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I was severely disappointed by this show. Mind you, I am paying a lot of attention to the creation of the world itself as well as plot and characters. I found myself rolling eyes a lot when watching the series - the tropes are a plenty here - and what makes it worse is the mediocre execution

What I liked:
* The "stick to what you decided" theme
* The older cousin character
* Art was good

What I disliked:
* Holes in the plot
* Incomplete world (examples: mecha get damaged, how do they become functional again? What really happened in the past between the main character and the mecha? Staff ... conveniently out of the way when they would be restraining main characters.)
* The Loli, even if she is older than she looks, or maybe that's what makes it worse
* "PEEERFECT" and "ROOOGER THAT!" - significant contributors to "eyeroll factor"

A good story played out by unconvincing characters.

I have been hearing this title for quite some time now and expected something decent at the very least. I had almost dropped it after 9 episodes due to execution and characters but I found myself thinking about the plot after a while and came back to it.

The show greets you with a great song by angela, and ever since Stellvia of the Universe I have been a fan of angela and the singer's voice. The opening sequence is one of highlights of this series.

However, the first 10 episodes is very difficult to get through. Instead of throwing ... some action at me to get me hooked and then slow down to explain things, it just kept at it. When it did slow down, it was only to point out things that were very hard to accept. Let me state a few questions that I could not find answer to:
* Why does the commander of the whole base goes out to pilot a fighter jet as any other grunt and gets killed right away?
* Why bother with having (not one but two) shields when they are hardly able to stop the enemy for whole 2 seconds?
* Why is the first pilot so good?
* Why is everyone around so influenced/infatuated by him?
* How did they manage to remain hidden for so long and then suddenly all hell breaks loose?
* How come you have guns that Fafners handle that are able to hurt the enemy but you have no stationary, more powerful versions of these?
* Why does the enemy wipe automatic defence systems right away but does not attack Fafners in the same way?

I also could not get over how the writers of the show had a MESSAGE to convey and how characters did everything to validate it. It was not people's natural behaviour that pushed the story forward here, it was the MESSAGE. There were many instances where someone acted like a completely different person because that suited the story. There were many cases of sudden, unexplainable change in behaviour that, again, were there only to point the viewer at a particular idea. I felt I was watching characters being jerked sideways by invisible strings to make them behave as it was required of them.

This series also miserably fails at creating drama in first 10 episodes. Attempts to force me to see something as very sad were so blatantly obvious that I could not help but reject them. Sometimes less is more.


Warning: mild spoilers starting here.

The case of commander dying so quickly (and then we get obligatory “grieving by a loved one” scene) is repeated on much grander scale very soon. Second pilot is designated, enemy attack follows and the she self-destructs to take out the threat. The problem is: she was hardly given any screen time for me to get to know, care about her and understand her motivation. All we know as she decides on a flight to her death is that she was a gentle girl of very weak health, as if the show is telling me: “look, a frail girl is flying to her death! This is sad! Cry!). And I thought pulling FMA or Steins;Gate on cute characters was obvious (who watched – knows).


Another gripe I have is with the way it portrays the "evil" characters. They are introduced in much the same way as the Big Bad Wolf from Red Riding Hood: rotten to the core and ugly to boot. A pair, foster parents, badmouths their adopted son pretty much from the get go. You have to be pretty screwed to do that to someone you've seen growing and whom you cared for for about 16 years of your life, and it's not just one parent, it's both of them! It's even more difficult to swallow since their son seems to have grown up all-right. And when we see how bad are they? It turns out they are spies and it gives even more ground to expel them from the island. Talk about fortuitous development.



The good:
* Story
* Premise
* Music
* Animation
* Second half

The bad:
* Execution
* Characters
* Weak start

This series is mostly about "cute", "helpless", "inappropriate" and recycles many tropes found in OMG and Chobits and several others, however it has much more fanservice thrown into the mix.

The show certainly delivers if you like cute females without a shred of common sense imposing on someone's life and making it much more eventful. There's your usual mix of archetypes, occasionally taken far over the top... like a teacher that is bent on picking the main male protagonist's cherry.

Truth be told, I have no idea why I liked this particular show. The main theme of "I'm your slave", should normally be an immediate turnoff, but ... it wasn't. The plot was not great to begin with and was certainly not in the limelight either. I did like the character design, though. And I think there was no loli character

However, despite all these downsides I still remember how it invariably contorted my lips into the shape of banana just a few minutes into each episode. Somehow all these seemingly mediocre ingredients coalesced into a fast food dish that was surprisingly tasty.

The high score is based purely on my own enjoyment of the series.