Overall a pretty average ending, though a step up from Rescue Force's drawn out epilogue. A good mix of battle and followup. Pretty happy with everything except for a couple of things
The epilogue
Spoiler
Everyone else kind of went off and did what you'd expect them to. No surprises there, so kind of blah. No real resolution on the love triangle, which is a pity. I know they never explicitly go into it, but they dangle this thing for nearly the entire course of the series and it ends with it still be ambiguous. I guess it allows people to make their own ending, depending on whether they're rooting for 4 or 1, but personally, I kind of would rather the writers just pick one
The battle
Spoiler
I've been thinking about the end of shows a lot recently. If you drew a graph for when the drama of a show climaxes, I think you'd find that it happens before the last episode.
Think about it. The main enemy in the show is ostensibly Don Kaen, but he gets almost no characterization. He's more of a plot device to give Fire-1 his sword and then be defeated by him to end everything. Joukaen, however, got a great back story, was truly menacing, had an interesting character.
The episode where Joukaen is defeated and gets his redemption and death was a million times more interesting than these last two. But maybe that's how things are supposed to be, with these last two just cleaning up the loose ends.
Anyway, I think you'll see this pattern a lot in shows. So what does this mean? I'm not sure, should writers try to end the story on a high point by cutting out the last few episodes somehow? Is that even possible or would it mean just ending too abruptly?