If you find a mysterious box on a truck in your technical college, the best and most obvious course of action to take is to open it. If it happens to contain a suit of powered armor and a manual,only read the passage that tells you how to turn it on and get inside. After that happens, there's no better way to celebrate the activation of your newly-found robot suit by visiting your ex-girlfriend in a crowded tower. Uh-huh. Metal Skin Panic Madox-01 (don't you love those old-school robot titles? 'Armored Trooper Votoms', 'Blue Comet Super Powered-Tracer Layzner'...) is another one of those old 80sshows with a plot seems more like an excuse for the directors and animators to cram as many cool fight scenes as they can into an hour of programming. It's a tried-and-true formula that produces morsels of crunchy animated entertainment and doesn't attempt to reinvent or blend any genres or push the envelope, and that's just fine. It's not intellectually stimulating or engaging, but it won't bore you to tears with hours of pointless filler or aimless dialog between sparkly-eyed effeminate men wearing goofy outfits in the pouring rain staring at opposite sides of the screen. Who also happen to be ninjas.

Everything is resolved at the end, nothing sticks out and needs to be hammered down. The fight scenes are fun, the animation's good, the English dub is awkward, and the artists seem to take too much pleasure in drawing little X-wing style flip-up targeting computers...

Seriously. There are like, several of them (I counted 5) and they all work with the same weapon. You'd think the company would have added a digital copy of the manual onboard, but... Whatever.