The first episode ends on a question that makes you lean forward. Zero walks into GOA and immediately you sense that nothing about this training program is what it claims to be, that the real threat isn't coming from space, and that he's walking into something designed to break him before he ever sits in a Goddess. The color work and character animation are so clean they make the mystery feel tangible, like you're reading a puzzle someone actually took time to design. What kills it: the show burns out at episode twelve, right when it's ready to tell you what was actually happening, so you'll spend weeks waiting for answers that never arrive.

Humanity clings to a single planet, Zion, after an alien species called Victim wiped out its other colonies. To keep Victim from destroying this last world, the GOA training school gathers boys from the Zion colonies to pilot the Ingrids, known as the Goddesses: five fighting robots that defend the planet. Every candidate needs the rare EO blood type and a special ability called EX. Zero, Candidate 88, has barely arrived at GOA when he falls into the cockpit of the Ingrid Eeva-Leena. Because the link between pilot and machine is so delicate, everyone expects the Goddess to kill him, yet he achieves a full synch just before losing consciousness. His pilot training starts before he can learn more about what happened.