What really upsets me about how poorly this series ended is that it started out SO strong. The first 2 episodes of this series are an entirely different beast than how it ended up. With brilliant animation, fight choreography and an interesting setting it has all the makings of what could be a classic but it is just utterly bogged down by its writing. ***Not a spoiler free review

Sirius the Jaeger is not a flawless series by any stretch of the imagination. The character designs for the vamps are hilariously on the nose and so absurdly cartoonish compared to the other more grounded designs in the series. And this over the top sensibility extends beyond just the character designs and into the plot that makes up the very fabric of the series itself. For all the subtlety the animators poured into the minutia of its smallest movements and delicate shifts in facial expressions the plot itself is just so utterly lacking in any subtlety whatsoever. With a plot absolutely riddled with clichés upon clichés the writers couldn't even be bothered to at least make it interesting; the clichés are just so cut and dry, there are absolutely no interesting motivations for the opposing party at all. It was purely Good Guys vs Bad Guys.

There are glimmers of brilliance at times especially with the first few episodes and the first arc they had which really gave me FMA vibes (in a good way) but all of that was lost as the plot progressed and it lost anything it had they made it so captivating in the first place. As beautiful as the animation was it wasn't able to save it from the bog standard "OH we gotta find this mcguffin that contains all the knowledge of the universe so we can gain eternal youth/limitless power and take over the universe" shit they've got going on. I said it reminded me of FMA but it totally failed to capture that gray morality that made fma SO strong and in the end only resembled FMA superficially.

One of the most egregious sins the series commits is by ignoring its supporting cast. The other Jaegers look like such full and dynamic characters but ultimately they just felt like set pieces that Yuliy could work around rather than integral players in the plot. They were just props. Worst of all halfway through the series the main character just buggers off on a solo mission and leaves the rest of the Jaegers behind only to replace them with some other guy that we're supposed to care about for some reason. And then to top it all off the very end of the series comes totally out of left field with this random moral that was not alluded to AT ALL or built up over the course of the series. The writing doesn't give us a reason to agree with the conclusion that it puts forward even though it had so much time to convince us of it if it actually wanted to. It was more like they realized "aw shit we gotta end it somehow and we didn't think of a real way to end it so let's just make something up and call it a day".

TL;DR: Brilliant animation, watch it for the first 2 episodes alone. But if you don't want your entire experience with this series to be soured stop watching it halfway through.