For Anno's first work, this is pretty damn good... especially when you go on to see what else he made. Perhaps its a victim of age. but the sound quality of the show was sort of bad (the songs sounded pretty out of tune). Other than that, the characters were pretty fun to get to know. My only real complain about the show is that it was too short. I feel that Anno kind of just went with the flow and didn't have enough time to correctly develop characters such as Noriko's love interest or Coach.