Egao no Daika is a run of the mill mecha anime that does very little to stray from convention. The show attempts to explore the philosophical quandaries of war, however, it falls face first by approaching this issue on a fairly rudimentary level. The core philosophical stances this anime takes on war can be broken down into two basic points, war is bad and everyone in a war is human. While it may seem reductionist, it isn't, this show has such a generic message that you'd be hard pressed to find any piece of media related to war that doesn't have this message. Therein lies the problem, this show has very little reason to exist because these points have been illustrated in a far more entertaining and interesting ways than this show could ever hope to achieve. Aside from my gripes with the overall themes of the show there is very little redeeming that this show does. First and foremost the mecha fight scenes are uninventive and frankly boring in most cases. The show relies on ambiguous pseudoscience that's extremely unclear namely the chrars. The chrars are never explained as to what they even are, one is lead to believe they are energy cores of some form, however the show never goes into detail on how these operate or sets up any rules surrounding them. This ambiguity makes the final payoff of the plot completely meaningless and unfulfilling. The plot stumbles around after episode three and never seems to get back on it's feet till episode ten, as such everything that happened in between this time is pretty much a blur of boring plot points. The only thing that occurs in these episodes is that a few characters died and even this is uninteresting because after their death it makes one realize their utter unimportnace to everything going on because the plot just continues with little regard making you ultimately wonder why the character even existed to begin with aside from just pushing the plot along. With the exception of the main characters most of the characters within the show are all interchangeable, as such, they are uninteresting, utterly devoid of all personality and just melt into one bulbous mass of innocuous filler. The main characters are recognizable at least, beyond that they aren't really developed in any meaningful way to make you understand them as people, which is ironic for a show trying humanize war. All in all this show is a boring mess with middle school level philosophy and a cast of generic characters that doesn't bring anything interesting to the table that you haven't seen a million times in a countless number of other war related media.