I thought this show was entirely in mandarin and was going to skip it as soon as I saw the joysticks in the cockpits. My friend convinced me to tough it out. It got slightly better.
First four episodes are bad and can entirely be skipped.
Then apparently the writers got replaced or magically smarter and then it turns into a half decent mech show that reminds me of Star Trek with its use of Chekov's gun style sciencey stuff.
It plainly obvious that the tone of the show changes dramatically when you hit ep 5, because there are a number of tonal changes that happen. The headdress wearing character isn't being racistly prejudiced against anymore, the mechs don't use joysticks anymore, there aren't the scenes that show the Seven Stone City (Seven Stones is the name of the presumably chinese production company that made the show) as well as the showing off of the presumably chinese bullet train shot and the government helping civilians. It feels very Transformers 4/Independence Day 2 with depicting the Chinese government in a positive light. The single joystick in each cockpit are never shown again as of ep 5.
I would give this a 6.5 if I could, I was going to give a 5 based on the first three episodes, but I'm a sucker that liked the quasi releastic sciencey stuff in Knights and Magic and Heavy Object. Without those plot points in those episodes, the show drops to a 5.5 for me.
No ecchi, space battles are incredibly bad/meh, animation is bad/meh, and hoo boy are there tropes/copied scenes from various other Gundam/mech shows. 85% of the dialogue could be removed with no change in impact to the show. I watched this entire show at 3x speed and it was still dull for most of it.
Not recommended to watch.
