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Do you like Top Gun for totally heterosexual reasons?
Did Witch from Mercury ending so soon leave a gay-mecha-sized hole in your heart that nothing else can fill?
Do you find euphemisms about how good it feels to be inside your super robot hilarious?

If your answer to any of these questions was yes, you'll probably enjoy Bang Brave Bang Bravern!

Jokes aside Bravern is a very fun watch. Don't go into it thinking it's gonna be a gritty real robots story like the first episode leads you to believe. It's a comedy and should be tagged on MAL as such.

American-style military homoeroticism and mecha are a match made ... in heaven, and I always love when a studio takes a risk with such a ridiculous idea. This is CygamesPictures after all; most notable for putting way too much effort into the Priconne anime.

And if for some reason I haven't convinced you yet: there's also plenty of female nudity for those cultured enough to appreciate both sexes.

There are lots of anime that I love, but I usually only ever find a favourite once every couple of years. I'm talking a show that consumes your every thought as you're waiting for next week's episode, a piece of media that hits all the right notes and vibes with you perfectly.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is the most recent example of that for me, it's been six months since it ended and I'm still thinking about it.

The soundtrack is stellar, I can't even narrow it down to the 20 best tracks, even if you have no interest in a show like this ... you owe it to yourself to listen to it. That Sunrise animation is gorgeous as always and the mecha designs are the sexiest I've ever seen. The art style and character designs are also fantastic. And to top it all off, it even has an amazing dub. In my opinion all but one character's performance is either on par with or surpasses the original Japanese VAs.

Season 1 is the perfect intro cour to me. The prologue acts as an origin story for the villain and establishes the politics of the world. The first episode introduces our leading ladies their dynamic and the stunning Aerial mobile suit. The head of each house gets their own little arc to explore their relationships and expand upon the politics behind their corporations. And finally the first season ends with reveal of the new Aerial Rebuild and a cliffhanger hinting at a full transition into the darker tone that's been simmering in the background.

Season 2 started off on a high note, the Eri reveal happened and Guel was well into his redemption arc. There was an amazing new OP and ED, and the common belief in the community was that we weren't even halfway through the show yet: all other Gundam AUs had at least 50 episodes after all.

However the main issue plagueing this season soon began to rear its ugly head: pacing.

The show did in fact only have 25 episodes, so the narrative rushes towards it's conclusion and as a result every character except Suletta gets the bare minimum development. Here's just a few examples:

Guel defeats Shaddiq in one fight and has some half-baked conflict with his brother Lauda in the finale.
Elan 5 is sidelined the entire season, Pharact doesn't even get a fight despite being one of the main suits appearing in the OP.
Even Miorine, the other leading lady of the show doesn't get a proper resolution with her father.
Another particularly weird thing is the early part of in the season is spent setting up an Earth plotline only for it to get completely dropped.

So how did it end up this way? Well it's time for some speculation.

I think it's well known at this point that Bandai didn't have much confidence in the show, if they did they would have greenlit 50 episodes like every other Gundam AU. Executives didn't want Suletta and Miorine to be explicitly lesbian which led to that laughable press release where they said they wanted their relationship to be "open to interpretation", cutting Kana Ichinose's comments on the two's marriage from an interview. This leads me to believe that there were executives already meddling with production, and the team were told they weren't getting more cours during season 2's development. If that's true, it's quite honestly a miracle the ending didn't completely faceplant.

Obviously in hindsight this was a huge fucking mistake on Bandai's part, the G Witch kits were the highest selling of any new AU; and I'm sure they're kicking themselves for not giving what could've been a big cashcow for them a fair shot. If it's any solace we probably will get some kind of sequel, if only spiritual in nature due to how well the kits sold. Silver linings and all that.

I can't help wondering what this show could've been with even just 1 more cour. Witch from Mercury already takes a lot of inspiration from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, so imagine if the show also had a time skip where the faction lines were drawn and the characters all got glow-ups. Most of the characters already have a post-time skip design in the epilogue, so if you wanna be really conspiracy brained maybe a time skip was at least discussed in the concept stage.

So while I still love season 2 (I'm giving it a 9/10 after all), I always think of the missed potential and the even better show we could have gotten.

I don't usually write long-form reviews but I feel the need to write my thoughts down after finishing Part 2, and looking at its MAL score of 8.7+ makes me want to share my dissenting opinion even more.

I loved 86 part 1. I gave it a 10/10 and I don't find that Part 2 stacks up in comparison. I wouldn't even call Part 2 bad, just very disappointing. It's a case of a lot of small problems stacking up and taking you out of the story, so the emotional moments don't hit like they should.

I know very little of the source material but I get ... the feeling that the story in Part 1 was a self-contained story that got popular so the author wrote sequels that weren't part of the original vision. This is purely vibes-based so if you want to tell me that I'm wrong and which episodes adapt which LN volumes, feel free.

I'll be comparing both parts for most of the review so full SPOILERS from here on out. I'm not gonna talk about the good stuff in Part 2 because there are already plenty of other reviews you can read for that.

Let's start with Frederica. I was immediately put off by her introduction as the little sister character because we already had Kurena filling that role. In a show already about child soldiers, we didn't really need a loud, annoying even younger child.

In episode 2 she reveals that she's actually the heir to the fallen empire, spouting a line about "blood and soil". The imouto saying a nazi slogan? Maybe the show wants to make a point about the childish nature of fascism? Part 1 had a lot of political commentary that hit way too close to home after all.

Nope. Frederica is just a repeat of Shin's arc of killing his brother in Part 1. I guess the author thought a loli in uniform would look good on the posters and sell more figures. She even has pyschic powers like Shin, but without any of the mystery.

That's another big thing missing from part 2: mystery. Part 1 was full of them: why did Shin's previous handlers kill themselves? Why does Shin shoot his comrades? How can Shin hear ghosts? What happened between Shin and his brother? Are there other survivors outside the Republic? I could go on. A lot of Part 1's story was built on our naive Lena's growth in response to those reveals.

Part 2 doesn't really have that. Frederica just tells Shin her brother is a Legion robot in episode 2. The Federacy unceremoniously makes contact with two other countries. The only mystery is what happened to Lena after the Republic fell, but she's on the poster and in the OP, so she's obviously still alive.

That brings me to plot armour and death fakeouts. Part 1 wittles the 86 down from like 30 to 5, most of it is unceremonious too. But Part 2 just does not want to kill anyone, it even brings Fido back to life!

And it baffles me because the cliffhanger in Part 1 is the perfect setup to kill the other 4 and leave Shin the lone survivor. Shin's whole arc is about how alone and left behind he feels now that all his comrades have moved on through death. But you still have 4 perfectly healthy comrades dude! Frederica would've even made more sense being there if Shin had noone else!

The scene where Shin leaves his comrades behind one by one is tropey and hollow. When Anju fell down the cliff I got my hopes up for a moment that there were actually gonna be consequences for Shin's actions. But then Theoto stays behind too, and I realised they were just isolating Shin for the climax.

Raiden even makes a sacrifice play to save Shin, takes a direct hit from a weapon that can level entire city blocks, and survives. It's fucking maddening. Part 1 had characters get caught out in the open for a few seconds and be shot dead without mercy.

Can you imagine how much harder Shin's moments with Lena would hit in the last two episodes if he truly was alone? They are so well directed but they don't feel earned, the characters were never in any real danger or had to face any consequences so it's just has a hollow fairytale ending.

How to wrap this up?

I wanted to love Part 2, but I couldn't. And seeing everyone say it's better than Part 1 makes me think I'm insane. If you love Part 2, I don't want to take that away from you, writing my thoughts down like this is just therepeutic for me.

This is my first ever review, because this is the first time I feel so angry at an anime that I need to write it down.

This season is just a waste of time, the plot comes to a screeching halt after the season 2 finale and nothing fucking happens for most of this season. It simply didn't need to be 12 episodes, it could have been done in 6 or less, they should have just done a movie.

The side characters are almost completely absent, Hachiman's lost his wit and all the fun and comedy of the show has been sucked out. There was seriously only ... one scene in the whole season that I found vaguely amusing.

I sat through 12 episodes to see how it ends, and again it's the most lackluster, inconclusive shit you could imagine.

I can't think of a single character or story element that I enjoyed, so honestly I think I would have been happier if this season never happened, and that in itself says it all.