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So season 1 is very good. The core of the show is a suspense-thriller and it executes this vision very well. There are lots of twists that genuinely got me, e.g. they would be attempting to sniff out a traitor with one obvious candidate and one improbable-seeming candidate. I would guess it would be the improbable candidate, since if the show is leaning so heavily towards the obvious one then I'd expect it to be a red herring. Turns out they were *both* wrong, and it was actually a dark-horse third candidate, explained in a way that made a lot of sense after the fact. There's several moments of this type of brilliant misdirection playing on expected tropes. Towards the end of the first season I genuinely couldn't predict where things would go, which is always a good sign in this genre.
There's also quite a bit of nuance which I appreciated. It starts out seeming like it's going to be a 1-dimensional struggle between the adults vs the kids, but it's soon revealed that everyone is playing their own game. The adults are nominally allied to each other, but are really out for themselves, and make alliances with some of the kids. The kids are mostly allied to each other but have their own side deals. It adds a lot of welcome dimensions to the struggle and makes the characters seem like real people rather than simple plot devices. There's also a fair degree of pragmatism in their plans, which I wouldn't normally expect from an anime, where they decide they can't save the youngest kids just yet.
I have a few minor quibbles. First, it's rather ludicrous that 11-year-old children are capable of doing all this, including tons of scheming and even chopping off body parts without much hesitation. I wouldn't have had to hold my suspension of disbelief so rigorously if they just made the characters the standard anime protagonist age of 16-20 years old, and nothing would have had to change that much. For the most part the characters act like this anyways, but in a few scenes the writers use their age to pretend that they're toddlers, which is quite jarring. There's also some pointless fakeout cliffhangers from episode to episode that didn't need to exist, e.g. implying characters are about to get caught where they shouldn't be, but it gets proven to be a false alarm in the first 10 seconds of the subsequent episode. These are silly and I wish they didn't exist.
Overall though, S1 gets a definite thumbs up from me.
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Then season 2 comes and bleeds out unceremoniously on the floor. Almost all of the negative reviews I've seen are mostly upset about the show not covering certain manga arcs. As an anime-only viewer, I'm fine if things need to be cut, but the end product still needs to work well, and this one just doesn't even come close.
Practically every good thing the show did in season 1 crumbles into dust in season 2. The show genre-shifts from a suspense-thriller to a generic action-adventure that's not well executed. The unfamiliar world of this show was tightly bound by the confines of the farm in season 1, which helped establish some parameters for what could reasonably happen, but once they're out in the wild it becomes clear that they're in very strange territory. At that point the suspense-thriller loses its luster because anything weird can plausibly be explained by "it's alien", and moments of tension are defused by "aliens doing alien things" that the writers could just be pulling out of their butts. After this happened a few times my interest rapidly waned.
The show has way too much lore to cram into 11 paltry episodes, and it’s clear that the creators cut far too close to the bone in which stories to keep vs exclude. The helpful aliens, Mujika and Sonju, end up being terrible characters because of this. Their backstory is left almost totally unexplained. Sonju is implied to have quite sinister motives for helping humans, but the show forgets about this and they both agree to help the humans again for no real reason. Then the commonfolk aliens decide to help the humans broadly for reasons that are barely explained, which is particularly ridiculous since it happens right after the humans commit war crimes on them. Alien society and Mujika in particular desperately needed more time to explain things. I don't think that stories need to explain every weird idiosyncracy if they're going to include aliens or demons or whatever, but there needs to be a balance since these ones ended up as little more than walking macguffins.
The nuance is stripped from the show as it becomes a basic story of good-vs-evil. At one point it starts to seem like there will be some internal dissent among the humans about the best course of action, but this is resolved in like 5 minutes. The main villain collapses after barely any resistance, and in his final monologue he implies that he was actually keeping the peace and that if the system was overthrown then bad things would be sure to happen. This is another potentially interesting plotpoint that ends up being sabotaged by time constraints, as it's shown shortly afterwards that nothing bad happened at all, therefore he was just cartoonishly evil and a stupid nihilist.
Finally, I can't really blame the show for this, but one of the major twists in season 2 (that I was already heavily suspecting) was inadvertently spoiled for me by Crunchyroll's thumbnails, so that wasn't great.
