A few weeks ago a friend of mine dared me to embark on a dangerous mission - one which could subject me to emotional turmoil even if I emerged alive. Turns out a bunch of no-name idiots were waltzing off to Mars to gather samples and research a cure for some lethal virus, while trying not to be ripped apart by giant mutant body builders with cockroach heads.

My mission? To sit around watching these idiots pretend to actually be doing something for 13 episodes while my senses are senselessly abused! I accepted, on the condition that this unnamed friend watch “Btooom!” in exchange. After completing my mission, I can safely say I’d rather re-watch that twice over than tune in to this clueless “performance” again.

Said performance is Terra Formars; the “action” survival “horror” anime that doesn’t care about either itself or its viewers; the show that feebly pretends to offer everything while offering absolutely nothing. Well, nothing except a few ridiculous, laughably edgy “death and gore” scenes in the first few episodes, which are so over the top at times that they transcend being horrifying and become plain silly. A certain head-severing spinal cord whip comes to mind.

If you really must watch this show (and I strongly advise against it), at least make it the uncensored version, otherwise you’re stripping out what little enjoyment there is to be gained from this animated fecal matter, be it for s(c)h(l)ock factor or simply laughing at the show’s tryhard nature. But I’m sorry to say that even such ironic enjoyment from the biology-defying bloodbaths is in short supply here, since both the comical absurdity and the actual shock value quickly dissipate as such scenes get toned down after the first several episodes. This leaves the show to rely on its actual substance and merit.

Hah, I wish. Terrible Formars goes to great lengths to muck up everything it tries to accomplish (...well, “tries” is pushing it), and to even greater lengths to ensure it’s as crushingly devoid of ANY substance whatsoever as a 5-hour season can be.

Don’t be fooled by its promises of a sci-fi survival story. There isn’t one. It literally sets up the basic premise, sticks the idiots on mars and then a bunch of said idiots and some roaches drop dead with no meaningful progress in sight. Plot threads vanish as quickly as they appear to never be brought up again. None of it leads anywhere and none of it ends up mattering as far as the viewer is concerned. Even if I wanted to make this a spoiler review, I’m not even sure there’s anything I could say about the plot that could spoil the viewing… “experience”. It’s like dangling a fish hook, waiting for a bite, then immediately cutting the line - on purpose.

Rinse and repeat until the writers get bored of it and stop casting out any hooks to begin with, and you’re just left with bugs and stick figures gawking at each other, occasionally interjected by a narrator gushing long-windedly about insects, lightning, the stages of suffocation and so forth. Honestly, these science lessons to pad out the episode or try to make some one-time bug transformation ability seem meaningful were the closest things to interesting material in the entire show.

So, without any notable plot progression the show is left to leverage another strength, like a sharp script or a solid cast of characters. To be honest, the latter quality is the one single area where Terra Formars succeeds most.

Succeeds at what? Being entirely incompetent on every level!

The majority of the cast have NO defining personality. They barely qualify as one-dimensional. You could have any two of them swap places and nothing of note would change. Several of them get some lengthy, drawn-out “sad backstories”, but evidently the show forgot to make the backstories even remotely define the character, explain their personality or tie meaningfully into current events, so you’re still left with non-characters with either one or no defining personality traits!

The protagonist is driven by the loss of a loved one to fight off the roaches and gather the virus samples, which is an acceptable motivation, but like most things in the show, NOTHING comes out of this - it’s just explaining why this caricature is on the mission and leaving it at that! There’s NOTHING else that defines him. He’s so bland and unremarkable that in any other show he would feel like a one-off side character, but there’s no competition here.

There’s also a woman who’s a jerk to her lover! What a complex character! And another was a famous boxer and - whoa, look! His bug transformation involves punching things! LOOK, IT WAS RELEVANT! What a miracle. Too bad that’s about all we know. These are some of the show's "better" attempts at making a character. With most, you’d be lucky to remember any of their names.

These aren’t characters; they’re just cutouts made from tree bark! And no matter how gratuitously violent the show tries to make some of their deaths, I don’t care, because why would I? It’s just tree bark!

Even the dialogue fails to add any flavour to them. In fact, it’s all quite dull. Its serves only to either blurt out exposition, fill time in a scene, or occasionally force in some awful comic relief. Are you tired of boob or perversion jokes? Well, these are just about the least-creative, most lifeless perversion jokes I’ve ever seen, or even comedy as a whole that isn’t set in a high school club room. Not to mention that in a supposedly serious story of survival, this forced style of humour comes across as out-of-place.

Without anything of interest in the dialogue, characters, their backstories, and no plot threads that go anywhere, all of the above just comes off like awful filler in practice. Yes, the plot and characters themselves are on the level of bad filler, dragging out the show, going nowhere, lacking direction, and existing only to waste the viewer’s time between any semblance of action. For a show whose first selling point was over-the-top violence, it seems intent on diluting it as much as possible, and this problem only gets progressively worse as the show goes on. Frankly, the pacing of everything after the first third is unacceptable, and what was already at best mildly ironically amusing becomes a downright agonizing viewing experience as episode after episode goes by without an interesting moment in sight.

Unfortunately, the production also tends to fall short, so these moments of “action” that should be something to look forward to are more like drops of dirty water in a desert. But I was so dehydrated that I was willing to take anything. I cheered out loud when, after several episodes of NOTHING, there was a brief sort-of-edgy scene with some character whose name I’ve all but erased from my memory. Then it was straight back to the desert trek.

But before I veer off-course, let’s talk about the action. It’s abysmal.

Whatever definition you may have for “choreography”, it’s near-nonexistent here. Your typical “action” scene might have 10 seconds of something even within reach of being called “dynamism” (usually it’s just the "death and carnage" scenes, which, granted, tend to be well-animated when they actually happen). The rest consists of some disappointingly sluggish direct face-offs between a human and an abnormally non-intimidating (just goofy) giant CGI cockroach. Remember that boxing character? Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t buy tickets to watch him fight these roaches. The rest is a combination of more bland dialogue pretending to be discussions of strategy, some science lessons from Mr. Narrator, shounen-style filler monologues, lengthy scenes of everyone just sitting around crying or gawking (as the roaches stand around doing nothing), or frustrating interjections from yet another woe-was-me backstory to waste another two-thirds of an episode on.

And the production weaknesses don’t end there. Visually, there’s the obvious issue with the armies of CGI body-builder roaches being of poor quality. Yet somehow even when half of them are off-putting CGI, their designs just don’t look frightening enough to feel like a threat (oh, wait, that would require some decent characters to be threatened by them in the first place). Honestly, the awkward human character designs manage to be more uncanny than the dumb, goofy-looking muscle-roaches could ever hope to be. When combined with bland colour and background design, static direction, a repetitive aesthetic and unremarkable animation, there’s little left to carry the show visually.

The audio doesn’t fare any better. Aside from a passable opening, the actual soundtrack of the series is pretty poor. Not one song is either worth listening to on its own or effective in the context of the scene. At best, they add nothing, and at worst, they’re actively ill-fitting, not to mention the repetition of the few (memorable is too much credit) “recognizable” ones just serves to make the increasingly soul-numbing viewing experience even more bland. Also, the sound design is atrocious at times, with some sounds quite literally clipping whatever audio channel it was recorded on. I thought it was my headphones, but nope, it was just an oversight that the most inexperienced hobbyist sound editor could recognize and fix in seconds. Production is more complicated than that, of course, but it seems there was some "production hell" going on behind the scenes and/or a rushed schedule failing to warrant the time or money to fix all such mistakes.

With this lack of even a serviceable level of production, and with so little in the way of substance or entertainment value combined with increasingly awful pacing, Terrible Formars is a landfill's worth of garbage in almost every conceivable way. The only thing it has to define itself is a few comical death scenes with brief spikes in animation quality, but the show couldn’t even commit to that one-trick gimmick as a selling point. While there are plenty of technically “worse” pieces of media out there, those were at least memorable horror shows. The only memorable thing about this is how little it even seems to care about anything it does, and if the show doesn’t care, it's hard to care as a general viewer. It feels like an ill-informed product, and a failed one on every level.

Let me be clear that I hold no resentment to the creators of this, nor do I think this show "owes" me anything - I myself chose to sit through it on a dare after all. But I'm going to call it like it is, and with that disclaimer made, Terrible Formars is the worst kind of bad anime. There may be other more shockingly incompetent shows out there, but the experience of watching this is awful. It’s not an ironically enjoyable “so-bad-it’s-good” series, not intriguingly or bafflingly insane or stupid, not uniquely or memorably inept, lacks value as a learning experience, and isn’t even insulting or offensively terrible; at least that would be SOMETHING! This is nothing. It’s empty; pointless; a creative void in animated form. It’s atrociously-executed and amateurly-produced across the board; utterly devoid of substance, integrity, plot, proper characterization, heart, effort, or literally anything worth caring about. Even the over-the-top deaths wear off fast. I can only recommend this to masochists. Everyone else, AVOID!