I tried… so hard to care about this two-part OVA, and ended up playing solitaire for half of episode 1. Lima isn’t interesting, and the way her story ends is… so very bad. The mini stories in episode 1 aren’t interesting. The stakes at the end of episode 1 were slightly exciting, I guess? Pinion negging Lukkage and Bellows has never been interesting and it’s not interesting here. The one interesting part was actually seeing more types of ships in the Gargantia fleet to confirm that it is a fleet in the military sense, as well. And then the plot took some extra stupid pills, which even put the main series to shame.
Land is apparently an actual thing, and with multiple countries, no less! To me it’s not so much a plot hole as it’s really the only way a lot of things make sense. Like is it randomly added here? Yeah. But does it actually make the main series less stupid? Yeah. It doesn’t fix most things with the main series plot because the story is still bad in other ways and it sounds like what this new plot thing would fix is not how things work, so… This series is just bad all around, really.
Anyway, there’s a beach episode. …Woo. /sarcasm. I guess you can expect it on a show that’s mostly on the water, but still. In a series that is already quite boring, this really doesn’t help.
On the spectrum of OVAs, I think this one’s budget was really low. A lot of the animation is downright ugly. Not to mention how bad the writing is. But hey, you get a lot of Ledo and Amy hugging, I guess. So on the balance, it’s only… mostly bad.
I do not understand why precisely one commander on the Gargantia is a woman. We don’t even see female underlings outside Lukkage and Bellows’ bikini/short shorts-clad henchpeople. Even Lima appears to be the only woman on her crew. At least Vacation Island has at least one woman in charge, I guess.
Overall… if you’ve gotten this far, I guess it’s worth watching for completion’s sake? There’s nothing new about the music that I noticed - it’s just reused from the main series. Otherwise, skip this. Watch literally anything else. “Macross Frontier” and “Promare” are great for mechs and stupid and drama and good music and fights. Heck, if you want a swimming show, watch “Free!”. Don't waste your time here.
