The first 3 episodes? The world building, atmosphere, art. Absolutely exciting. Steampunk themes with horror, mystery, and trains in feudal Japan? It was a pitch for a home run. All main characters were likable and well rounded and sensibly designed.
Then, it got bad. Real bad. I can only assume there were problems in production and writing, because everything started falling apart quickly once the extremely over-played "well there are monsters in this world, but the real monsters are HUMANS!" Story beat reared its ugly head.
It defies belief, how "professional" writers throw away perfectly mysterious, intriguing, scary monsters as the main antagonists, and instead opt for some generic anime villains with the absolute worst writing tropes. It's all here folks: pretty male with colored hair, long flashy sword, high social status, masochist, social darwinism, manipulative, wolf in sheep's clothing. Sorry, nobody ever asked for another one of these dime-a-dozen villains. You didn't subvert expectations by changing your antagonist from horde monsters to humans, it in fact is the exact opposite.
None of the actually interesting mystery surrounding the monsters is explained. The story gets derailed, pun intended, and goes into human-vs-human conflict. Every single time we get a human-vs-monster story, it always ends up like this. No wonder people call this a rip-off "attack on titan". Except that story took a long time to make that turn, and explained everything. It was deserved.
What happened? It was just too hard to write something original for longer than 3 episodes? Had to go back to boring cliche anime themes?
And it's just the frustrating because everything else is good here, That's why it was still a 6/10. No complaints. No cringe loli, no fan service, no power fantasy, no joke characters, no bad CGI, no cheap animation. Original (though the AoT influence is obvious, it still stood well enough on it's own. Steampunk, with trains especially, is definitely not nearly overplayed compared with 98% of all the others we keep seeing).
