MuspellPete

I should begin by mentioning that going into Gunbuster, i generally am not a fan of mecha or large scale space warfare (e.g. the mecha part of Gargantia and space warfare of Legend of the Galactic heroes were not particularly intetesting to me.) However i do love FLCL every single time i see it, and thus i went into Gunbuster with a lot of goodwill due to the Gainax label.

The story of Gunbuster covers a relatively large amount of arcs over the span of only 6 episodes. This also means that a lot of the space warfare etc. (which i do not care too much about anyway) takes the backseat to character development for the most part. While i do have some gripes about how some of the characters do not get enough of an introduction relative to how important they are to the plot, i generally liked the relationships between them. This is also largely due to how (minor spoiler) these relationships are often affected by a time-distortion element; causing characters to age at different speeds, which leads to some interesting situations. The characters themselves are pretty standard though, with little interesting going on, but that is as expected with this little time for building up their backstories.

Though i don't care that much about the mecha-element, it is (compared to today's standards) pretty average. It does have some very satisfying scenes though, both in regards to the action, the way moving mechanical parts are animated, as well as the general technology in the universe.

The music and animation quality is pretty darn fantastic for its time, and still hold up decently today. It has those crazy Gainax moments, but significantly toned down compared to their more modern series. Still very enjoyable however, with things going quite bananas at times.

Finally it should be mentioned that the story has a satisfying ending, and can be enjoyed by itself. Of course if you find the series enjoyable it is natural to move on to the sequel.

Overall pretty enjoyable, if you like or at least can live with a relatively mecha-centric plot.

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