Poking around the OVA treasure trove that was the 1980's it's not hard to notice themes and influences barely a year or two apart. The 2000's have had their fair share of instant trends, between Sword Art Online inspiring the isekai boom, K-On and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya revitalizing mainstream moe culture, and My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute bringing us the unfortunate series that is little sister light novels, but of course the instant feedback from works like Mobile Suit Gundam and Birth is nothing to sneeze at either. Sometimes you can find it even outside the big leagues; if you wanted to trace the punk style of Studio AIC's Bubblegum Crisis for example, one barely has to follow their own output back two years to find Megazone 23's Space Adventure Cobra-esque celebration of youth, technology, and revolt, as well as the lesser known Fight!! Iczer-1, an alien invasion staved off by two women in a power suit distilled down into five or so fight scenes over three episodes.
The character designs especially evoke a Bubblegum Crisis nostalgia. Starting around this period we get no shortage of the so-called “battling beauty” character archetype, but in this case that extends to both the protagonists and their three main opponents, a fair chunk for a show with no more than 10 named characters in total. A range of hair from yellow to blue to orange is plenty reminiscent of the Bubblegum Crisis Knight Sabers, even if some of them are playing for the other team (yes, I also mean there are lesbians; canon ones even, although don't go in expecting that to play a major role rather than just a nice touch).
But in Bubblegum Crisis the Knight Sabers were on a team together, and all of them were ready to fight the good fight. In the first episode of Iczer-1, Nagisa Kanou goes from being a normal schoolgirl to a target for the invading Cthulhu, to being cajoled into even using her latent powers to pilot a giant anti-Cthulhu robot, about ten years before the same situation would make Neon Genesis Evangelion's Ikari Shinji famous. That cajoling lasts for most of the second episode for good measure. With her resistance against sticking it to the people who killed her parents and are actively trying to wipe humanity from the face of the earth, stacking her up against the squad of Bubblegum Crisis leaves something to be desired, and the fact that her kickass partner Iczer-1 has to spend so much effort and attention pressing her into service—at one point with a literal tractor beam—detracts somewhat from her as well.
So the real takeaway from that last paragraph is characters be damned. Iczer-1 does excel in terms of visuals, especially for people who enjoy that rough old cel style. Besides the character designs from director Hirano Toshiki mentioned above, this was an early work for Oobari Masami, famed animator and later director for (surprise!) Bubblegum Crisis, and his action sequences are dynamic and chaotic. More than his work though, the big draw for me was the monster transformation sequences, oozing and dripping with horror and thoroughly revolting. The monsters appear from people, so it's not so much the final appearance of the monsters as the way their human shapes disintegrate and slide off the fleshy tendons underneath. Not every OVA from the era had to innovate their stories, and if action and horror are enough of a draw for you then it's a nice movie-length ride. Then again, if you can read this you have Youtube and Sakugabooru at your fingertips, so take your pick.