(13 episodes)
What’s it about ?
The year 2052. The world is still recoiling from a huge disaster at the end of the 20th century that wiped out most major cities. A terrorist faction has taken over a space station and threatens Japan with it. The government takes the “wait and see” approach, so the independent paramilitary organization known as “Jesas” (sic) sends in their manned mecha to recover it in a bid to get themselves established. They completely bungle it, but never fear : their new generation of mecha pilots, kids with prescience superpowers, are nearly ready !
Characters
Kazuto, our generic male lead. You know the type : when he falls off his bike, he manages to land watching under a girl’s skirt.
Kanna, our generic female lead. You know the type : she goes changing into the men’s locker room by mistake, and never acknowledges she did anything wrong.
There are six other new pilots, but they don’t show any personality so far. They all attend a briefing given by your typical hard-ass instructor, who has no patience for Kazuto and Kanna’s antics, and is of course voiced by Jouji Nakata. He’s mostly there to deliver exposition.
The Jesas organization is lead by generic council of vagueness, with one woman objecting to nearly everything the others say ; this is presumably supposed to make her look better than her scheming cynical colleagues, but she just comes off as irritating.
The terrorists’ only character of interest is a slightly creepy mecha pilot who annihilates his opponents without breaking a sweat.
Production Values
Oh, dear. Where do I start ?
This series is entirely computer-generated. And it looks terrible. The backgrounds are okay, if the “empty streets of Mainframe” look is what they were going for (after all, the setting is post-apocalyptic). But the characters look horrible, a bizarre cross of semi-realism and traditional anime designs, and their body language being all out of whack doesn’t help them getting out of the uncanny valley.
It doesn’t help that the directing is amazingly incompetent, with long shots where nothing happens and pregnant pauses that only underline the artificiality of these robotic characters. Every third shot has a sweeping camera movement that was presumably meant to show off the smoothness of the animation, but the fixed speed of motion makes it look like someone’s fallen asleep.
Overall impression
This does have some (unintended) comedy value, but the novelty wears off after a while. Mostly, it’s boring, and the cliché antics of our two leads don’t help. There are some major failures of storytelling (I’m still unsure of the sequence of events between Jesas’s first attack of the space station and the various scenes with our protagonists), and it’s just ugly to look at.
You might want to watch an episode to have a good laugh ; but otherwise, avoid it.
