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Animation was good. Characters left something to be desired. Despite supposedly missing an emotion, nothing comes of this premise and the characters all fall flat as typical anime tropes with nothing new as a result. Animation was on the same level as the Spider-verse films with spectacular fights and a neat art direction. Story was overall confusing, I feel like the episodes were written out of order and to supplement this, the writers came up with the excuse that "the universe had to correct itself." The 3D people added nothing to the overall plot, could have been removed entirely in favor of going into more ... detail about the characters we're supposed to be rooting for, or they even could have just dedicated a single episode to the 3D people. Perfectly fine but I'm not watching it again unless it's gonna be watching strictly the fight scenes.

Studio Trigger has a bad habit at cutting good shows short and dragging out finished shows for longer than they should be. Darling in the Franxx is a prime example of that problem. While Studio Trigger has other wonderful shows that could have been made even better with even just 5 more episodes, such as Kiznaiver and Brand New Animal, Darling in the Franxx is the one that they chose to elongate to 24 episodes which has always confused me. Darling in the Franxx, in all honesty, should have been around the length of FLCL. Everything that you need to know about the world is ... decently set up in 6 episodes and everything after that 6 episode mark really just goes to ruin all of the world and character building done up to that point.

Let me elaborate: Darling in the Franxx was not a show that needed answers. One key component of storytelling is that sometimes, in order to make a story better, you should show and not tell. Darling in the Franxx did this wonderfully for the first 6 episodes. There was enough said and enough left up to the viewers interpretations, and had they stopped it there, I am of the firm belief that Darling would be able to rival FLCL as this "coming of age" metaphor. However, someone in the writing room didn't know when to quit, and at some point they must have replaced all of their writers with animators because that's their biggest fallback. However, unlike in other Trigger shows, I don't think this works nearly as well because by this point, you could care less about what's going on in the background or the characters because instead of using their extra 12 episodes to build characters, they rush all of these things in the last 5 so you can watch some melodrama about 2 of the kids from the plantation getting married and how that's "against the law" for reasons that we may never get a good explanation for. I say good explanation because the explanation they give for shutting this down is... mediocre.

Really this all comes to a head when the worldbuilding takes a turn for the worse, and you learn that, spoiler alert, Zero Two is a dinosaur from the blue enemies in the show. This itself could have been a plot point. But to get to this existing, they jumped through so many leaps and bounds to make it happen. In one of the final episodes, they explain that this entire plot happened because some old dude couldn't get over wanting to get with the alien dinosaur princess- I'm not kidding. The whole episode that revolves around him usually has the same 2 lines on repeat- not kidding about this either. Dr. Franxx, or whatever his name was, I can't care enough-, says "I'm an athiest, I don't believe in god," and "klaxosaur princess..." It just isn't good. If this was the writer's original intention, that's cool and dandy. But in a show who has a plot that would better to be left up to interpretation, every episode past 6 feels like the sequels to FLCL: unnecessary and ultimately serves to make more money because Zero Two is one of the most iconic anime girls ever at this point.

The reason I don't rate this a 4 or below though is because despite these flaws, I couldn't help but enjoy it. That isn't to say that I think my criticisms are invalid- I believe my criticisms are very much valid and could have made this show a lot better. But that being said, the animation is engaging and if I want to get buzzed or something, it's something nice you can put on as background noise or visuals. I guess in that regard it may be a nostalgia thing seeing as I watched this entire show off my ass with friends in high school. But even still, in recent years, I have failed to find that same enjoyment with the show twice, making me believe that you weren't really supposed to think about it when everything's all said and done. After getting more invested into Trigger shows, it really shows that this one is unfortunately at the bottom of the barrel, burdened by the extra 12 episode run that it received. Whereas Trigger shows like Kiznaiver and Brand New Animal leave you wanting more, Darling in the Franxx is a show that leaves you wanting less. In releasing Darling in the Franxx, Trigger has shown that they don't know the difference between giving a show a 12 episode run despite it needing 24 episodes, or giving a 6 episode show 24 and 18 of those episodes just being little nothings.

While doing some research for this review, I did find out that most of Trigger pulled out for the second half of the show in order to work on SSSS Gridman, one of the few Trigger shows I feel like feels comfortable in its 12 episode runtime. I guess in order to fuel one success, some sacrifices had to be made, I'm just royally upset that out of all the trigger shows, it was Darling in the Franxx that they had messed up. Darling in the Franxx had the potential to be a new age classic, but unfortunately, it falls flat before it even finished its first 12 episodes. All in all, if you like bright colors and don't care about the story of a show, Darling in the Franxx might be worth investing your time in. If you like Zero Two, you'll probably love the first 3 episodes and that might carry you for the rest of the show. I don't really know. Characters aren't that compelling, art is beautiful, the music's pretty good too. It could be enjoyable depending on your tastes, just don't expect too much from the story, and I'd even say prepare to watch it crumble in on itself in the final moments. Overall, if I didn't have any nostalgia for this show, I'd give it a 4/10, but dammit I still come back finding stuff to love. Not gonna let that get in the way of the truth though. I think Darling in the Franxx is a good 6/10.