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This series is a tricky beast. On paper it should be the perfect anime for me. I love the style of Post-Tezuka Manga/Anime, so character designs that embrace the look of the era like these sold me on watching it alone. The show's premise too seems interesting. A new energy source that turns out to be far less perfect than we initially believed. Dueling agencies of secret agent martial artists duking it out in the best wuxia battles this side of Crouching Tiger. This show should be amazing, but sadly, it falls a bit flat. And Here's Why

Pros:

-The art design in this show is ... phenomenal. I liked how they didn't just copy the art style of the late 60s/early 70s, but rather took elements of that style and mixed it with the style of the time. The character designs I love, I really love, and even though some feel kinda bland, this show definitely has a distinct look.

-The animation is phenomenal. This show is definitely one of the highlights of the pre-CGI era of anime. Everything is smooth and crisp, and it is a joy to look at, even if the content lacks substance at times.

-The music is also interesting and distinct. It has this operatic/orchestral feel that makes it stand out from it's contemporaries. It helps to underscore the tragic themes that the series inhabits.

Cons

-As other reviewers have pointed out, for a show called Giant Robo, the show really doesn't feature that much in the way of Mecha Battles. It saves the action for individual fights of the wuxia variety. This isn't a bad thing, it's just that this show bills itself as mecha, but doesn't really feel like it.

-The story starts out really interesting. Once I understood that this wasn't a mecha show, just more of a sci-fi shounen, I started to find it interesting. However, it doesn't elaborate enough on the interesting mythology of the world, and instead continues to give us meaningless action, death, and explosions.

-This show has some great character designs and animation, but that can't make up for the lack of connection I feel towards these people. There are about a dozen that we are told to empathize with, and the way that they're introduced makes it hard to latch onto them. There are some interesting ones in the bunch, but the time that the show would use to show us these details is used to introduce us to more characters instead. A lot of them start to feel really homogeneous after a while too. I can only have so many Chinese Warriors. A few of these characters die, and this lack of connection I feel towards them makes these deaths feel trite.

-The ending of this show is effing ridiculous, and not in a self referential way. It's bad, and the last few episodes are these really long, drawn out battle scenes. I'm not against sequences like this, but when I'm not really feeling the characters or the story, it makes me feel disconnected. The last two episodes are a non stop battle that doesn't take a breather, and this really messes with the pacing of the show. The unending pace makes me feel desensitized to everything that's going on and makes me feel disinterested.

TL;DR
This show is a joy to look at and appreciate as long as you don't pay too much attention to the story. This isn't a mecha anime as much as it's a weird sci-fi shounen. It throws at lot at you at once, but if you are in the mood for some crazy action battles, this may fit the bill.

This show isn't bad. It just didn't leave me much reason to stick around. I was initially drawn to the show's unique setting and art style. I figured it'd be a nice change of pace from other battle-oriented shounen. For a few episodes, I really enjoyed it! Aladdin and Alibaba are really likable protagonists, and I enjoyed the way the story began to open up the greater world.

Soon though, the show introduces more political themes, as certain countries begin going to war, roping the protagonists into conflict. At this point, the show descends into typical shounen tropes. The light adventure tone of the first ... few episodes has been replaced by episode-long battles, where the protagonist always wins. By the end of this season, so many characters are thrown at you with no explanation of their backstories or reasons for existing. I even had trouble telling them apart.

The main antagonist by the time we get to the end of the season, which feels like a cop-out. None of the action on screen really meant anything to me. It just felt stale. I wish we could know more about the character's backstories like in One Piece, or maybe the arcs were a little shorter like in Fairy Tail, but there really wasn't anything that made me wanna watch the episode, other than hope that the series would pick up. It never did.

Like I said, this show isn't terrible, it's just really same-y. With a unique art style and world, you figured that there would be a nice hook in place to keep you interested. After about Episode 10, the show falls back on standard shounen tropes and it really loses it's steam. There are better options out there for anime to scratch the shounen itch, but there are also worse ones. Definitely try it out if the characters or world seem interesting, but just don't expect anything breathtaking.