First of starting this year (and season) is the anticipated cute girls doing cute things going south pole. Yes you read that right. Anime has once again vested us with cute girls in *insert activity in here * to add in the endless list of SoL moe blob to once again give our otaku viewers with cute girls to fap adore into. Or does it?

To give you a background, here is an excerpt from Anime News Network

A Place Further Than the Universe centers on high school girls going to the South Pole. The project will reunite staff from No Game, No Life: Atsuko Ishizuka is directing the series and Jukki Hanada is writing the script. Takahiro Yoshimatsu (Hunter × Hunter 2011, Trigun) is designing the characters. Kenji Nakamoto is producing and Madhouse is animating the series.

So why was it anticipated?

• Just as written above, the team is composed of staffs from the eye inducing, mind boggling, No Game No Life.
• Aside from that we also have the main cast which are bunch of big names in the seiyuu industry namely Hanazawa Kana, Iguchi Yuka, Inose Minori, Hayami Saori

So how was it?
I say that it was Really Good. Although the first part was kind of cliche, the second half gave us clear goal, something that we are gonna expect in the future. Aside from this, we have the constant(and clean) animation quality that gave a grounded look similar to Tsuki ga Kirei(impurities and 3D puppets aside).

I wanna make this spoiler-free so:
I recommend this one, giving it an Excellent overall score.

p.s. I always rate my anime based on 3.5 things = Direction + Animation + Soundtrack + (bias/2)