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I liked Aquarion pretty well. It's a Mecha show, so there will always be some serious suspension of disbelief, but they have some interesting ideas, even if some of them come across as a little... silly. The mecha in question, Aquarion itself, is three parts that can combine and recombine into different forms for more adaptability (don't let children watch them "merging" unless you want awkward questions about the faces they make), and the pilots usually have psychic-ish special powers that help them in various situations. All of this, and more, add up to situations where the pilots really have to not ... only work together, but trust and understand each other, which is a decent message, even if the anime tends to cop out on that idea later.

The biggest complaint I have is that it could have used more attention to detail. The story is good, but weak; the main characters get the standard amount of attention, meaning that they have a persona that may or may not be fleshed out by individual episodes about them. However, secondary characters, no matter how prominent, remain two-dimensional at best. (Jean-Jerome Jorge, I'm looking at you.) Some of the plot points seem tacked-on, such as the military-industrial-complex types that apparently were perfectly content to let children pilot giant mecha with a mysterious stranger commanding them, without actually bothering to have a bunch of military folks sitting there grousing, but they were still waiting patiently to do military-industrial-complex things as soon as it became convenient to the writer.

I don't have any comment on the art (it passes...?), and the dub was predictably awful, what with english voice actors never managing to make any of their lines sound like they were actually part of a conversation, much less the conversation in question. It would be hard to blame this on the anime itself, though.

In all, if like me you like to be given a glimpse of another, interesting world, then Aquarion is a world that you might find interesting. If you're looking for something more serious, or which really takes itself seriously, maybe not. Or you can just "read the footsteps" of this somewhat odd anime and decide for yourself.