Robot cops fight criminals.
My instinct when this first aired was that it would be a waste of time, but then people told me to give it a second chance, and the second episode had at least one decent joke (when he got in the robot and it started spamming popup windows).
Apart from that my initial impression was correct, the show was completely forgettable.
The action was boring. The criminals were dumb. I couldn’t care less about any of the cops. What was the point?
- Storytelling – D – Seen this one before a million times but better.
- Voice – D – Pretty much nothing unique.
- Characters – D – Totally forgettable.
- Attention Grab – F – Knocked me right out.
- Production – D – Meh.
- Overall – D
Recommendations – Psycho Pass, Gatchaman Crowds
If you ask me, the point was to amuse those who were already inherently receptive to this particular kind of show, which was rather “stuck in the 1990s” in more than one sense and had more in common with Power Rangers than with Psycho-Pass, instead of appealing to either a general audience or to otherwise more modern tastes.
Given that I kept watching the show on a weekly basis and had plenty of dumb fun, I can’t share your harshness towards this one. Personally, I would just give the series a C myself. Indeed, it didn’t do anything new or impressive, but in my experience it always provided some sort of amusement value. When you say the show was boring, I can only conclude we had very different expectations and perceptions about what is or isn’t fun to watch.
The show certainly didn’t have high tension or bone-crunching action, but I still liked seeing the power suits in motion. They were cool enough, and how they were used was often part of the goofy atmosphere surrounding them.
I’d say Gatchaman Crowds and Psycho-Pass are both very good shows yet extremely different, when compared to each other and also with respect to Active Raid. I really wouldn’t even bring them up in the same conversation, apples and oranges, but that’s me.
You know, you’re probably right. I’ve never watched Power Rangers or anything else really in that genre, so I probably missed a lot here.
The only good thing that came out of this mess is that it made me re-read Patlabor
Which is also not that much like this series either, given the Super Sentai influence was so transparent here and was quite lacking there, so it’s another misplaced expectation. But sure. Patlabor is good.
Yeah, I need to watch Patlabor too…