apoc9

Let me start from my first impressions. Initially I was like "Show takes place on the bus? Don't tell me the whole story is going to take place only inside the bus?" Luckily not, but first things first. In the beginning I'm punched in my stomach with one huge info dump. I am talking about the introductions. In short time two or three dozen of characters introduce themselves and basically tell what they are about. Since I presume most of them are just wearing the red uniform it is good thing to have large cast, otherwise there won't be so much characters in a few episodes. How the hell should I remember them in that short time. They are all dead anyway. That is what I thought at first, but let me tell you contrary to the appearances the anime is not shlock horror.
The whole premise or rather its initial presentation is quite silly. It is bunch of people on tour for secret village, where people live outside of control and norms of the Japan society. Except it does not make sense. If it is so secret how would they ever get there in the first place, even more in some kind of organized trip.
When they get to the village things spin out of control. Still not that interesting, although some people considered the whole thing as comical. However to paraphrase Gordon Ramsay “You have to finish strong!” That is what this anime did in its final chapter. All things started to get lot more sense and the story was much more pulling me in, unlike in previous episodes.

The characters are bunch of more or less crazy escapists. There were some serious nut jobs to the point it was comical for viewers. While it seems like there is huge cast in fact only about a third of the characters are shown fully. The rest is more to add up to numbers, there is not much about them shown or explained. They don’t do that much for the story. Towards the end I find myself even liking some of the more prominent characters.

As for animation it is fairly ok, with some CGI, like it is usually done these days. BGM was pretty good and underlining the eerie atmosphere. OP/ED couldn’t care less.

If I didn’t finish watching this anime I would rate it much lower based on impressions from the first half. It did some serious mistakes, but finished on a positive note. The biggest problem of this anime is that the point of the story is exposed too late – viewers would gave up long before that episode. It might be better if the story did less focus on mayhem in the village and gave more exposition to individual characters.

That is my reasoning why I am going to place this story above anime series such as Erased, Grimgar and under some more interesting anime series such as Overlord, GATE (Even if both have serious flaws as well).