This review contains a Discord mod’s favourite kind of spoilers - minor spoilers. If you want to avoid those, or just don’t want to have to read the entire thing, then skip to the last paragraph right at the bottom of the review, after the last rainbow breaker.
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury has, for me at least, been a surprise that capped off a year of surprises. A lot happened in 2022 that changed my life for better or worse, and in the middle of everything - as has always been the case - I turned towards fiction in various formats from books to games to movies and anime to get my mind off of things or just give me the room to process things. I even watched all the Evangelion rebuild movies and in the process ended up with a new appreciation for a franchise I once completely hated, and like Evangelion before it, the Gundam franchise was one that I had little if any love for. So when I watched this anime’s prologue episode, even after a glowing review from someone who has Good Opinions, I did so with the expectation that I would be mostly unimpressed and uninterested. Yet 12 episodes and a few months later, I’ve just seen the end of the first season of undoubtedly one of my favourite anime from 2022. There’s a lot that this anime does well, but there were really two key areas that Witch from Mercury excelled at which made it such a great viewing experience, that being its character writing and the immersive quality of the writers' approach.
On the first count, Suletta and Miorine are probably my absolute favourite main duo from any anime I saw in 2022. More than just their relationship with each other, I really appreciated how authentic both characters felt. In lesser anime and more poorly written stories in general, the relationships that characters have tend to be controlled by the needs of the plot, almost as if there’s a quota for how many fights a couple should have before they make up in time for the season finale. For some reason the first thing that came to mind in terms of examples of that kind of writing was Titans, the live action Teen(?) Titans adaptation, but it doesn’t matter as long as you get the idea, it’s extraordinarily lazy writing with very little internal logic behind why characters behave in certain ways, and it gets frustrating. Witch from Mercury doesn’t have this issue at all, because the state of a given relationship or dynamic in this anime is determined by the mindset and particular outlooks of the characters involved.
When Miorine and Suletta have a disagreement, it’s not difficult to understand why, it’s not a betrayal of either character or a comically funny breakdown in communication, it’s a misalignment born from their particular perspectives in that moment, and those perspectives themselves are the result of their wildly different upbringings and personalities. Speaking of which, Suletta’s entire personality made her endlessly endearing right from the start. She’s socially awkward and nervous but always able to confront challenges head-on whether or not she’s scared. You could say that outline is fairly common among anime protagonists but the dialogue and voice acting probably go a long way towards really selling it here, the stuttering, long silences and bad jokes make it all feel much more genuine. We’re presented with a relatable character just trying to find her way in the world and choosing to persevere no matter what comes, and since that made me care about Suletta, I cared about the story going on around her. Miorine, the emotionally neglected heiress of an interplanetary conglomerate, is also a deeply sympathetic character through her continuous battles to assert herself and gain control over her own life after having everything dictated to her by people and institutions who only cared for what she could do for them rather than caring about her as a person. These are distinct characters who work well together, but that I would just as readily watch as protagonists of their own separate stories.
A lot of stories tend to throw you in head-first and not give you the space to take in or process a lot of the information or events you’re being presented with, and considering how short people’s collective attention spans are and how quick studios can be to kill projects off if they don’t get enough traction, it’s easy to understand why. The prologue of Witch From Mercury does do that to an extent, and it also serves the dual purpose of building a degree of mystery to Delling’s intentions as well as Suletta’s background in the main story, but the anime takes things a fair bit slower after that point and I personally appreciate that quite a lot. That way, when we do get back to the levels of high octane action in the prologue, it carries much more impact. We spend most of this first season in a relatively low-stakes school setting and through that we become immersed in the relationships and motivations of the characters, and the conflicts in the world of the story brewing under the surface with the references to discrimination, oppression and distant wars that we get throughout. I love knowing exactly what’s at stake before things get turned upside down, and this anime is able to create a relatively calm status quo to upend without having it necessarily feel mundane or uneventful, especially with the action of the prologue serving as a portent of things to come whenever this world’s conflicts inevitably bubble back up to the surface. It’s structurally similar to Attack on Titan’s first episode, where you get the shot of the Colossal Titan right at the start and spend the rest of that episode building up to it. Once a viewer is immersed in the story and looking at things from the perspective of the characters in that story, all of the violence suddenly becomes much more horrifying than it is cool to look at.
It does bear mentioning though that this anime is in fact very well drawn and animated, which shouldn’t come as a surprise since Sunrise always does a good job with the various Gundam anime iterations, this is their most prominent franchise after all. The characters are expressive, animated fluidly and really well designed. I saw people online mentioning the range of body types on display with the characters as well, which is something I didn’t personally pick up on at first but is definitely a welcome departure from the more typical designs that anime characters tend to have. This being a new instalment of the Gundam franchise, I’m sure there’s probably a lot of discussion on some corners of the internet about how the mechs looked this time around, and while I don’t generally get into that sort of thing and therefore can’t comment much on the different designs, I felt like they all had a certain weight to the way they were animated that really emphasised the scale of these machines at points. The final episode had my favourite example of that in the post-credits scene, with the Aerial’s hand alone being this massive presence when we get that shot of it from a more human scale. Also goes without saying that the action is incredible, and never without purpose, which made each duel between mecha pilots over the course of the anime feel engaging in its own right, I mean for heaven’s sake this anime made me care about a fight involving a guy named Guel Jeturk by the end of the final episode.
With all that said, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury was a really fun anime to watch weekly, and is still more than worth a recommendation, especially if you’re a fan of stories that take their time to build character-focused stakes and tension while also delivering expertly animated and high impact action. It very easily earns a score of 85 out 100 for this first season and could realistically go even higher with future seasons as it explores more of the ideas that this season introduced.
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