This is the show that treats a crossover strategy game's original cast like they always deserved their own war epic, and it works because it never apologizes for the genre. Ryusei Date gets scouted out of an arcade sim and dropped into an actual Personal Trooper, which is the most honest wish-fulfillment premise mecha has ever run, and the SRX combination sequence with R-1, R-2 and R-3 is played completely straight every single time. Bian Zoldark isn't a cackling villain, he's a man who saw what came out of that Marquesas meteor and decided humanity had to be forced to get strong, and Divine Wars actually lets his argument breathe. Kyosuke and Excellen's Alteisen and Weissritter show up like a different anime crashed the party, in the best way. And yes, when Trombe plays, you know exactly who just arrived.

Humanity stands at a crossroads two centuries into the Space Era. After two meteors threw Earth into chaos, a third that landed in the Marquesas Islands turned out to hold advanced alien technology known as EOT. Dr. Bian Zoldark, head of the institute studying it, found evidence that its makers were heading to Earth to take it back or even invade. To guard against that threat, the government builds humanoid mecha called Personal Troopers. When robot bugs strike Tokyo, a robot game player named Ryusei is handed a real trooper to test whether he can fight, and he finds its controls match the game he knows. The result is action-driven science fiction built around mecha battles.