This show can be described in one word: excess. Subtlety doesn't exist in its dictionary; everything is big, bright, and brash. Giant robots, giant monsters, giant boobs, giant emotions, giant melodrama. It's both a parody of super robot shows and an unabashed love letter to them. Speaking of love letters and excess, that's the other ingredient of the show: romantic comedy. Like everything else, this is dialled up until your ears bleed. Why have one or two romance arcs when you can wallow in the love lives of every single character in the show? Sometimes it's played for laughs, other times it's played straight, butit's always over the top.

If this sounds chaotic, it is. Though a lot of fun in general, the madness does get away from it sometimes. In the middle of the series we get a lot of filler focusing on the seemingly endless parade of robot pilots from around the world. They're a weird and distinctive bunch, and inevitably every two-person team has some kind of repressed romance going on, but I start to wonder why so much time is being spent on them. When it gets to the point where we spend an episode focusing on the arranged marriage of a random engineer who has no bearing on the plot, I'd rather it just got on with the main story. That's not to say these parts aren't entertaining, but the series does spend too long spinning its plasma drives instead of moving forward.

Fortunately, the majority of the show works better. The action is all good, being one of the last shows to use all hand-drawn animation for the robots. There are plenty of mysteries and twists. And the central age-gap romance between the main robot-piloting couple works as a great source of comedy and drama, ultimately becoming quite poignant by the show's surprisingly heartfelt conclusion. If the show had spent more time focusing on these elements, it would have been a solid 8, but as it is, it just about slips to a 7.

That's what my head says, at least, but I love this show anyway.