I think what really hurts the tone isn't that it's so out there, but because the world building is SO good early on with how it presents racism and culture in a monster society, that the later chapters dropping it in favor of increasingly sci-fi or even cliche anime tropes kills the atmosphere the early chapters worked so hard to create.
I was fascinated by the rules put in place preventing even consensual centaur riding just by the sheer weight of the history involved. It made the background of the (actually very logical) enslavement of centaurs as beasts of burden and war way more real. The utterly foreign nature of the Antarticans was interesting because seeing the effects of isolation on moral values paired with their just-really-scary appearance made for Best Girl Suu.
Basically our suspension of disbelief went from zero to one hundred in the space of a single volume, when we would have been more than happy to see this story through the lens of it's diverse and likable cast, presented as a little microcosm of a huge and unknowable world. Time travel plots don't fit the themes the series was establishing, robots and laser guns say nothing about how relationships are affected by media (like Hime's fear of Suu based on a horror movie) or how stereotypes are sometimes based in physiology ('centaurs are good at sports' being something Hime kind of subverts).
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 11:56PM