Sentan Island is caught in the middle of a warzone. Akiyuki looks like your everyday student rushing off to school when there is an air raid and the school bus he was on explodes. While trying to help a refugee he helped sneak onto the bus, he finds himself "Xam'd" - when a human is injected with a seed known as "Hiruko" transforming them into a raging creature. Nakiami, a girl who just happened to be in the area from the courier ship "Zanbani" spots him and takes him in, offering to teach him how to control the Hiruko within him. Even though he is given little hope of returning to his human life, he continues to believe he'd be able to return home to the island one day.

It has an interesting setting that kind of looks like your modern day Japan but not quite so at the same time. If you replaced the traditional buildings that sit next to modern day structures in Japan with those from a fantasy JRPG then you pretty much got the setting. Artwork looks great, action scenes are good but you'd probably expect that from a big name studio like Bones. It's not an uptight, gloomy action show despite all the conflict and everyone struggling to get through it all. Thanks to the vivid colours, beautifully drawn backgrounds and the odd joke here and there it lightens up when you least expect it.

The show kind of hits you with all sorts of mysteries right from the start and rather than let characters clear things up, you're left to piece together the shreds of info and figure them out yourself. You'd probably be compelled to watch whether Akiyuki's determination bears fruit in the end. No one on board the Zanbani pampers him despite his condition and he is made to earn his stay. You kind of keep keep watching to learn more about the world setting too, why there are factions at war and what the whole "Xam'd" thing is about.

I think the only downside is that it branches out too much towards the end of the show as it tries to cover all the different characters. That said, it's still a good show for the most part.

Out of interest, this is Masayuki Miyaji's debut as an Anime director and he was responsible for the storyboarding of many popular action shows such as Attack on Titan, Kabaneri Fortress of Steel, Durarara x2 Ketsu, Sword Art Online S2.