OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Big Wars

Big Wars is yet another military space adventure in the spirt of Starship Troopers, even though this feature-length anime out before the American take on book. The OVA special came out in 1993 by Magic Bus and is inherently "Earth Vs. Flying Saucers". Yoshio Aramaki who also created the Kantai series wrote the novel this anime is based on. Aramaki specialized in alternative history, so it's not too hard to look at Big Wars as being in an alternate future.

After a whopping text crawl explaining how humans first colonized Mars, the story shifts ahead to the early 25th Century where an unseen race of aliens have appeared to claim the planet as their own and refer to themselves as The Gods. Whether these Gods are genuine divine beings isn't ever revealed in the story, but they attack with flying saucers and can brainwash humans into acting as agents for them. Captain Akuh leads an assault against the God's main mobile base known as Hell in his own submersible warcraft, the Aoba, which is similar to Space Battleship Yamato as it's an old military wreck that was rebuilt for a new generation. Akuh has to deal with a corrupted government and a mind-controlled girlfriend, but in the long run he leads a suicide mission inside the alien fortress in heavy gear armored suits to sabotage their engine. It's unknown whether this permanently stopped the Gods or if there was further fighting, even though it does culminate in a psychologically stressful event with the aliens using telepathy to nearly drive the Aoba's crew mad.

Big Wars has bold visuals and vigorous battle sequences, even if most of it is tanks shooting down fast flying saucers. The story is fairly bland and nothing you haven't probably seen before, but the characters are still better than anything you would see in a Michael Bay blockbuster. You won't miss anything by skipping over this, nonetheless it is an interesting view at 90s anime.