I don't know why I was expecting this to be more "normal", for want of a better word, but here we are.
As a visual work of art-in-motion, it's great. As a sci-fi work that swings for the conceptual fences, it's great. The character story really has trouble landing the hits, though.
Like, it keeps hanging emotional climaxes on relationships barely or only just set up, instead of the ones it's actually been developing for a while (to say nothing of the iffy nature of some of those, although I feel like the discussion around that is incomplete without mention of the tokusatsu inspirations in there. I have got to know Anno's Ultraman Leo opinions). When it's trying to tell a love story, it tends to fall flat; but when it goes "hey time dilation would make space warfare really hard to cope with [and this is what being left behind by your friends growing up feels like]", or "what if a sports anime but it was super robots running laps and being clumsy", or "we storyboarded like five episodes' worth of action for the finale so just look at them in motion comic form", I'm nodding very fast.
So...yeah. I think I expected to like it more? But it also surprised me positively with some wild shit? Two important takeaways here:
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I need that outfit
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Finally, a bisexual communist mecha pilot
