The first thing that completely gripped my interest was the world building and setting, it is so beautiful and exciting. Frontier is a huge space colony ship fleet designed to travel in space for decades at a time. It consists of an "island 1" which looks like a full size diorama with a glass dome over it, and an armored movable clamshell on top of that. Inside the dome we have what is essentially si-fi San Fransisco complete with beautiful ocean side landscape and famous landmarks.

This main ship is the most critical and protected vessel but for comfortable lifestyle it also has a whole bunch of more simplistic trailer ships dragged behind it for various purposes, which can be discarded as necessary. This brings us to the first great thing about this setup, Frontier is an isolated colony ship in space with a limited supply of air, water and bio-mass, damage sustained in battle will gradually deplete these supplies, which builds up stakes and excitement as the story progresses. This dynamic is similar to colony satellites in some Gundam shows, where the satellite itself is in danger of being destroyed. Except the difference is you can always escape to Earth or other satellites in a Gundam show. While there is FTL in the Macross universe, you are very much still limited by space-time and escape is not an option. If island 1 is destroyed then the fleet is doomed.

The intended lifestyle within the colony ship is quite colorful and ideal, since it's a re-creation of San Fransisco it is implied that most people here speak English, some of the main characters like Alto and Ranka speak Japanese, while Sheryl speaks French. This detail is never explicitly mentioned nor is language barrier ever a thing, it adds to the world building, making Frontier feel like this super fun multi-cultural city of dreams I would very much want to live in.

The setting works great because it sits in that goldilocks zone between fantasy and hard si-fi, we have artificial gravity for example so that the colony ship can be just a flat piece of landscape instead of some kind of cylinder. Macross battleship the series is known for can also have this epic humanoid form without confusing orientations, it just makes many scenes and interactions much easier to understand.

It is at the same time also full of details that reflect real-world physics like for example tips on how to survive brief exposure to vacuum, self-sealing hulls, transportation networks, hold-down straps for hospital patients in case they fall out of their bed from ship maneuver etc. Details like these make the show feel very believable and realistic despite the few key fantastical technologies that make this world work. Each major character has their own completely unique cellphone design. Ranka's phone for example is like no other, it's soft squishy almost like a living animal with its own gesture-based text input UI. It can even eat a CD to play it, so much more interesting than rectangular slabs we have now in the actual future.

Macross has always been about power of song, in the first series it’s not really explained why singing can win wars, but in Macross 7 they went all-in goofy, making the power of song literally shoot ki blast like a DBZ fight. Then in Macross Zero they rebound to full realism and made songs have no power what so ever. I think Frontier again is in the goldilocks zone in terms of power of song, it is of no tactical value except as moral boost and another key exception later on. The setting feels realistic but still allows power of song to play instrumental roles in some cases without feeling goofy. It’s clearly a delicate balance since they will go on to mess this up again toward the goofy side with Macross Delta.

Ranka's Kira attack is the strongest move in the entire show.

The songs themselves are of course, just the best. I think they’re still among the top pics in karaoke in Japan to this day, in fact they’re still doing a new live performance July 2025, when the last performance for Macross Delta the sequel was held in 2023. I’m not sure how to talk about or evaluate music, I’ll just say many of these songs have never left my MP3/Smartphone/Playlist since 2007.

Choujikuu Super Live cosmic nyaan

This show doesn’t have any deep philosophy, it’s pretty straight forward and it’s about taking control of one’s own destiny. It does a good job of keeping all the elements of the story in coherent around the theme, for example the entire Frontier fleet is wondering across the galaxy in search of a destination they do not yet know.

Protagonist Alto was a prodigy actor of traditional Japanese stage play, yes that is pretty random, but then decided that he wants to be a pilot instead, a difficult path but one he has chosen for himself. Ranka Lee is a regular high school girl with a passion for singing but without the drive to turn it into a career, she will have to find that courage to fully grasp her destiny. Sheryl is basically Taylor Swift who is on tour to Frontier from another colony fleet, always believed she was destined to be the star she already is, but she will soon find that was never the case. Giant alien chick bitch slaps her regular size boyfriend inside of a mech, these are some great characters, seriously. Right, there’s another colony fleet, Galaxy, a ship with completely different vibe, we don’t really see what it’s like but I’d imagine it’s like Night City from Cyberpunk 2077. The mere suggestion of its existence and how different it is, instantly expands the world building, and incentivizes your imagination to go wild, it’s great. What do you mean by "melee combat" in an aircraft carrier?

Frontier also strikes the perfect middle ground in terms of the combat choreography. Macross Zero was more realistic but not as romantic, Delta and even Frontier's own movie version both had more fancy combat that went overboard and started to lose contact with reality I feel. Here in the TV series they're stretching the believability of "melee combat with 500m tall gigantic mech" barely to the limit, these giant ships aren't moving too fast to start feeling small again. While watching this you could almost believe it is actually a good idea to make your aircraft carrier transformable into humanoid form, certainly with help from the rule of cool.

Animation alone would only get this 4/5 but music more than makes up for the 5 Bonus point for Ranka being my favorite waifu Bonus point for music, this show has so many bangers Bonus point for triangle love, a curiously lacking theme in anime today

A word on the movie, there's 2 movies that's an alternative shortened version of this story and has a very different, but now canon ending. I suspect the movie plot has been tempered by corporate decisions with consideration for property rights and the convenience of the next Macross series, Delta. I am convinced the TV series ending is more faithful to the characters and story, where as the movie ending is a compromise to real-world events. They're still great movies that get most of the main characters across, but sacrifice some less important characters. The reworked final battle I feel is too over the top and started entering goofy territory.