It is wild that the art is soo good but the show is so bad.

Yeah, like those soft surreal fantasy landscapes are absolutely on point, and then it's like the story does everything it can to just skip past it so it can revel in this consequence-free torture and exploitation of Riko, or get hyper focused on revolting ancap frenworld monsters for an entire season. The basic concept isn't unsalvageable, but imo it would have required fixing the pacing, aging up all the characters, giving the characters actual progression both good and bad, and cutting a lot of the grossest and most clearly-the-author-is-getting-off-on-this shit.

Although even aesthetically I can't shake the feeling that it's really derivative and generic, but I can't point to what it's drawing on. Maybe just the general sort of surreal fantasy art that would make it into stuff like Heavy Metal or get used as pulp covers in the 70s and 80s.