An alien spaceship crash lands on Earth and her secrets lead to a desperate war against an alien enemy sent to retrieve the ship.
There is a scene in the first episode that contains an animator's inside joke. Hikaru crashes his Valkyrie into a building marked "Studio Nue". This was the name of the animation studio that produced Macross. Studio Nue's mascot, a grinning imp creature, was also on the building. If you watch closely, you can see the imp react in horror as Hikaru careens toward the building.
Shammy Milliome:
Captain, there's no smoking on the bridge!
Bruno J. Global:
Oh, of course not, Shammy. I was just holding it.
Due to the fact that at least three studios of wildly varying quality worked on each episode simultaneously, many minor continuity errors and animation inconsistencies (for instance in Ep. 3 "Spacefold" where the escape pod under Roy's Valk every so often switches to a gunpod) crop up in each episode.
The Japanese TV ending is literally a sampling of the pictures in Hikaru's album from one of the episodes. If you look in the top right, you'll see his flight helmet there.
The first two episodes were originally edited in to one hour-long episode for the show's premiere on 5 October 1982 in the Osaka region. The opening of the show was changed to avoid any shots of Hikaru in a Valkyrie or the Valkyrie's "Battroid" (full robot) mode.
Japanese