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This one is pretty cool if you're into that 80s style mechanical design and general anime style and stuff from the period. If you already know that you like that stuff, the kinds of special effects they only used in the 80s and the early 90s, the kind of music they only had in the 80s and the early 90s, then you should probably check this one out, because it is one. And it's far from the worst one in absolute terms so, yeah, there it is.

Where my criticism comes in is in terms of the story and the characters, which is a fairly big ... problem. There is also some uneven animation going on, instances of frames of art not holding up the standard of quality, characters end up with derp faces from time to time, that sort of thing. That kind of stuff, the animation and art shortcomings, I really can put up with okay and features can easily end up with a 7 out of 10 from me with that kind of stuff going on. But the story and characters are severely lacking.

How do I even begin? Well I guess the first major problem is that we don't really have characters in this feature, we've got a cast of stereotypes. 80s anime female character stereotypes, too, which is just about the worst. I was going to say the main problem is that the creators don't know how to establish characters, which means we can't care when things happen to them, but really there aren't characters there at all. Just catchy designs.

I can't really talk about the story and some of the things that really vexed me without getting into some spoilers, so I'll just say the direction the story took was offensive to me, scientifically, and I was really annoyed on the gender role implications and related things. Find my review on letterboxd for a spoiler review.

Ultimately, what we have here is a relatively short movie with some cool animation and mechs and monsters and fights and things, but it falls far far short of something like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, in all respects, and Akira, which would premiere two years later would also blow this sort of thing away. Watch it if you want to. I, for one, struggle, because I simultaneously love it and also feel really critical about it. The reality is, I'm just not likely to find many anime that do all the cool shit I like (such as this one does) but don't have major shortcomings, problematic or outright toxic elements, and etc. That's life!