Terra Formars Episode 1 [First impression]

Here I am talking about the anime that everyone DID NOT care about at all. A sci-fi, horror, creepy show called Terra Formars. This is the first show of the fall season to premiere, and it premiered really early as some summer shows aren’t done yet. I wasn’t planning on doing a first impression of this, but I felt like why not. I didn’t put myself under Possible Bloggers for this, and I wasn’t sure if I would take this show. But my mind changed after watching this.

It’s the year 2619. The episode starts out in an underground fight arena, where our main character is introduced. His name is Akira Hizamaru. In this underground arena, plenty of rich people come to watch people kill each other for entertainment. In the back are two individuals, who are not interested in this kind of distasteful show, are more interested in observing Akira from reports they’ve gotten about him. But why? The match begins, and we see that Akira’s opponent is a bear of all things. Things go bad quick and he gets mauled by the thing, and his mind drifts off to why he’s doing this in the first place.

The reason? A girl named Yuriko. Yuriko is a girl he met as a child when she had offered him food. After that, they had become friends. Akira had even developed feelings for her. Unfortunately, Yuriko is suffering from a certain disease that is slowly killing her, and for her to survive, she needs to find an organ donor. While visiting her in the hospital, Akira tells her that they had found a possible donor. Of course, doing this procedure would cost a lot of money. From what we saw in the flashback to when these two met, we can deduce that Akira is either an orphan or just very poor. To get the money, Akira signed up to be part of underground fighting, making a deal with someone that they would operate on Yuriko when enough money is made.

With this in mind, we see a different side of Akira awaken and he kills the bear. What did he do? I HAVE NO IDEA BECAUSE CENSORSHIP. The censorship was so bad that I couldn’t even see anything. After, Akira picks a fight with the man he had made the deal with, finding out that he wasn’t going to operate on Yuriko. The man tells him he sold her to someone, and points to the two individuals from before. Akira asks them where Yuriko is, to where the man simply tells him that she died.

The man is named Komachi Shokichi, and the woman is Michelle K. Davis. They’re both from the United Nations Aeronautics and Space Administration, or for short, the U-NASA. Specifically, they’re from the Mars Exploration Team. They tell Akira that there are people “with a boiling rage” like him, and asks if he wants to save children with the same disease Yuriko had. Apparently, this disease is caused by a virus that comes from Mars and is highly infectious, and it can kill many people. In the end, Akira goes with them. We find him in a hospital bed where he had woken up from a week of sleeping after a grueling surgery. It’s a surgery to strengthen his body in preparation for Mars. We don’t know exactly what, but Akira is not a regular human so he made it out of the surgery okay. Michelle mentions she’s the same as him. We learn that the success rate for this surgery for regular humans is 36%, and then we get introduced to a group of regular people awaiting their surgery.

Characters get introduced, and Akira meets up with them and they all get aquainted. Michelle then takes this group to a room to explain the mission they would be handling on Mars. They have found an alien virus, or AE virus, on Mars. The mortality rate of people infected by it is 100%. The virus samples they find on Earth can’t be cultivated, so the team is to go to Mars to study its air, moss, sand, and water, the existence and variations of said virus, and bring back samples if necessary. Hopefully they can eradicate the virus before it’s kills all humankind. Sounds easy, right? Well, U-NASA has tried this before, but there’s one problem preventing them from coming back. Yep, here we go. Mutant cockroaches, also called terra formars. Teams have been sent before on this mission, but they were all killed by these things. Why do they kill people? From Michelle’s explanation, BECAUSE WHY NOT. She calls it a war between humans and cockroaches to be the dominant species. In the end, we find out that humans have sent organisms to Mars before humans to see how they react. They sent algae, and they also sent cockroaches. The insects evolved so they would be able to live in Mars’ harsh environment, and so they became large, bipedal, mutant killer bugs. That’s a huge problem. In the credits, we see that the group have all survived the surgeries. A year has passed, and a group of 100 members takes off for Mars.

The premise is pretty solid until you get to the cockroach part, which just makes it strange but unique. And I like that. The first episode was pretty good and I was really intrigued by it. We got into some explanations quick, though there is the question of Akira and that nonhuman side we saw from him. This was an introductory episode, but it looks like things are really going to pick up quick since they’ve already left for Mars. I can agree that maybe the pacing was a little fast, because the questions I have are how were these people picked for this mission, why do they want to put humans on Mars, what kind of person is Akira? I hope we would get some word on this, because it can be pretty confusing. As for animation, the art style is more mature. It’s kinda so-so for me. It can look good at times, and then not. There were moments where it could be lighthearted, but I know this is going to get dark real soon, and I shouldn’t get too attached to some characters because I know they’ll just get killed off. I was already sad with the whole Yuriko thing. Speaking of, I can’t say too much about characters since it was more information dump than anything. This show gave a good start, and I hope it doesn’t get ridiculous enough for me to stop watching because it seems promising. As for blogging about it, I was thinking about it and at first I wasn’t sure, but this is a very different show that I really want to talk about every week.

Possibility of watching: High

Possibility of blogging: Moderate