Visiting space long ago was a complicated process that required years of training, lots of money, and a high chance of failure. While visiting the great dark ocean above us has become a bit easier—though still insanely expensive—The Orbital Children looks at the way we might explore space and it’s pretty cool. Watching our main cast of young teens like Touya Sagami, Hiroshi Tanegashima, Taiyo Tsukuba and Miina Misasa utilize cell phone-like gloves and androids with A.I. is like witnessing our potential come to reality. Equally, seeing how humans can become almost entirely addicted to that same tech—which is kind of happening even in our time period—scared us a bit. Nevertheless, The Orbital Children has some really intriguing gizmos and gadgets that make us hyped for our own possible future one day.

Being anime fans for a long time, we’ve seen new studios kind of struggle to make new anime look good. The Orbital Children might be from a new studio as we made note of earlier but the animation looks quite fresh and beautiful. From the strong background visuals to the eye-opening space scenes, The Orbital Children looks like it came from a veteran studio. Animation isn’t the most important element of an anime series though but we do have to applaud Production +h for doing such a phenomenal job with their entry series.

There are several main characters that make up the cast of The Orbital Children and honestly, most are kind of obnoxious. Touya is an intellectual moon-born teen who hates Earth and those who hail from it and makes it known often in the series. Taiyo is the justice-filled official from Earth whose justice is tiring to deal with. These characters have deep backgrounds and clearly have different thoughts on life, tech, and law but they end up becoming annoying with how much they proclaim these statements. You’ll hear these kids say sue him or them so often you’ll feel like you’re watching a Tik Tok video…yeah they are that annoying. They redeem themselves a bit and friendships are forged as the show progresses but we still didn’t fall in love with these characters and doubt others will.

As a space-survival story, one might expect death-defying moments and high chances of death from the harsh elements of space. The Orbital Children does have some “close calls” but rarely did we ever fear for a character or felt they wouldn’t survive. Don’t get us wrong, there are some darker moments and we won’t spoil if anyone dies or not, but this survival story has more laugh-out-loud moments as our heroes stumble into pathways and make jokes about exploding in space due to weak suits. Even when characters nearly fall into space—but are lucky to be saved by a giant crab statue—you will never be screaming or worrying about anyone. Space survival seems scary but The Orbital Children makes it seem like a video game experience and that isn’t a bad thing but does make the story feel a bit strange at times when our cast does meet some gruesome fates.