Story:
Our heroine is Takaya Noriko, a student at a mecha piloting academy. Unfortunately, she's a terrible pilot. Fortunately, one of her dead father's former crew is given the coach position and she's selected to go into space with the actually deserving Amano Kazumi. Hooray for nepotism. This, naturally, puts them in a fighting force against aliens.
The big issue with this OVA is that it's full of exceedingly stupid elements that make no sense when you can be bothered to think about them. First of all, why are they training school kids to go into space and fight aliens? Why not actual adults who are in the military? Secondly, let's talk about Takaya's selection. Her Coach basically argues that she has the "potential if she works hard" and that's why she's a good candidate. Even though the vast majority of people can improve at something if they try and the fact that she isn't putting in effort kind of shows that she doesn't really give a shit.
Let's also discuss the warping. In this series, warping causes you to basically skip years that are passing on Earth. The issue this brings up is that Takaya's father spent her childhood travelling around in space but somehow always managed to return for her birthday. Now, every time we see the warping in action it seems very finicky. Like, less than a minute of warp can cause a year to pass finicky. So, how did he manage to always come back? Did he warp for five seconds, spend five minutes on his missions then spend five more seconds returning? There's also the bit at the end where warping takes much longer than could possibly make sense. Because... their vessel is damaged.
There's also a scene where the Earth forces are in a desperate situation and the captain decides that their only choice is a suicide attack. Because the super powerful, secret weapon they're carrying only has a limited operation time. I'm just picturing myself being on the bridge in that situation.
Captain: We have to ram it and blow this ship up.
Me: Or, we could send out the secret weapon. It's not like there's anything to lose.
Captain: No, it's not finished.
Me: But it's our best bet at this point and definitely better than dying.
Crew Member: Captain, the Gunbuster is deploying.
Captain: It can't be. It only has a few minutes to operate.
Me: For the first time, I'm glad you idiots didn't listen when I said we needed trained soldiers who could follow orders to send into battle and not literal children.
The romance is also pretty shit. Both because of the difference in power and age of the participants and because it's just poorly handled. Also, why do they have their robots exercise by doing sit ups, jogging and shit like that? You could make the case that it's about mastering fine movements, but there have to be a thousand better ways to do that than to have the pilots do light PE exercises in their mecha.
The one positive I will give the series is that it is a bit engaging. There's just enough potential for something interesting to happen that it keeps you invested until you reach the end and realise that potential was never reached.
Characters:
Takaya is more than a little annoying. She spends about sixty percent of her time whining that she needs to be better, thirty percent of her time being a generic good girl and the other ten percent going at a situation with gusto. Amano is a boring "cool older sister" type. The Coach is a boring mentor. Freud Jung (yes that is her name) is just a boring friendly rival character. And there really aren't any other characters with enough character to be worth mentioning.
The aliens' motivations are, at best, very sketchy and trite and that's literally all we have to define them. The series tries to add complexity by making the "heroes" act in short-sighted and morally irresponsible ways. Including having them destroy a galaxy, but it doesn't really work when the creatures they're trying to stop just want to consume actual stars and destroy humanity for weak reasons. There's no reason to care in the slightest if these things are all destroyed.
Art:
This series suffers from some pretty bad art. There are a lot of awkward facial expressions, some moron at Gainax decided it would be more intense to have certain scenes in black and white and the animation in the final episode is just unfinished. There's no colour and the big climactic battle has a lot of still shots just playing in a slide show. They also show the tits of their young heroines way too much. It's just trashy.
Sound:
The acting is a bit stilted. It's not absolutely dreadful or anything like that. It's more that the delivery is just a bit off at every moment. And I know that some of these actors, if not all of them, can do much better. I've heard good performances from Wakamoto Norio, Kawamura Maria & Sakuma Rei. The music is kind of bland but passable. I have heard Tanaka Kouhei do better.
Ho-yay:
The way Noriko latches onto Amano comes across as a bit homo-erotic at times. But the OVA will never do anything with that and it doesn't come across that way all that often.
Areas of Improvement:
Make the pilots young adults. You could explain this away easily enough as them wanting to have pilots who would experience fewer harmful psychological effects from the time shift, but it doesn't work when you're using actual teenagers.
Instead of trying to squeeze complexity out of enemies who never communicate or do anything besides attack, just have them trying to swarm through to nest in our sun. The result is the same, but it's far less stupid.
Have a complex crew that makes sensible decisions. If they're up against a wall, the captain should be the one who decides to send out their secret weapon since there's nothing left to lose. If they need a candidate, they should pick someone who actually demonstrates ability before being pushed into putting in effort. That would vastly improve this OVA.
Final Thoughts:
This isn't as bad as certain other Gainax productions I've reviewed but it is worse that I remembered. And, ultimately, it is pretty bad. I have to give it a 3/10.
