Macross

A simple summary of this series is that it is a really inferior imitation of both Gundam and Space Pirate Captain Harlock/Galaxy Express 999.

The style of the anime sits firmly on the laurels of a Mobile Suit Gundam, but it forsakes this with the actual character styles, opting to imitate the Harlock/Galaxy Express style instead. Instead of airs to grandeur, the characters instead all are fairly subdued and slow to react to everything. This results in every character looking like Harlock, talking like Gundam, but not really having a personality at all in the end. It is just a bunch of gazing at each other, ... talking about Minami, or elementary school level bickering or gossiping.

The story of aliens for whom culture (mostly just pop idol singing and sex, unfortunately) is either a drug or alternately a poison, is fairly humorous. Everything else is pretty bad though. The pop idol storyline is all bad, especially because the songs are so lifeless. Minami is all anyone will talk about for pretty much the whole series, and it becomes incredibly obnoxious as the series goes on. The fights are decent, but the reasons given for the enemies not just destroying them from the getgo are pretty implausible (especially given what they finally do later, although that is too big of a spoiler for me to include here).

The art is simply atrocious. The lines are bold and chunky, or maybe a better way to put it is that especially all of the characters look smeared all of the time. When a zoom out happens the character art becomes even better. At least it resulted in some hilarious moments, like when (probably due to a guest director or producer) all the eyes start bugging out in episode 25.

The voice acting is average in Japanese, and actually listenable in English with the exception of Minami whose voice is an insulting psuedo-Asian broken English trainwreck (no other character sounds like this, the rest all speak perfectly decent English, including her entire family). The music has some really good ideas...and is unfortunately incredibly limited. Like if you tried to listen to a song and replayed it in 15 second format on amazon.com, the music here repeats incredibly short stretches over and over. No matter how good the classical style booming drums sound, banging them the exact same way every episode is exasperating.

Overall, I guess go ahead and watch this if you are absolutely obsessed with space works or gigantic robot works, but just know you are getting something that is a derivative and inferior work. There is much better you can spend your time on, like the aforementioned works from which Macross is derived, or perhaps a nice cup of Legend of the Galactic Heroes!

{minor spoilers}

As Macross started, I found the basic premise, theme (music/culture vs violent aliens) and story very fascinating, and I was gripped. Unfortunately, the story quickly descends into the most repetitive, contrived melodrama that I've ever had the displeasure of watching, filled with characters that behave in a similarly melodramatic and contrived manner. Additionally, despite the characters acting absolutely batshit, the series doesn't seem to be quite self-aware of this at all.

Macross' romantic plot can be summed up fairly easily into a few repeating segments. The two main characters Hikaru and Minmay meet at the beginning of the series, circumstances cause each of them to ... be trapped with each other, but before anything can develop they are saved from these circumstances. This plot structure pretty much continuously reoccurs in a similar fashion for about 80% of Macross, and the lack of any real development is extremely unsatisfying. Hikaru and Minmay have a potentially romantic moment, which gets interrupted by a battle with the worst timing, and Hikaru goes out to fight, rinse and repeat. Macross' entire plot is literally fueled by this contrived bullshit until its conclusion, and it doesn't help that the characters behave and act in extremely unnatural and socially awkward ways in order to force the plot to go the way the writers wanted it to go, rather than any sort of natural conclusion. The basic idea they were trying to go for is that circumstances keep Hikaru and Minmay apart and cause strain on their relationship, but the specifics and repeating circumstances behind it all are so contrived that it's almost parody.

Somewhat nearing the end of the series, some partial conclusion finally happens between Hikaru and Minmay, and an exciting and significant battle occurs that places a lot of focus on the two of them. This would have been a great place to end the series (and this is where the story fortunately ends in the movie). However, for some reason, the story continues. The arc that takes place afterwards is extremely unnecessary, incredibly dull in comparison to the amazing battle prior, and really just drags for way longer than it needs to because the characters start acting even more absolutely absurd and oblivious than they normally do.

The only reason I would personally recommend watching Macross is to understand the lore better. Later Macross series often make reference to Minmay, who is an extremely significant figure within the Macross universe. So if you're watching this to get into other Macross series, do yourself a favour and watch the movie instead, which has a better overall plot condensed into a movie length (rather than 36 episodes), as well as far more impressive art and animation quality. It generally writes certain key characters a lot better and doesn't try to turn Minmay's character into a bipolar trash fire in order to justify a love triangle formed from ridiculous repeating contrivances (not that the justifications for the love triangle in the movie are much better). Hikaru has significant character issues in both the series and the movie, though the nature of these glaring character flaws is different across the two.

I personally regret not just watching the movie instead, as the only reason I got into the series to begin with was to watch Macross Plus and Macross 7 (both of which I enjoyed far more). I found this quite ironic as Macross 7 seems to be considered as somewhat of a black sheep among the Macross fandom. It boggles my mind how this consistently contrived garbage is held in high regard, and I can only assume that many people give it a free pass due to its age or nostalgia.