2014, 13 episodes:
AniDB
After civilisation is nearly destroyed by an invasion of
virus-controlled creatures, only the children born with a small dose
of the virus are an effective weapon against them. So they're paired
with adult handlers, and sent off to the fight.
This one's based on a light novel series, and it's immediately
clear that there's far more story in the original material than we're
ever going to see here. At the same time, what story we do have tends
to drag: instead of plot development, we get lots and lots and lots of
fighting. Yeah, all right, it's well-animated fighting (except for the
big creatures towards the end which are in a CG style that really
doesn't match the rest of the show), but really, how many giant
bug-creatures getting splattered by a guy with a sword does one really
need to see?
There's the usual faintly creepy subtext (all the Cursed Children, the
effective weapons against the virus-monsters, are prepubescent girls,
and rather too many of them are crushing on the hero), and some rather
blatant emotional manipulation (what's more heart-string-tugging
than one dead kid?). The mood shifts rapidly, with our hero starting
out as a lovable but hardly competent goof, but then developing a
backstory not at all consistent with that, and ending up as the
super-tough military commander of the last human stand against the
monsters. Sometimes he's crying over all the death; sometimes he sees
his fellow men pointlessly cut down, and goes out to buy beans.
There are some consistency problems, too: the Cursed Children,
humanity's last hope, are despised by the rest of humanity (why?), but
actually other weapons (whether swords in the hand of a hero, guns,
fighter jets or a Great Big Bomb) also turn out to be highly effective
in the fight.
I haven't read the light novels, but taken on its own merits this
series must be considered a failure.
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