Studio: Liden Films
Director: Hamasaki Hiroshi (Blade and Soul, Steins;Gate)
Writer: Yasugawa Shougo (Rokujouma no Shinryakusha, Choujigen Game Neptune)
Main Cast:
Hosoya Yoshimasa as Hizamaru Akari
Kiuchi Hidenbou as Komachi Shokichi
Itou Shizuka as Michelle K. Davis
Animation: Shino Masanori (Black Lagoon, Gungrave) and Kimura Satoshi
Music: Murai Shuusei (Allison to Lillia, Gin no Saji)
The first show of the Fall 2014 season is upon me, and it’s Terraformars, a show about a bunch of humans fighting huge cockroach things (that totally don’t look like old timey racist caricatures of black people) on Mars in the far future. The reason the humans are even on Mars in the first place is that they need to get samples of a Martian virus that if left unchecked, will kill of the human population, which is on Earth. And the virus, along with the huge cockroach things, developed during the terraforming process that has turned Mars from the dead planet we see it as today, into a more hospitable place for people.
Now, with the threat posed by the human-cockroaches, this is a show that could work. All it needs is some characters for me to give a shit about. And sadly, those are in short supply. The main character, Akari, is first seen wrestling a bear to save his childhood friend from what first appears to be anime wasting disease, but turns out to be the Martian virus. He gets roped into the mission to retrieve virus samples by Shokichi and Michelle, the captain and vice-captain of the ship heading to Mars. Not a lot of effort is made to make me care about anyone, there is a line of dialogue about Shokichi having lost friends on Mars, but nothing to make him feel like a person. In fact, much of the second episode is devoted to the crew making juvenile and poorly written comments on how they want to bone each other. And since there aren’t any good characters for me to care about, I look forward to some of them to get brutally murdered.
Thankfully, I get my wish, as midway through the second episode, the giant cockroach things attack. Even heavily censored, I can see that the humans do not die cleanly. I’m pretty sure at one point, a guy’s head is ripped off with his spinal cord still attached by a giant cockroach-thing, who then proceeds to lop of heads of other crew members using the apparatus as a bludgeoning device. But, this quickly gets boring as no one important gets offed, the closest that happens is that one of the girls has a cockroach approach her and she wets herself, which absolutely had to be shown because Terraformars is classy. There are also some mentions that the officers are total badasses who can kill the cockroaches without the medicine that the normal crew need to properly fight them. Why the normal crew is not holding this medicine all the time, even in space, is a mystery to me. Though, I guess it’s so there can be a dumb action scene where a bunch of people get slaughtered. And it’s not like the action is really that good anyways, just people standing still getting killed in a spray of red. I keep waiting to see these badasses show up start kicking some cockroach ass, but I only get a few pans of dead giant cockroach bodies.
There are the two primary ways to get me to care about a show like this; pull me into the action or give me someone, anyone to care about. Terraformars fails at both of these. The funny thing is, I think this show is fixable, and it wouldn’t require that many changes. For example, in episode one, to get those superhuman powers, everyone needs to undergo some surgery that has a 70% death rate. And there are four characters who are about to get the surgery. Now, a smart show would have a couple of these characters die, so that the survivors realize how serious of a situation they have gotten themselves into. But, nope, all four survive and spend the forty day trip to Mars flirting or something before the human-cockroaches show up and start offing people.