REVIEW AFTER WATCHING UP TO EPISODE 8: 60/100

Contains spoilers for episode 3 and 5:

It started off so good with the first 2 episodes but i feel it keeps making decisions that are slowly ruining the series for me. The tipping point for me was the part where Arthur literally was losing because he didn't realize he was using the wrong hand. I mean that is just so stupid and immersion breaking that i can't stand it. I absolutely hate Arthur at this point which is a shame because his character design and power is pretty cool. I honestly thought he was going to be one of my favorite characters originally.

The second big thing that annoys me about the series is the fact that by episode 3 the different fire fighter companies are basically enemies to the point that they would actually attack one another in life or death scenarios. Like wtf, it doesn't really make sense at all, and to top that off our main characters are just on board for literally invading other fire departments in deadly battle.

It just doesn't seem very realistic or organic within the world they've built. I think the story would probably be a lot better if they just had a common enemy outside of the other fire departments. Or at the very least if they had implemented the conflict in a way that it felt more believable. For example, atm it seems like all other departments are bad or under suspicion of being bad from the get go. The other departments are painted in a negative light immediately when the story was in the early world building stage. Don't you think it would of been far better to actually slowly get to know these other fire departments and then suddenly have a shocking reveal later in the story that they're actually evil.

Overall, the show does little to change our preconceived conceptions of how a fire department would work in this world beyond handling the infernals. And due to this the actions taken by our group make no sense and are blow way out of proportion. You would expect them to just respond to calls to put out fires or handle infernals. Instead, we have completely weird things that make no sense happening. Example: "you work at burger king. oh your co worker left in the middle of the night, she must be being held hostage at the other burger king! quick grab your guns and crowbars, lets engage burger king in brutal combat!". When in reality you have no reason to believe she's at burger king nor in any danger so why would you take such actions. This is precisely the situation that happens in episode 5 only replace burger king with super power fire department.

The production quality is pretty high a number of times but there are also moments that really could of done with some more polish. At this point some major damage has been done to the show which will undoubtedly negatively impact the final score no matter how good the rest of the series may or may not be. Which is unfortunate because the series definitely had potential.

EDIT AFTER FINISHING SEASON 1: 65/100

After finishing season 1 my overall opinion hasn't changed much. I decided to up my score from 60 to 65. This show had so much potential great premise for world building, great character design, cool action scenes and superpowers. But it completely tarnishes all this for very lazy, unrealistic, and childish writing. The way the characters react to other characters, the world, and situations they're put in seem unrealistic, uninspired, or flat out stupid. The show does have some great action scenes but it also suffers from very poor animation for the many other aspects of the show Including even some low quality actions scenes, so your not even guaranteed to like all action scenes. IMHO It's better to have animation that is consistently above a certain level and then up the fluidity and intensity for important scenes. Instead Fire force opts more for the late naruto idea of low quality animation for as much as possible across multiple and then all budget on one scene. Sure the scene might be cool but everything inbetween is so unengaging that it's hard to watch.

The last few episodes with the main end of season encounter with main character and bad guy X was very well animated. In particular the early part of the scene where he enters the room is done in a very high quality style with great use of contrast as well as being very fluidly animated. I'm sure these scenes were the main reason I was so unimpressed with other areas of the show when it comes to animation. Unfortunately, while these were some of the best scenes of the show It ends in a way that give me little hope for season 2. The way certain powers that are discovered in the last few episodes work and how OP they are leads me to believe there will be no satisfying and believable way to continue the series without rolling our eye the entire time. And the thing is I'm usually the kind of person that will give some leniency to powers that are op and could end a fight instantly. But that's mainly due to the fact that most of those are edge case that's not immediately obvious unless you really think of it or there are other feasible counters the opponent might be able to use. It's also common when these situations happen that we already have and idea of or know of others in the world that have far stronger powers. However, in the case the powers introduced at the end of fireforce they are so OP that this seems impossible to adequately integrate into the rest of the series. The only possible way they could IMO is to introduce even more OP characters but the thing is these powers are godlike OP. If they introduce any other character capable of going toe to toe it will be up there with the the biggest eyeroll moments in anime history.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they do have a way to tie it all together in a satisfying way. But the above paragraph is only my thoughts on the last few episodes and season 2 setup. It doesn't change the fact that this season rated a 65/100 from my perspective.