In ~2008, I staying up until like midnight on Monday nights in order to watch this on the Sci Fi Channel's AniMonday block. Looking back on it now, I feel so...cheated out of the 30 minutes of sleep I could have gotten instead of this, though this obviously wasn't the only show playing on those nights. At the time, I had dial-up internet and I didn't know how to watch whatever anime I wanted, so I was limited to whatever got dubbed and made it onto TV. And this did. We were so deprived.
It's kind of hard to describe exactly why I hated this so much, because the show itself is hard to describe, but that's kind of the problem. It's hard to describe any overarching thing about it, but any individual thing isn't merely simple, but lifelessly boring. Instead of injecting any kind of humanity into those moments, it starts papering over them with incomprehensible prattle about quantum states, and only doubles down on that more and more as the show goes on. Nothing really matters. There are several versions of almost every character, and none of them is really consequential. There's a whole side plot about these two investigative characters and Haruka's father that goes almost nowhere plot-wise or thematically.
And it just goes on, and on, and on... There are many shows that deserved multiple cours. I cannot understand how or why this show, of all shows, got two.
The art style probably looks good on paper. I'd believe you if you said the concept art for this show was particularly nice. But it's so inconsistent in motion and the early digital color job flattens everything. It's so ugly most of the time.
This is one of those shows where the top reviews are so glowing because they're from shortly after the show came out and were probably written by the first wave of teenagers who used MyAnimeList. Don't believe their hype. Those people didn't have good taste yet.
Noein does not deserve a look back, even if you vaguely it from back in the day. The person who directed this also directed Escaflowne, and I strongly recommend checking that out instead if you somehow stumbled across Noein first.
