For buying all the DVD's on a whim since Rightstuf had seven volumes for only $2, I am genuinely surprised by how great this show is. I really enjoyed this a lot. As for the story it has comedic moments sprinkled throughout each episode and I feel like they generally mix very well with the situations at hand. There's also a decent amount of actually incredible scenes that look fantastic and have great sound design; I love the sound of when they open a gate to use their abilities and then scream "GATE OPEN!" and even though it's essentially the same thing every time it feelsdifferent depending of what's going on and everything else and how the audio is mixed. It makes a lot of scenes feel really epic and I'd rewind and watch the sequence again because it seemed so cool however it doesn't seem like it's trying too hard to be cool or anything like that (at least not to me) and I feel like that's why comes off really good and really kept me engaged with the show and wanting to continue watching.

The art and animation is pretty consistent throughout the whole show and how good the CGI is really took me by surprise. There was only one episode with a purple CG helicopter that was super bad but other than they did a heck of a job considering this was from the year 2000.

My favorite character was definitely Ikusawa, Ruriko or Rurippe as the nickname given to her by Ukiya, Shun which you will hear most of the time. Kawasumi, Ayako does a fantastic job voicing her and I love when she yells, perfect tone in comedic moments and intense moment and everything in-between. I also really liked Mei and how she'd say "Gate Open" and her powers in Chinese most of the time. Reiko seemed to be a little too much of an air-head but she still seemed to get some good moments and she cares for everyone and not just Ukiya. Kaoru to me felt too pushy to assert herself onto her Senpai Ukiya but I didn't dislike her and she does get some great moments to shine throughout the series. I like how she transformers to use her powers by just whooshing off her normal clothes with her tracksuit underneath. The only character I didn't like so much was Megumi which is kinda backwards for me since I generally really like the quiet ones with glasses. The different tensions with her still had impacts on the story and wasn't meaningless even though she wasn't very nice or anything. Finally for our main character Ukiya, Shun I'd say he's actually likable. He does share some typical traits that you'd expect from a main character but there's also more to him. He also has a couple really good character arcs that he goes through and you get to see him struggle.

If you happen to stumble across this show I highly recommend it, especially if you can still get the DVD's for super cheap like I was able to. As for re-watching, I definitely will eventually and I still have the sequel OVA series to watch too which I will watch next out of the countless DVD's and Blu-Rays that I have. I would've liked to see an HD remaster with PCM audio if they did it correctly/still had the original master but I'm not too concerned since the DVD's still scale nicely. I'd say the average score for this show is an accurate assessment of how it's score should be but I just had such a blast watching this and it felt really refreshing. Anyways, hope my review will be insightful for somebody!