Don't get me wrong, I love anything Macross-related, and this isn't a total disaster: the animation is beautiful, particularly in the dogfights, there's some nice humor here and there, some pulse pounding action and so forth, though the musical score struck me as rather generic and bland, and there's much to praise in the beautifully-realized transforming mecha, that's all great stuff.
Alas, the story is goofy and the conclusion is incoherent. Young Buck Pilot crash lands on a Polynesian island that's populated by Aztecs (Or maybe it was Mayans). Excuse me? Turns out the Aztecs were experimented on 10,000 years ago by aliens they called "The Birdmen," and the priestly bloodline in these Polynesian Aztecs (Or Mayans) have the ability to psychically control various Birdmen artifacts left behind, including a machine that will wipe out all of humanity if we haven't figured out how to control our more base instincts (Violence, hate) by the time it's activated. Well, despite what Thor Heyerdahl wrote, neither Mayans nor Aztecs were Polynesian, and Polynesians are no mesoamericans, and even if they were, Polynesia was only settled in the last two or three thousand years and neither Mayan nor Aztec civilization was anywhere near 10,000 years old. In essence, it's just ancient astronauts crap that would play well in the 70s, but is kind of dated and silly now. That notwithstanding, we have the UN fighting the aptly-but-unimaginatively-named "Anti-UN" over control of this island and it's artifacts. The Anti-UN are not given any great depth or motivation, and the characters are not exactly compelling. It's good to see Roy Fokker again, but he's more of a jerk than usual in this OVA, and we get a cameo of Captain Bruno Global towards the end, but aside from that, no one we know is here. All of this would be merely annoying, of course, if the story were good, but the story is not good. It's merely an excuse to show some admittedly amazing dogfights, some cool transforming robots, and a (Typically) hot naked chick. The story is something to string action pieces to, but doesn't really have any umph behind it. It's ending is utterly abrupt and incoherent, and in the end none of this has any real relevance to the rest of the Macross universe. (or, for that matter, the Robotech universe where I think it could probably fit in somewhat easier.) In the end, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened that no one ever bothers to talk about again afterwards, so it may as well have not happened.
Many people complain about the hokey-jokey nature of Macross 7. (Occasionally for good reason) Macross Zero goes to the exact opposite extreme, and is positively grim, far far grimmer than the original Macross, and remember the original Macross involved the deaths of 6 billion 999 million human beings in the space of about ten minutes, so it's a pretty grim show on occasion by itself. Everybody in this miniseries is so dour and unlikeable and grim all the time, to the point that it was hard to get involved in the whisper-thin storyline.
Also, I found the redesign of Fokker's character to be particularly distracting. Pilots in Macross generally had long hair, and Roy was no exception. In flashbacks in Macross we also saw that he had long hair years in the past, however in Zero he's got a more typical military buzz-cut in 2008. Unless he's wearing a wig or hair extensions (Unlikely), there's no way he could have grown his hair out to Macross lengths in a year or so. This creates a continuity error through the series, and I'm probably taking this too seriously, but it really distracted me.
Alas, the story is goofy and the conclusion is incoherent. Young Buck Pilot crash lands on a Polynesian island that's populated by Aztecs (Or maybe it was Mayans). Excuse me? Turns out the Aztecs were experimented on 10,000 years ago by aliens they called "The Birdmen," and the priestly bloodline in these Polynesian Aztecs (Or Mayans) have the ability to psychically control various Birdmen artifacts left behind, including a machine that will wipe out all of humanity if we haven't figured out how to control our more base instincts (Violence, hate) by the time it's activated. Well, despite what Thor Heyerdahl wrote, neither Mayans nor Aztecs were Polynesian, and Polynesians are no mesoamericans, and even if they were, Polynesia was only settled in the last two or three thousand years and neither Mayan nor Aztec civilization was anywhere near 10,000 years old. In essence, it's just ancient astronauts crap that would play well in the 70s, but is kind of dated and silly now. That notwithstanding, we have the UN fighting the aptly-but-unimaginatively-named "Anti-UN" over control of this island and it's artifacts. The Anti-UN are not given any great depth or motivation, and the characters are not exactly compelling. It's good to see Roy Fokker again, but he's more of a jerk than usual in this OVA, and we get a cameo of Captain Bruno Global towards the end, but aside from that, no one we know is here. All of this would be merely annoying, of course, if the story were good, but the story is not good. It's merely an excuse to show some admittedly amazing dogfights, some cool transforming robots, and a (Typically) hot naked chick. The story is something to string action pieces to, but doesn't really have any umph behind it. It's ending is utterly abrupt and incoherent, and in the end none of this has any real relevance to the rest of the Macross universe. (or, for that matter, the Robotech universe where I think it could probably fit in somewhat easier.) In the end, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened that no one ever bothers to talk about again afterwards, so it may as well have not happened.
Many people complain about the hokey-jokey nature of Macross 7. (Occasionally for good reason) Macross Zero goes to the exact opposite extreme, and is positively grim, far far grimmer than the original Macross, and remember the original Macross involved the deaths of 6 billion 999 million human beings in the space of about ten minutes, so it's a pretty grim show on occasion by itself. Everybody in this miniseries is so dour and unlikeable and grim all the time, to the point that it was hard to get involved in the whisper-thin storyline.
Also, I found the redesign of Fokker's character to be particularly distracting. Pilots in Macross generally had long hair, and Roy was no exception. In flashbacks in Macross we also saw that he had long hair years in the past, however in Zero he's got a more typical military buzz-cut in 2008. Unless he's wearing a wig or hair extensions (Unlikely), there's no way he could have grown his hair out to Macross lengths in a year or so. This creates a continuity error through the series, and I'm probably taking this too seriously, but it really distracted me.