Taylor

Anime has been in, dare I say, a recession. I of course with most things blame COVID. Production delays, deadly fires, lockdowns, the whole has just DRAGGED anime as a genre down. Last season though, I said we’re back baby. True, true, I was right, but this season? We are SO fucking back. FULLY back.

Gundam, just behind Dragonball, is THE anime for me. Back in the day Toonami had G Gundam in one of its big afternoon slots and Lil Tay didn't miss a SINGLE episode of that. I've probably seen each Gundam series at least once in my life. Not a single series has really disappointed in my opinion though Turn A was kind of weird. The latest outing for the franchise, Iron Blooded Orphans, fucked on an entirely different level though, bringing the series back from its semi-slump with a gritty look at child soldiers from Mars.

So now almost out of the blue, we get a new series called THE WITCH FROM MERCURY. I was excited to hear about this, but as I started looking a promo material and the like I started referring to the show as Little Gundam Academia. Its set in a school for Gundam pilots and engineers or something. I had no idea what to expect, going in fully blind, but I cant say I was disappointed.

The art as always was decent. The Gundam series very much has a style and the anime hits it very faithfully. The CG is ok, its not Overlord level jarring but you can still tell.

The characters are always where a Gundam series thrives, and in this entry, it looks again to be the case. The MC is a bit annoying with her constant shy bullshit, but the deutoragonist, the silver haired Miorine is RIGHT up my alley.

The story seems simple enough so far: MC goes to a space station with her Gundam at her mothers request from Mercury to study at this school, gets into hijinks, and at the end of the episode gets into a duel against local retard and spoiled brat Guel Jeturk (stupid name), who is Miorine's fiance (  ). She beats him in the duel and this is where things get great: By beating him, Miorine is now HER fiancé. Fucking YURI BAIT LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. There’s also a lot of behind the scenes politics, like a narrowly avoided assassination attempt on Miorines dad whos some corpo big shot or something. Kind of dark but that's what Gundam really is. I kept expecting something super sinister to happen but it thankfully didn’t, although Iron Blooded Orphans took a few eps to really crank up the dark factor. Still fucked up over that one scene where they gun down that cute girl in the mall.

Anyways, overall its a good show, a lot of potential. The ending fight sequence was hype AS FUCK. I look forward to seeing more of it. I don't have a scoring system to give here, so just go watch it, its good.