What’s it about ?
Terminator with mecha.
Characters
Aoba, our generic high-school student protagonist. He’s got a generic (absence of) personality, and generic friends constantly saying how great a guy he is. He’s the picture of boring normalcy.
Hina, the girl sitting next to him in class who transferred in recently. Everyone just assumes she’s stalking him because she’s infatuated with him (for some unfathomable reason) ; and while there might be some degree of truth to that, the real reason is that he’s going to be Really Important in the future, and she’s a time-traveller who’s come back in time to protect him from…
Er, actually, I didn’t quite catch this guy’s name. (And since the credits just have him as a purposefully uncredited “pilot”, I presume that’s a plot point.) Anyway, he’s fallen into a wormhole from the future with his mecha, and for some reason he makes a beeline to kill Aoba. Hina was in hot pursuit, but somehow ended up arriving several months earlier ; this makes me believe time-travel isn’t an exact science here.
Anyway, the battle escalates enough for Hina to decide that the best course of action is to throw her mecha (with Aoba also in the cockpit) together with the other guy’s into another wormhole. When Aoba wakes up after that, he’s alone in a completely different mecha, at some point in the future, and the army owning that mecha is scrambling for combat…
Production Values
It’s Sunrise doing mecha. Of course it looks fine.
Overall Impression
Well, that’s certainly an intriguing start. I’m not too fond of the characters yet, but the premise is introduced well enough to feel interesting despite them. I certainly appreciated the way it rushed to have Aoba into the future so quickly, as there certainly wasn’t anything of much interest in the present.
I’ll give it a few episodes to see where it goes. (I have no clue whatsoever why it’s called “Buddy Complex” yet, for example.)
