It's a Sailor Moon kind of show in that it makes heavy use of high detail stock footage in every episode and tries to make up for that with fancy music to continue to hold the viewer's attention. There is also a monster of the week format but in this show all of the random enemies are characters who reoccur constantly who just become the enemy to fight for the episode. Unlike the disco music in Sailor Moon though this series has a bunch of weird pretentious kind of chanting songs (they sound like those typical Latin ones but except it's Japanese). And this show is so pretentious that when the name of it is showed it's always subtitled by a version of it in French (the show has nothing to do with anything French, that's just Japan's obsession of it to be the classiest place). Another Sailor Moon connection is that it was created by one of the Sailor Moon directors and like Sailor Moon it was an idea that an anime studio first came up with and then gave an author to create the story in a manga that the studio would later adapt.
Also some of the younger characters feel very out of place and ruin the seriousness of the story. The middle school boy (who I along with others thought was a high school girl at first) feels out of place on the student council, and the elementary boy who is the lapdog of one of the girls in the show also feels inappropriate to be shown in the series. I also think that elementary boy may be a self-insert for the director of the show since he had another character that looked like him for his self-insert in Sailor Moon.
I'm saying pretentious a lot but that's what the show is. And if you don't find things like Gendo talking about "opening the chamber of guf" and "terminal dogma" to be cool then you won't like this show at all, since all the main characters do is speak in riddles and it's another confusing kind of story like Evangelion where nothing about the plot is presented clearly.
There's lots of stylized aesthetic and dreamlike scenes but by the end they become too cartoony. I thought all the red cars appearing in the arena whenever there was a fight during the last arc to be boring compared to the visual motifs from before.
This isn't the kind of show I could enjoy watching again, which is my criteria for an anime to be a favorite for me but there are a few cool episodes that wouldn't be so bad to rewatch. My favorite ones were the enemies from the guy who would corrupt students with black rings and black roses to duel.
