This Ugly Yet Beautiful World

Synopsis:

Takeru Takemoto is your typical teenage slacker. He goes to school, works for his uncle and just takes every day as it comes not expecting anything out of the ordinary... he's even grown immune to his cousin, Mari Nishino, constantly nagging him all the time. Takeru has grown accustomed to his simplistic lifestyle. But things are about to change when one evening while giving his friend, Ryo Ninomiya, a ride home on his motorcycle the both of them notice a bizarre light that descends from the sky into the forest. The curious teenagers decide to investigate the strange phenomenon and happen upon a young girl stuck in a tree where the beam of light had landed. Takeru helps her down and she is grateful for his help but ends up passing out, not knowing who she is or where she came from he decides to give her a name... Hikari, meaning 'light'. However, while Takeru is helping Hikari on her quest for identity he also learns that the mysterious girl that finds life on Earth to be such a beautiful thing also intends to destroy it...


Reviewer: Endosanity
Total Episodes: 12

Review:

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for the usual 'alien babe comes to Earth and falls in love with the average schmoe' type of scenario in an anime series. But the thing with This Ugly Yet Beautiful World is that after the first couple episodes things tend to stall. That intergalactic romance that most of us are looking for doesn't go anywhere and the entire series as a whole just seems to goof-off with things like 'space girl gets dressed' 'space girl goes to school' 'everyone goes to the beach' and the ever popular 'look, a hot spring in the middle of nowhere!' and accompany that with an inordinate amount of facial exaggerations may have you questioning yourself if you even want to continue the series. While all this is going on the relation between Takeru and Hikari has little to no progression which may have you yelling at your TV "For cryin' out loud... kiss her!!"

While this is going on everyone is attacked by giant monsters every now and then that are bent on destroying Hikari but oddly enough, Takeru can transform into a supernatural being that looks something like an abandoned video game mascot that quickly disposes of any monster. However, why this happens isn't explained very well and just when the series is about to end it throws some heavy drama your way and tries to explain everything within the last two episodes and it feels extremely rushed leaving you with an ending that is beyond unsatisfactory.

The animation is about average and the plot had some really great potential but it just didn't go anywhere. Combine this with some poor character depth that just didn't make a whole lot of sense when tied to the main plot and you've got a series that I really can't recommend even with it's short 12 episode span. There are a great many other series that share this same plotline that tell a much better story.

This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (opening)

Recommendation: |Low|