I would have to say that Gunbusters has the building blocks necessary to make a very good character driven mech show. It is something that really wanted to do more than it had the episodes to do, and therefor suffers a fair bit. Character development that had major effects on motivations and repercussions on characters, gets shoved into a 20 minute period that you end up not really caring about. While the story itself is fairly basic and easy to understand, overcome personal challenges and pilot big mech to defeat aliens while suffering at points along the way and in the end win the war.

The characters are the largest casualties of the short 6 episode run time Gunbusters was given. Character arcs and development end up being forced into 10-20 minute segments in an episode. And feels really awkward at times with how quickly characters change in their beliefs and grow. You end up with characters like Smith, who gets 1 episode and has repercussions for another episode. But during this time I kept getting the idea that Noriko and Smith were supposed to have spend weeks together and even might have developed some feelings for each other, but that was never shown or given any time. Or Jung, who goes from somebody who dislikes Noriko and Kazumi and has this rivalry with them at the beginning of the episode, to having a decent friendly relationship with them by the end of the episode. But then will suddenly have moments when the rivalry shows up again randomly, for seemingly no reason for one scene. And then goes back to being good friends and hanging out with them, it just makes her character feel very disjointed. At one point it seemed like they wanted a conflict to develop between Kazumi and Noriko over how much time Noriko was spending with Coach, based around Kazumi being jealous of how attention Coach has always given Noriko. But it lasted about 10 minutes and was resolved without any issue.

I did like the artwork and animation throughout the show, and thought it looked pretty good. At times you could see the shots they reused from other episodes, or issues were they forgot to finish drawing a scene. But never once did I think it looked bad, it just looked fairly good. Episode 6 also had a rather unique style that got used so they could finish the show the way they wanted to. When it kinda turned into a slideshow of single shots of various fights and events occurring throughout the final push, and did a really good job of showing the fight without actually animating everything.

The story I feel wasn't all that special, but was good enough for the time given. The new pilot Noriko with a famous dad, who isn't that good a piloting. Improves over the course of the show to become better, being driven at times by revenge and also a wish to stop the enemy and saving everybody on Earth. While improving she gets assistance from the various characters, and finally grows enough to be able to pilot the ultimate mech that gets used to save the day. The enemy they are fighting never really gets developed in any way, it is just a mindless enemy they are trying to defeat before it gets to Earth.

By the end I enjoyed my time with it, but am left wishing it had more time to tell it's story. Because 6 episodes just wasn't enough to tell the full story them wanted to and develop these characters in the meaningful ways they wanted to. But I would still say go ahead and watch it if you feel like watching an old decent mech show.