Kidô senshi Gandamu: Suisei no majo

I missed the Gundam franchise altogether and maybe I'm late to the party now, but started watching this show with high hopes anyway. I tried watching retro mecha anime many times, but couldn't get myself over the retro look. I'm sensitive to art quality.

The Witch from Mercury looks stellar. The characters are pretty neat and it really reeks from atmosphere, the space scenes are particurarly atmospheric also the music is supporting it well. I was engaged from the beginning and will definitely watch this show for a longer duration. It's a mixture of mecha battles, campus slice of life and political intrique and a little yuri romance. Still on the positive side, there are no annoying characters, unnecessary drama, fan service or filler episodes and the male characters are cool too.

The battles are somehow not that stellar, even tough, there is one almost in each episode. Battle choreographies are simply not clever enough (watch The Expanse for what I mean by clever; even the end of the first Appleseed movie packed more gunpowder). Somehow the script is dumb. It takes on grand schemes, which is respectable, but then it falls short with the implementation, mostly in the "political intrique" department. Not ridicuolusly annoying, just a bit childish, like Suletta herself. I guess teenagers might be able to wholeheartedly enjoy it, but as a grown up adult I was constantly skeptical and smiling ironically. Maybe, this could have been an acceptable story somewhere in the 80's, but by today's standards, well... there are more cleverly written shows out there for certain.

Still, it reaches the bar, as long as my bar is concerned. I'm a big sci-fi fan, so I'm less strict with this one. I could complain endlessly, that characters are not polished enough, especially the side characters are neglected, they are just "being there", but the story moves ahead with a comfortable pace, it never gets boring and it always feels good to look at the screen. It's a bit flat and Suletta's and Miorine's relationship is not really going anywhere crazy or fast. I had the very same feeling with Angel Beats. Interesting enough to do not stop watching, it has a heart and can be loved for what it is, but wouldn't watch it again or recommend it to anybody as one of my favourites.

UPDATE: At the end of Season 1 it finds its fangs and switches gears to a darker and more serious tone (people starts dying, so the main issue is not who marries Miorine anymore... ;) ) which makes it way better, so I raised my seven to eight. Battles are still somewhat boring, but at least it's not duels now, but real war. I'm a bit more angry for all the script pitfalls and overdone scenes (didn't these guys know proportion?), because it could have been a masterpiece rather just being good. But it definitely has memorable moments, worth watching once.

There's only been like 4 episodes released so review is based on those.

It's not like typical Gundam series.

The animation is beautiful, the story is okay, but the main character Suletta is extremely silly. Many anime have silly moments and childish characters but Suletta is on another level. She has the mannerisms of a 5 year old child. Hiding behind people because she's too shy, crying like a toddler, which makes it even more weird that they're dueling over marriages.

They've basically made what would normally be the comic relief character the main character of the show. This makes it harder to take her seriously as a pilot when you see how she acts, it's hard to believe that she has the constitution to go into space and pilot a mobile suit. It's similar as to how in season 2 of Gundam00 the guy's ditzy girlfriend had become an elite mobile suit pilot. It just didn't fit.

They've shown little so far as per the normal themes of Gundam, but Im hoping it will get better. Even the Gundam has a more round cutesy face than normal, because the pilot is female, and females cute, shy and innocent, right?

I really hope it get's more serious later on.

Sapphic gundam is enough to get me to watch gundam. And it was pretty good. It still has anime things that have been so ingrained in the format you can't help but try to find something eye roll worthy endearing, and sometimes I can do that. Sometimes though, stuff does not make sense because the priority is to surprise the viewer. So, watch this when you're in the mood to allow a lot of hand waves and want The Mood. You won't be sorry.

If you've heard that this is written excellence though, unfortunately this is not that. It's really fun and actually has some amount of queer rep though. And war is bad. Capitalism is bad. I can get on board with that.

Music Amazing, Drama, action, funny all there.

Japanese language version much much better than english version.

The issue which is not relevant at all to the series is the love story between girls, again forcing this to a new generation of teenagers, pfff The 2 seasons, takes u gradually into action, really really good, u will watch it again and again and the music alone gets u addicted.

U might have seen a previous series or the movie of gundam but u will search for more series or movies to watch, each has its own story, not related to each other which is slso really good to see, looking forward to see a real good movie from these series.

So firstly let me say the good stuffs. The art and music in this anime is done pretty well.

That's it for the good stuffs so let the bad ones roll.

1. Plot. The whole plot is full of plot holes and a lot of the direction of how the story progress is due to chance/fate? Its completely random and I think I would shoot myself in the head if I am the author of the story.

2. Main character. Suletta is not an interesting person at all. They tried to make her likeable, but she is not cute or interesting, or relatable. I understand that there might be due to further character development, but I don't see anything interesting until the last episode where we finally see something going on but its too little and too late.

3. Other characters: The is no one that is particularly charismatic or interesting. Miorine is too much of a princess. Guel is too arrogant, Elan and Shaddiq are both too pretentious.

In my humble opinion, just skip this for now. If season 2 does pick up, then maybe can consider to watch this. I've regretted spending like 6 hours on it...