One thing that's truly wonderful is how it presents combat. When combat occurs on Earth, especially early on, you see it from the perspective of nature. A mobile suit moves, and dozens of animals are displaced. A shot is fired, and trees in the forest burn. This is presented the same way some earlier Gundam and many other series present character deaths. However characters dying is treated as secondary in many of these scenes. You can see that the real issue is the destruction being caused to the Earth. Even in scenes where people are passively outside of their Mobile Suits, the Earth brims with life.
It's through storytelling like this that many of the themes of the story are relayed to you.
Tomino, like Anno, hates the average anime fan. He hates the Otaku, the Gundam Fan. He hates people who feel they're owed something by a piece of art, or that they own it. This can be seen in much of his storytelling structure. Early on characters give "awkward exposition" but they don't tell you anything you don't know. When they begin to speak about something new, that would allow you to "make sense" of the world you're seeing, the scene focus will shift or they'll be cut off. You are forced to piece together much of the important information yourself.
I love this anime. I love how it relays information. I love the characters. I love the very normal ways it displays characters doing things like eating, or screwing up. I like the lack of grandiosity to most of it. In my opinion it's at its worst when it's having epic battles, or the finale.
My main critique is that it could have used about 10 more episodes of breathing room, to properly decompress, as the ending is rushed. Truthfully though, almost every Tomino Gundam series ever has been rushed or cancelled, so that's just par for the course.
Many people will not like this anime, because it is not traditional anime in any way. It is a rejection of convention on almost every level. Much like Turn A, it is at times intentionally produced in a way to upset people who feel certain ways about how things should be done, how characters should act/be presented, and things of that nature. It was on a budget, so at times it's also not a feast for the eyes, though to me it never looked ugly. I often found it quite pretty, but I can't deny it doesn't have the budget of some anime.
If you are used to Tomino's work, or looking for extremely unusual structure and character actions in an anime, then embrace this one.
