This anime is my worst nightmare.
A long time ago, the battleships of all the major factions fought to destroy the Sirens, however a rift develops splitting the factions into two alliances, Azur Lane and Red Axis, among the conflict, Sakura Empire secretly develops a new weapon using siren technology, the conflict becoming ever more complicated and the ace of Azur Lane Enterprise going through a journey of self reflection, the battleships may need more to stop this new threat.
This is my first experience of the so called waifu simulator, usually combining anime girls with battleships or similar, having them battle avoids the label of them just being eye candy and the all female cast zero males dynamic avoids the male gaze accusation; but it's still not going to make for a convincing story.
The main problem is the cast is so bloated that it's difficult to focus on any aspect of the plot when every group of characters fights for attention, then you got Enterprise who speaks the same tired words all the time to really bring the mood down especially when there are so many scenes where it's just the cast having fun, the Sakura Empire doesn't fair any better in this regard.
It's my worst nightmare as a writer as an over bloated cast can lead to an early collapse of the story. At least the British forces were given great designs.
The dub has the quirks of using accents to identify who is on what side which can either be fun or distracting but then again full Japanese can make it even worse for the cast to stand out as many voices will be similar and overlap one another.
Final Verdict: This genre never does well in the story department and never escapes the realm of being a glorified game of top trumps, no matter which medium it's presented in.
