So after the uh... "experience" that was the original Azur Lane Anime, I was constantly spouting what they should be doing instead. Just have the girls do stuff. Maybe they listened, or it was already in development, but after a while came the Slow Ahead anime.

For people who don't know, Azur Lane had a few comics going, and I believe they still are. Slow Ahead was one of them, and in it was usually Z23 or Javelin doing stuff with whatever ship was relevant at the time. Another was Queen's Orders, but that's for a different review. Fact of the matter is, the comic was slice-of-life, instead of the "serious" story that the anime was trying to show.

To quickly summarize my opinions on the original anime, it felt too unfocused, with it trying to do several things it couldn't in the short span of it's runtime. For a series with over 600 characters, trying to do a story focused anime seems practically impossible to do, since, honestly, most of the characters are boiled down to a trait or two (of course, there's some of my favorites that I feel can offer a lot of interesting scenarios, like Sheffield, Kiev, or Roon).

So what makes this so good? Well, maybe not "great" but a good fit for the series? Simple. The characters just do cute things. Moe is a perfect fit for the kind of stuff that works for Azur Lane, with so many characters you can have a generally revolving cast save for the 4 starters that seem to work pretty well as a friend group, not to mention the episodes are half the length of normal episodes so they can be more creative with their ideas and not feel like the idea is being stretched too thin. Cute characters do cute things. You can't really go wrong if that's what you're in the mood for.

Now, why the score is so low for me, is a few things. One, the ever expanding cast still seems hard to keep up with. New Jersey or several of the Prio ships never make an appearance, and while the background is full of several different characters and its a lot less forced feeling, it still feels under utilized. Two, I'm not exactly all that into moe. Either the way the anime portrays it is just underwhelming or not as fun as I would like it to be, or something else.

Another thing is the fanservice. If you played Azur Lane, you know that the ships in that game are carrying milk trucks on their chest. One one hand it makes a lot of the characters feel rather samey, on the other, is a giant tit. The anime is not shy whatsoever about accentuating the huge chest of the shipgirls in the anime, in fact, the last episode is just Laffey sleeping on their boobs. While I like tits, there feels like a severe lack of other kinds of fanservice present that the game also has.

They're coming out with a second season sometime in the near future, and for what it is, Slow Ahead is a decent enough anime and a perfect formula for one of my favorite gacha games. Of course, if they can figure out how to do stuff with the Sirens and not come off as ungodly confusing, that would be fun to see, as well.