This one grabs you with the premise before it ever bothers making you love the pilots: Edo-era humans dug up three space capsules, panicked, buried them, and handed one family a torn map instead of an answer. Four hundred years later Akira Kamui is strapped into Tri-Zenon with his little brother Ai and Kanna riding along, and the show is far more interested in what the Zenon Guardians ARE than in giving its cast tidy arcs. That's the trade. Characters here are levers the plot pulls, and if you came up on 2000-era mecha you already know that's half the charm, the mythology unspooling capsule by capsule as the other two wake. Twenty-two episodes, no fat, aliens on the doorstep and a family legacy nobody asked to inherit. Watch it for the buried-history hook and the sheer nerve of making a kid brother copilot canon.

During the Edo Period, three mysterious capsules fell to Earth from space. The people of that time feared the objects might bring chaos, so they buried all three underground and gave a map describing them to the Kamui family. In the present day, the three objects are waking one at a time. The first is Tri-Zenon, one of the Zenon Guardians, now piloted by Akira Kamui, a descendant of that family, together with his brother Ai Kamui and his friend Kanna. When aliens come down to Earth with a purpose of their own, Tri-Zenon stands against them in this science fiction mecha series.