Sound of the Sky

Sound of the Sky was by far one of the largest disappoints that I’ve watched recently. They attempted to combine a cute girls doing cute things show, alongside a show about music, alongside a war drama and failed in absolutely every aspect.
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Story
The general overall plot and story of this show both exists but also kinda doesn’t. For the first couple episodes you are watching the new girl Kanata try to learn to play trumpet and fit in with the rest of the group. Then it kinda meanders for a while exploring various character backgrounds. And trying to play catch up to explain some stuff. And suddenly an antagonist is introduced they fight, and it is over. They didn’t merge together the various aspects of this show well at all. This show feels like they wrote a story that would cover 2+ seasons or a dozen light novels, and then realized they had to cut to back to 12 episodes.

Instead of trying to do everything, stick with just a single subject. Produce a high-quality war drama about these young girls trying to survive during the middle of a terrible war. Or put them in a military academy and have them learn various skills while safe in school while training to leave and eventually fight the war. Maybe have this be a story being told by somebody as a grandmother to their kids, about their time in the past and how things got resolved, while also not being super dark because it is being told to her young grandkids. Literally anything would have worked as a better story than what we got.
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Million Questions
By far though, outside of the story my largest issue with this show is the lore and history and how little sense anything makes. You are expecting me to get attached to this world that literally makes no sense on a progression scale at all. You are showing Armies marching by foot for miles carrying hunting rifles. Alongside walking tanks with advanced technology inside of them. You have people trained to send messages via trumpet for some reason, even though using a trumpet to send messages on a modern battlefield would literally be the worst method of communication possible outside of maybe carrier pigeon. You have the technology to maintain and build walking tanks but can’t rebuild an old fashion phone network or at minimum telegraph network.

Your genius mechanic can rebuild a half broken ancient technology tank using holo-screens. Which would require advanced computer systems to run and balance. But she can’t figure out how to wire the telephone to a speaker system so somebody doesn’t need to always be near the phone. We aren’t talking about super advanced stuff here, but rather basic technology that doesn’t require sophisticated parts to build but does have the tools and parts to rebuild that tank.

Education has shown to essentially be non-existent. But education is a requirement to run any sort of successful empire, and to fight a long-term war against an enemy. Because if your soldier doesn’t know how to read the map they will walk into an ambush or get lost. On the other hand, it seems certain people did get a decent education in some respects, but never really explains how this happens or who gets educated. IDK, more stuff that I wanted explained they just completely ignored.

Fuel is a constant question I had throughout this show. You show motorcycles and cars and tanks, but never show a tanker truck, or fuel tank, or any kind of fuel supply. So how are all these vehicles being powered, I have to assume it must be a futuristic technology in that case. But that just raises the question of if you can maintain that technology why you are not reproducing it for other uses.

How about how this town they live next to survives at all. They don’t seem to be a farming village because I don’t see miles of fields. They are at the edge of nowhere, so they aren’t a trading village. They don’t have some sort of major education center to attraction money and people. The only thing I saw was the glass factory, but given they seem to produce low numbers of glass by hand for some reason, I don’t see how that could support a village of that size.

Also where is this village located at? They had to deal with a tsunami that suddenly shows up and creates drama. But they are surrounded by high altitude mountains that have snow year-round, and get heavy snow fall in the winter. Have an endless desert close by the town. A river that heads by the town and a small road. But I don’t remember ever seeing a large ocean. I’m not a master at geography but I don’t understand how their location could possible be hit by anything remotely resembling a tsunami. They should have replaced that tsunami with a bad winter snowstorm, and it would have worked much better.

How about questioning the current war that is ongoing, or in long term cease-fire? I don’t know anything about these two countries who are currently fighting or what they are fighting over. Where are they located in the world? Or how did a fairy tale style ending with the war just stopping happen because of a single marriage. Why bother with the marriage angle if the emperor just lets the new wife leave and doesn’t keep her as essentially a political prisoner. If he doesn’t care about her, and she isn’t a political prisoner why was a war occurring and not solved by just talking. Guess they weren’t really fighting a war in that case, I guess.

Final major question that kept bugging me is what happened to this world? Like they show a single flashback to fighting some giant creature at some point in time. They show this creatures skeleton in the water. And given how the world is destroyed I guess they lost the war to these creatures. But what are they, how did they fight and destroy the world? And what happened to them now, did we win against them and kill them off? Did they just decide it wasn’t worth the effort and left? You can’t just destroy the world and then completely ignore all the questions that comes from that destruction event. Even a 2-sentence throwaway line would be better than what we got of nothing.
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Characters
In general, I was okay with the characters, but feel like they didn’t really change much. They warmed up to each other and got to be better friends. Learned some new skills and respected each other but didn’t change very much. Not as much as I would expect from a group working in the army trying to survive this war. They never suffer any lose or harm, nobody gets permanently injured. In a story set during a war I expect more character building to happen because of that war.

Sure, we do get some, some of the characters have tragic backstories that we learn about. And reasons for being located at this remote outpost. But we are just learning about their past not how they are growing while we are with them.
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Visuals
Well it was an A-1 Pictures production, so it looked pretty good. Don’t think it was amazing, didn’t have any shots that will make to go back and re-watch just for it. But wasn’t anything aggressively bad or distracting. Not really sure what was going on with the hyper-stylized OP with the girls as like old roman goddesses. Felt super strange and out of place.
#Sound
While the music and sound of the show didn’t do anything for me. It wasn’t a low point for me. It had some pretty good music and voice acting. I really liked the different language completely for the foreign soldier it sounded pretty good and was a nice change to show the differences between the two groups.
#Overall
This is a review I feel a bunch of people will dislike judging by previous reviews and the score of the show. But I just couldn’t enjoy it at all. They didn’t stick with a single genre and instead tried to do multiple ones together. In a way that didn’t work at all, unlike some other shows that did it a 1000x better. It felt rushed and disconnected, like they had too much story and not enough episodes. So, they just cut them together to show their favorite moments and then forgot they only had 2 episodes to finish the show. And the lore of the world makes so little sense it completely took me out of so many moments. Overall, I just do not see what is amazing about this show compared to other shows of similar ideas with young girls in a war of some kind.