one who voices Erika, that's her first recorded job. Yet here some good ones; Shion Wakayama who voices Hinageshi, is the voice behind Momo Ayase from the current new anime hit "Dan-da-Dan". Miyuri Shimabukuro is known to me at least by her role as Inca Kasugatani from "Fire force". Then you got Misaki Kuno who did Irumyuui and Faputa from "Made in Abyss", and also Hawk! the beloved pig mascot from the Seven deadly sins.
4. Don! Don! Don!

⚠️: I will edit this review at the end of the season with my final thoughts with no spoilers at my "Anime List" on my profile, i will NOT delete this early review. If you want to check the season review or other anime reviews i do, you can check it here: https://myanimelist.net/animelist/Ron014

In any season, there will inevitably be winners and losers….

And in winter 2025, one of those losers… happens to be called Momentary Lily.

Now, there are a few things wrong with this show, but let’s start off with a brief history. Studio GoHands put out some great looking promotional footage for this series that showed some high octane fighting that was pretty visually appealing. And at the time, I was skeptical of whether the series would have a good story or not.

And, as it turns out, I was right to be skeptical.

Firstly, the empty world lacks in areas where, say Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame does in ... creating a vast empty world. Rather than Eerie and forlorn, the world of Momentary Lily just feels empty. Primarily because nothing seems to break down or age due to maintenance robots that run around and clean up after every one of their battles. Honestly, that fact alone made it all feel like the setting of the series was underdeveloped and terribly artificial - as if it’s not real whatsoever. And for fiction, that’s a terrible issue to have. I’ve honestly seen terribly written Isekai series with more interesting and believable worlds than what’s presented in this. Where as the emptiness of worlds like Blame and Heavenly Delusion lend to the apocalyptic “end of days atmosphere", the world of momentary lily only really makes it seem that much less thought through.

But, were that alone the issue, this series would still survive scrutiny. The bigger issue is the downright brain rot dialogue in this series that does nothing but make it feel like a hyperactive spaz fest full of flashing lights and explosive action. Now, a series that survives on fights and animation isn’t exactly new. This season there are two that I think have survived entirely on their action sequences - Solo Leveling and Sakamoto Days. The difference between those two series and this one is that they have their focus on a small number of characters with distinctive personalities built on a bit more than a single quirk and the writing is still serviceable enough to give the series just enough substance for enjoyment. Their characters have clear boundaries between each other and can be largely distinguished from each other in terms of personality whereas Momentary Lily’s cast feels as though they all blend together into one overly quirky ball of chaos that doesn’t help the show in any way. There's no humor to the interactions, and there's nothing terribly compelling about their characters.

They're almost all too spastic and eccentric for for their own good, sometimes spouting what effectively comes across as absolute gibberish in a conversation and making it hard to even comprehend what's going on. And don't get me started on their attitude towards the world at large. The fact that they were so relaxed about everything, living life as if nothing was actually wrong with the world helped neither the characterization of the cast, nor the building of the world. People being erased from the world is treated almost like a non-issue.

So this series was ultimately just a flashy but uncompelling little project. Part of it was interesting - the almost magical girl-esque concept behind it with our all female cast and their specialized weapons with different abilities. But that’s about where my interest stops. It’s certainly a unique attempt at something new, but not a good one. It lacks any compelling characterization, narrative hooks, or intrigue with the world to really keep attention past the first episode. So it genuinely disappoints.