I realized playing SRW that I never finished Gunbuster when I was 13 or 14 and watched it. So I remedied that by watching it over the last few days. I remembered the boobs since it was the first anime I'd seen that had nudity. But what I didn't remember was there being a GIANT SUPER ROBOT. Apparently that was because I never made it to ep4!
It was slow, but good, and full of whiny crying pathetic Shinjis, but then in ep4 when GUNBUSTER appears it got kind of classic great (although Noriko's transformation from ultra pathetic to SUPER AWESOME FIGHTER was kind of instantaneous and lol). Then ep5 was ok. The pacing felt rushed but it had some cool action. So I went into ep6 expecting it to be this epic awesome finale that is why Gunbuster is so well remembered; something on par with the Kawaru ep of Eva, or the final FLCL ep, or final Gurren Lagann ep. What I got was 24 mins of black & white oddly paced build up, a bunch of line art storyboards for 20 seconds depicting what was supposed to be the major epic battle, and then an ok little finale with a tit. Kind of disappointing. Overall I liked it, but you can tell they just didn't have the budget to do the big action epic they wanted in the last 2 eps, so I felt it was a slow build up to a peak in ep4 and then kind of rushed/budget/incomplete story after that. Not really the anime classic I was expecting, but despite problems it's a good OAV. Would give it around ***/****
It also had more boob than any Highschool of the Dead ep will ever have.
Still Interesting to see Anno and Gainax trademarks and style choices that would eventually make it into Eva. Now I gotta finally watch Diebuster. I only made it 2eps into that when it first came out.
