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Voltes V is the second of Tadao Nagahama's "Romance Trilogy" mecha anime, coming between Combattler and Daimos. Like Combattler, the story focuses on a team of five pilots fighting against an invasion of Earth, and they're powered by extreme science and the power of friendship. Every week, the villainous Prince Heinel and his lackeys roll out a new monster for the team to fight, and with sheer determination and willpower, our heroes are able to carry the day.

So from the sound of it... just another 70s toy commercial.

What makes Voltes interesting, though, is that this isn't just a simple battle against an alien ... empire. There are strong undertones of racism and revolution that guide the action of the show. Most of the exposition doesn't arrive until the final third of the series, but when it does, it suddenly adds a whole new dimension to the action. Boazan is a planet where horned people enslave the hornless, and a handful of slaves led by a deposed prince are fighting for their freedom.

Three of the Voltes pilots are brothers, and their father, Professor Go, is at the center of everything. He was the one who designed the Voltes and prepared a handful of trusted comrades for the impending invasion. He turns out to be a key member of the Boazan rebellion, so Voltes' mission is not just about protecting the Earth. The Voltes pilots must come to grips with the fact that not all Boazanians are evil and that they have a duty to protect the slaves just as much as they have a duty to protect the Earth.

The aforementioned Heinel is also an interesting villain. He is the son of a traitor and seeks to restore his good name by serving the emperor, but his position is anywhere but safe. He must deal with the difficulties of fighting Voltes while also staving off subterfuge by his own generals, who have their own separate agenda.

The art and sound are about what you'd expect from a show from the 70s: hasn't aged well, but it's passable. The robot combines with the theme song blaring triumphantly in the background, and all is right with the world.

For me, the last five or so episodes pull the whole show together and make it worthwhile. The cruelest twist is saved for the end, when we learn the last outstanding piece of Professor Go's backstory...

I've seen a fair bit of mecha, ranging from the 70s all the way up through today, so I have a pretty good idea of what's been done and how it's been done. When I take a look at Cybuster in that context, the result is a rather luckluster series that can't hope to match the standard set by Masaaki Endoh's glorious opening vocals.

Cybuster takes elements from the Super Robot Wars universe and spins them into a standalone TV series which follows the progression of the Divine Crusaders from a friendly reconstruction group to a world-bending military dynamo which spams black holes like they're ... going out of style. It's pretty clear from the beginning that something is up with them, and anyone who has played the games or saw the more recent SRW animes already knows that DC is bad news.

The machines have completely different designs from their SRW counterparts, eschewing fantastic design elements for something that looks more realistic. The result is a Valsione that closely resembles Nadescio's Aestivalis, a Granzon which could pass for a Guntank, and a Cybuster which loses all of its map-clearing magic and signature moves, with the exception of the Cyflash. That is used exactly once... in episode 25.

Most of the time Cybuster is just punching and kicking its enemies or throwing razor-sharp wind at them, which causes some cosmetic damage and knocks them over. Enemy robots shoot back with projectiles which explode around the Cybuster and occasionally grapple with it and knock it over. And all of the robots move slowly and methodically through the combat area, providing little tension since the payoff tends to be robots falling over and then retreating. Did I mention that the mechs of Cybuster often fall over?

I think it's pretty bad that I was watching a show about trans-dimensional elemental robot gods fighting against transforming tank-bots that shoot black holes and thought, "Wow, these fights are boring."

There's not too much to complain about on the character front. They're pretty stock as far as mecha characters go and all the standard tropes apply. Main character Ken Ando shows decent growth as he learns to think for himself and evaluate DC as it truly appears, not as he wishes it to be. My biggest gripes are with Masaki and Lune. They've been greatly toned down from their SRW counterparts, losing all of their hot-bloodedness and replacing it with... well, I'm not sure what. Lune got a raw deal, turning into a selfish brat with no piloting skill.

For something produced in 1999, the animation is embarrassing. Sure, the backgrounds properly illustrate the deteriorating condition of the world, but when individual frames of animation can be picked out by the naked eye, there are problems. Cost-cutting measures are easy to identify -- recycled attack animation is acceptable for a mecha anime, but from stationary foreground characters are not. The budget must have been laughably small.

So in summary, this show takes numerous elements from Super Robot Wars, waters them down until they're not even hollow copies of their originals, and drags a standard real-robot storyline through 26 episodes of bargain-basement animation. On the plus side, the DVDs are just as cheap!