Verdict: celestial setting with infernal plotwork
Well, I wanted to like this one. Quite a bit, actually. And looking at the paper facts, chances were looking good. After all, a space station under siege from terrorists sure is not a bad theatrical stage to begin with. Now add a highly detailed eroge charadesign and some ecchi to the mix and you'll also have something for the visual end of the deal.
Unfortunately, that was pretty much where the goodness stopped...
Animation:
The designs are really splendid if (and only if) you generally like hgame designs. The bodylines, especially the legs-in-stockings, are a feast and the girls' facial designs are among the cutest that I've seen in a long while. But (unlike an hgame) an anime can't live on a great design alone - it requires animation. And to get those detailed charas into motion apparently cost more money than they had. In other words, animation fluidity is visibly subpar and you'll witness plenty of lowcost maneuvers. I won't even comment on the infernal CG here...
Sound:
Op and Ed are disposable trance-ish J-Pop shells that will vanish from your memory as soon as the last note has faded. The background score is out-of-the-box but, admittedly, gets the job done most of the time.
Most of the voices are ok, although it has to be said that the girls all get a high moe-factor (soft, high pitched and emphasized) which will be distracting for some. I say 'most' because I get goosebumbs every time I hear Nanami talk... remembering that this one hails from an hgame and knowing that she is one of "the" charas there.
Story:
Although the initial plot premise isn't half bad, it soon becomes blatantly apparent that Soul Link can't decide on a genre to use it for. Namely, it hops from one scenario to the next about every 3-4 episodes. What starts out as a ecchi space-moe tale soon leaps into a "Die Hard"-ish siege action phase, only to turn into cheap B-horror setting shortly after... which, in turn, is dropped for a pseudo-philosphical finale. Finally, add the fact that the plot repeatedly either relies on predictable twists or on totally cheesy/alien turns of events and you'll understand why the plotwork can't help the overall score, either.
Characters:
"Beauty is only skin-deep"... describes the situation rather nicely. The charas may look great, but most behavior profiles are one-dimensional and fuzzy. Well, granted, SoulLink clearly has too many of them (see below). The girls more or less all act alike, both in relaxed and in distressed scenes and each of them gets their turn to try-to-be-heroic only to be stopped by one of the males.
Concerning those, SoulLink features at least one memorable male chara (Shuhei) - but it needs to be said that he's only memorable because he is molded to be the single most perfect male in anime history. He is charismatic, far-sighted, calm, courageous , super-intelligent and heroic... to the point of being plain hilarious. He is fun to watch though, in a "McGuyver" kind of way. :D
Finishing Line:
Know that I'd love to say something redeeming about "wasted potential" at this point - I really wanted to like SoulLink, after all - but alas, I can't. Since SoulLink takes any initial potential it might have had, puts it under the saddle, and then merrily rides the horse of mediocrity from here to the demiplane of Limbo and back... until that potential has turned into some gooey brown matter, not entirely unlike what you might find way back in your fridge after a two-months holiday.
Anyway, the thing that finally broke SL's back would be the chara count. Had they cut the cast in half they might have ended up with a good/average shallow Moe space tale, but somehow the directors were obsessed to get every chara from the game into the anime - which has to be a bad move in a 12ep series.
Take the girls, for example: although each has her own, sufficiently nice+touching backstory, these stories somehow feel just cheesy if they are fired off in super-quick succession. In other words, after only ~20min of total screentime per girl, you are buried under her respective over-dramatic backstory. It's no surprise that this doesn't really work on the emotional level. Of course the fact that most of the five male protagonists have their own dramatic backgrounds too won't help, either.
And thus, Soul Link ends up as a beautiful yet fuzzy ecchi-moe romp that first vainly tries to pose as an action-horror title, then soon fails to do so because of substandard plotwork - and then finally gets overrun by too many tear-jerking backstories in too little time.
...but yes, the girls looks great. Definitely. Actually, if it wasn't for the fact that the image on the screen looked great every time I had hit the 'pause' button, I probably would have given up on this one halfway. -_-
