Haven't done one of these in a while, since I've mostly been embroiled in Final Fantasy. Thanks to the seemingly-endless amount of grinding, though, required to complete some of the harder post-game content, though, I did manage to slip in...
Sakura Wars TV - 3/10 - Playing the recently-released (in the US) Sakura Wars 5 got me in the mood to try and watch this again. Man, if I hadn't only been half-watching this as a distraction from all that tedious FF XIII grinding, I don't know how I would have gotten through this show. I tried it once before and just couldn't. Anyway, this series is pretty much a perfect example of why I find it hard to watch most anime from before 2001 or so: it's bland, it's boring, it's not terribly well-drawn or animated, and the English voice acting is terrible. What's bizarre about this is that this series was supposedly animated by Studio Madhouse, an studio well-known for its awesome animation. The show's plot just goes through the motions, never being outright bad and never being terribly good. The villain is comically bad, which is sad because he has an interesting backstory that could have gone interesting places if the writers gave a damn. He's evil because...Trix are for kids. Hell if I know. I guess he just picked up the script one day, saw that he was penciled in as a Stock Anime Villain Trying to Plunge the World Into Darkness with the Powers of Evil (TM), and just decided to go for it.
The one good thing this show has going for it is its insanely-catchy
opening theme (which I will now subject you to), produced in the days before the anime intro was so overwhelmingly J-pop singer-advertising as it is now.
Anyway, I've already devoted more words to this show than it deserves, but I will say this: I've started watching the movie that was produced shortly after this show concluded its run, and it's fairly enjoyable (and contains a few characters from Sakura Wars 5, if you're interested). I'll have more to say about that in movie thread.
EDIT: Actually, to the show's credit there is one other compliment I can give it: despite being a show about a bunch of teenage girls (and one gradeschooler) performing in plays and battling in steampunk robots, there's not a single goddamn exploitative scene in the show. If this show were made nowadays, it would be covered in panty and breast shots, especially of the gradeschooler. You can't imagine how refreshing it is (after all these years of watching anime) to see a show that has every opportunity to do so, but never sinks to that level.