I tried to watch this years ago when I was properly into anime, and I hated the art style and couldn't get past it. Saw a bit of a YouTube video last night and wanted to give it another try. Very glad I did; I loved it. The scope of the story is incredible. I went from "how is this two hours long?!" to "how is this only two hours long?!" in about 45 minutes.

The pacing is pretty all-over-the-place and a lot of the necessary backstory seems to have been inserted as an afterthought towards the end, which makes the last 20 minutes a bit chaotic. I bet Netflix are dying to get their hands on this to make it into 5 seasons of forgettable crap.

The sound direction is incredible as well. I'm a sucker for a good score and you don't often see something so grandiose in animation like this.

If you don't like anime, you're not going to like it. I think it probably invented, or at least popularised, a lot of the genre tropes that annoy people about anime (the last 15 minutes is basically every character screaming AKIRAAAAA TETSUOOOOO KANEDAAAA which even irritated me!). But if you're into anime, and you haven't seen it (who even is that, at this point?!); give it a try.