The animation is beautiful and seems to be for the most part hand drawn. A lot of detail went into this. During the early episodes you see the OS of the laptops with gothic bolded German letters that the Empire conducts their business on. I thought this was a really nice touch and shows the animators care about the setting.
Yang Wenli is in this series but plays a small role. For the most part the Alliance here is represented by Walter von Schenkopp and the Rosen Ritter. Here you get to see how he became the regimental commander and his motivations for the rest of the series are explained as well.
While it's a good precursor to the main series there are some bad parts.
For one the detective Kircheis saga was pointless. It was cool seeing the satellite I guess for one episode but an entire arc based on a drug network in the Imperial Army that only Kircheis is able to help solve seemed really trivial and contrived. What was the point of this? Why couldn't Reinhard have been there?
What also sucks (is another detective arc) where Reinhard and Kircheis are investing the murder of students at the military preparatory academy they attended as teenagers. This arc was also boring and did little to further the story.
While there's nothing inherently bad about both of these arcs they weren't befitting a story on a galactic scale.
Aside from that though the rest of the series was top notch.
So for a beginner to the series, I'd say skip the episodes from the two aforementioned arcs and watch all the rest and you have a good primer for the main series.
Also a small complaint, the music used in the series was really repetitive. It seems they just stuck with 2 of the classical tracks from the main series (which had dozens upon dozens of them and many of them were uniquely placed).
