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(I republished this review after finishing the show since I decided to give it another chance to proof my early opinions wrong. It did not.)

This show was just pure disappointment from beginning to end. The only expectation I had was "Must be decent" due to its high rating and everyone and their mother talking positively about it, but I went into this with a grain of salt from the start... and still got disappointed.

Story:
The storywriting is bad. Really bad. Nothing makes sense, or should I say no information or explaination is given for anything that happens. Not a single character is asking relevant questions ... they really should be asking at one point. No character seems to be interested in learning anything about anything.
There's absolutely zero worldbuilding. Nothing about Kafka being able to turn into the very monsters humanity fights is being explored. There's not even any people living in the cities. Why are there no people aside from the main cast on this planet? Are the Kaiju even a threat? I genuinly can't tell.

Action:
The action is... surprisingly underwhelming. It's mostly carried by cool music and shounen speeches, nothing else. It's not even close to most of the recent action anime. I had hope maybe the action will get a quality boost in the second half of the season, but sadly that wasn't the case.

Music:
The music is really good and fits the vibe and elevates the scenes well.

Characters:
Kafka (MC) is an almost middle-aged man. This offered huge potential for a mature, level-headed and cool main character for once. But Shounen animes are allergic to that, so he was turned into the most cringe, childish, dumb, unserious character I've ever come across. His tsundere side-kick Reno would have made for a WAY better protagonist than whatever Kafka is supposed to be. Every scene just hammers home how dumb Kafka is more and more. I don't even understand why Reno sticks to him, he's just Kafka's babysitter at this point. It really just comes down to "you saved my life so we're bffs now". Every remotely interesting or serious scene is immidiately ruined by Kafka's class clown personality. And aside from his Kaiju powers he's pretty much useless.

Kafka's childhood friend only exists in order for him to have a goal, because it seems he has no other goal in life but to "become so strong and badass like Mina so I can stay by her side". Mina herself is awefully bland. She's depicted as this great, strong, leader, but she doesn't really do much of anything but give people stern looks and shooting her gun once (no, sorry. Twice. She shoots it twice). She's just a plot device for Kafka, nothing more. But she must be a cool character, only cool characters have pet tigers.

I can not relate to ANY of the characters. At first they hate each other, then they get like 20 minutes of bonding, and backstory flashbacks during fights, and suddenly they're all best friends for some reason. The character's personalities aren't even consistent, or they got character development in 2 episodes. Reno started out as a tsundere, but suddenly that trait flew out the window because it wasn't necessary to the plot anymore.

I liked Reno and Soushirou the most, but that's hardly a feat when the rest of the cast is as bland as unseasoned food.

I have very mixed feelings on this show. So much so, that I'm not even sure how to rate it.
It's an anime I would have surely dropped towards the end of the 1st season, had I not watched it with a friend.

The music was really great, the humor was actually funny and the artstyle was very good. But that's it.

The story went downhill fast, everything got super repetetive, and kinda... underwhelming and predictable. I was waiting for several twists that never came.

The blonde girl and the little brother of Rayne, whose names I couldn't even remember after 2 seasons, because they were completely pointless (main) ... characters. I was waiting for them to show their strengths either in battle or as a person that puts meaning to their character's existance. Again, none of that ever came.

The very last battle was set up as this epic final battle, but it was just 95% talking and 5% underwhelmingly animated action. I think Mashle is the first anime I ever watched, that almost made me fall asleep during its action scenes and I'm not even exaggerating. So much explaining of the most basic things they did, and that after literally every 2nd move they made. The battle scenes really treated the audience like toddlers.

The magic even stopped making sense at the end, because Mash's Daddy went "Time needles" or something, just so he could have an offensive magic move even though his magic is time themed. Really now? There are so many things you could do with time magic to use it offensively, but sadly, creativity is really lacking in this show.

As a comedy show it was really good, especially the 1st season, because the way Mash was solving his problems was actually still unique and surprising, but got stale really fast. Everything else was very meh or flat out bad, which is sad, since this actually had a lot of potential.

I definitely enjoyed season 1 more.

I don't even know how to rate this.
I think this donghua was the greatest disappointment of everything I've ever watched.
Not because of some expectations getting crushed when I started - I really knew nothing about this show before I started it except for the PV - it was more the expectations I had AFTER watching the 1st episode.

If I had to give a rating to the 1st episode alone. I'd rate it a 10/10 with all honesty in my heart. It started original, had tension, very amazing fight scenes and the MC was a skilled sniper and came off as cool-headed and calculating. All ... in all it was absolutely amazing and I didn't understand how this could have such a low rating.

And then all of that just, *poof*, as if it never existed. Nothing of what happens next makes any sense, the MC's skills just don't matter anymore because he's suddenly using a knife (as a skilled sniper should, right?), only gets kicked around together with his annoying tag-along and there's an useless amount of CGI even in scenes where they're not even moving and I was wondering why they didn't just make the whole thing CGI in the first place.

All in all I felt like watching a completely different show after the 1st episode and had to drop it at the 5th because it's boring, confusing and annoying me at the same time at this point.

It IS pretty fast paced, especially the training phase, which was kinda non existant. Regardless, the movie was still close to a masterpiece to me.
Compared to japanese animes I've watched the past years, this is on a totally different level. Having watched many chinese anime until now, I got used to how fast they feel, I have barely time to read the subtitles, which I never had a problem with before. Maybe to others, this adds to the already fast paced story on some parts.

Story: 9/10 I loved the story right from the beginning. I only feel it lacks a bit of interaction between the ... characters.

Art: 10/10 What else can I say. No 5 year olds that are actually 25 and no giant, wobbly boobies.

Sound: 10/10 Apart from the amazing soundtracks, the simple sound effects they use to dramatize a scene are something that doesn't even exist in japanese anime. They also added details to small things like the sound of their armor mid battle. Simply awesome!

Character: 8/10 Like other reviews already stated, due to the fast pace it's a bit hard to get to know the characters or add any real character development. Regardless, I liked the characters and the most important characters got enough love to grow to like them.

Enjoyment: 9/10 I watched it for the action, awesome animation and badass MC. And I got action, awesome animations and a badass MC!

Overall: 9/10 Apart from a few problems the show had, I loved it. There's no such sing as a "really perfect anime" every show has it's flaws somewhere and for me the flaws in this one were a minimum.

It was refreshing to see an anime stray from the cliche all animes are filled with nowadays. Because I'm already fed up with those.

It's pretty simple, though: If you came here for action, you will like this anime. If you came here for characters, their problems and development, you probably won't. But maybe give it a try anyway.