This season’s other mecha original premiere, and Juuou Mujin Dandivine doesn’t make much more of an impression on me than Vertex Force did. It’s not bad, but there’s really nothing in this premiere than stands out (I feel like I’m saying that a lot this season). Writer Inoue Toshiki has been doing this for a long time and has done some very solid work on adaptations, but I don’t see much spark of originality in Dandivine. It just feels like a congee of every mecha anime that’s come before it, left on the stove just a little too long.

Where Vertex Force had a strange mostly-CGI hybrid look, Dandivine betrays its low budget with generally tired conventional animation (the CGI is applied in the usual places, mainly the battle scenes). For story we have a kid named Shijima Gekiha who’s only notable for how utterly normal he is. But his uncle Yuusaku (I don’t imagine anyone but Konishi Katsuyuki was ever even considered for the role) was the pilot of Dandivine, the mecha that saved Japan from the invading Aposdolls twenty years earlier. They’re back, and Yuusaku – who’s just bummed a free meal off a kid – takes his nephew along for the ride.

The hook here, such as it is, is that the the president of the toy company that got rich on Dandivine models is bemoaning this era of peace. Is he behind this revival of Aposdoll peril, or just happy about it? I don’t care that much, to be honest. If I had to judge I’d say that despite its myriad flaws, I probably found Vertex Force’s premiere a little more engaging narratively and more interesting visually. But neither of those are particularly high bars.