With many well-established staff members such as Yasuhiro Irie acting as the show's director, and Kevin Penkin composing the soundtrack, Eden showed a lot of promise. However, coming from the newly formed Quibic Pictures studio, there are issues that detract from the strengths of Eden as a whole.

Story - 5/10

The plot of Eden centres around our main character Sara and the robots who act as her family. In the early episodes, a lot of time is spent fleshing out Sara's character as well as her robot parents, doing a good job in making you care for these characters. As the story progresses, more characters are introduced that also get similarly cohesive stories that successfully bring you into the world of Eden.

Sara's journey is a compelling one, as you discover more about what happened to other humans who lived before and how the world came to be in the state it is now. The world of Eden is built up well with flashbacks and discovery slowly allowing Sara to uncover the mystery of the current system. Despite this, many times the plot hardly progresses at all, or unexplained story elements are introduced without much explanation. This becomes a larger issue the further you get into the story, with the final episode pushing the story into a forced conflict that seems half-baked and unnecessarily action-heavy.

These major issues with the pacing of the show seem to come from the 4 episode runtime, which is not long enough for Eden to fulfil everything it set out to accomplish.

Animation - 5/10

Coming from a new studio creating their first 3D anime, I was not expecting much in the way of flashy visuals, and that is exactly what you get.

The models themselves of human characters and robots alike are fine, with a good amount of detail and pleasing design, however, there is very little in the way of expression for these characters, with the robots almost always being static textures on a model. There are also times where the movement feels stiff, being inconsistent with the sometimes great movement animation.

The lighting used for these scenes is often not good, with the characters often being incorrectly lit compared to how they should look. The lighting issues can make scenes look flat and dull, taking away from the visual experience.

Despite all of this, there are scenes where the show can look great, but these are few and far between, leaving the rest of the show with an average attempt at 3D animation with poor lighting.

Soundtrack - 8/10

The soundtrack to Eden was by far the best element of the whole show, with some beautifully composed tracks that consistently matched the mood/tone of the show.

The soundtrack does not act independently of the action on screen, instead, working in harmony with it, heightening the feelings of calm, adventure, fear and anger as they arise.

There are definite inspirations from Kevin Penkin's previous works as some instruments occasionally feel out of place for the world of Eden, however, this rarely detracts from the impact of the music on the scene.

Conclusion

Eden is a show with a good core storyline and a very good soundtrack, which stumbles when trying to best convey this to the viewer with poor pacing issues near the end and sometimes wonky animation.