I personally enjoyed it although I generally have a soft spot for old animes and a hard spot for newer ones. It had a proper unique story unlike all the isekai, evangelion clones these days. I first saw it as a kid 17years ago and did not understand half the stuff that was going on. I always liked the concept of the show and overarching plot I could make out then so in 2021-2022 I decided to watch it for reals. I got real bored binging all the new animes and this made me feel good about anime again. The story explores a polluted Earth withvarious flavors of human colonies while on the group's search to an Eden like colony. The protagonist of sorts in the group is a Shinji like guy Shu from a dystopian colony where humans are being used as a resource to store data (like blockchain/barcodes). Shu isn't any dystopian wasteland Jesus, just that he was rescued by the group and was able to start thinking for himself. I felt the settings and timelines were pretty accurate about the future for a show made in the 90s.

The initial episodes are slow. There are two virtual characters Eightron and Dolly who kind of appears to save the day or move the plot initially but after the first 5 episodes they stop becoming deus ex machina. This keeps the story not reliant on them. There are a few fillers here and there only if the viewer doesn't want to explore the different kind of colonies they encounter but hey even Bebop had them. Those episodes were actually interesting to see how various humans innovate to survive.

Animation-wise its pretty much what you expect from 90s anime, some reused scenes and movements, the walls which are going to be animated have a different color and so on. The music is memorable but feels repetitive over several episodes. Anime direction wasn't much a thing back then so the characters and frames feel like manga slides i.e. robotic transitions.

If the viewer can tolerate classic animes, this is an excellent watch nevertheless. It gets quite gripping after the first 8-9 episodes. I am rating this good devoid of recency bias. The ambiance is somewhere between Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion and story elements are pretty believable and realistic unlike say DitF