This is a review of both seasons taken as a single piece. It's one continuous story and is best looked at as a whole.

It has been a very long time since I have enjoyed anything as consistently or as viscerally as Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. It is a piece of work that builds on the legacy of Gundam as a franchise, but also draws significantly from Neon Genesis Evangelion and plays with concepts drawn from Shakespeare's The Tempest. The series has a deep and clear anger at how rich nations exploit poor nations and the military industrial complex forments conflict for the sake of profit, and at how the older generations are willing to sell out the younger generations for their own comfort in general, and that anger is given meaning by the tenderness and humanity with which it treats its characters. The warfare of this setting is not an all out conflict, but a pervasive ill whose wider effects draw in and harm people outside of it, and despite the efforts of some to contain it, death and destruction can still spill out into places that seem safe. This is a very astute and appropriate evolution for a franchise that is principally about the horrors of armed conflict but is now in a world where Japan and the main markets for anime are now separated from it, even as it continues elsewhere.

The principle defect it has is that it's only 24 episodes long, and unavoidably feels truncated at that length. There is simply not quite enough time for the world and the characters to breathe and simply be as much as they should, and there are a couple of moments where the plot makes slightly jarring progressions. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that it still does a very good job of fitting as much as possible into the time available and has the ambition to try to do so, and the short length gives it a great intensity of pace. I'd have preferred more, but the concentrated dose we got has a great effect all its own.

The animation and direction is good, if unshowy. The fights between the mobile suits are suitably impactful. I don't know if any of the designs will go down as classics, but I do very much like the look of the central Gundam Aerial. The direction contains many subtle flourishes that make key moments hit harder, and since the general direction is fairly standard this actually allows them to stick out more. The series does a very effective job of making space feel very big and hostile, which is appropriate for a story which considers whether humans belong up there at all.

The series is mostly hinged on the odd couple relationship between its central characters. On the one hand there is Suletta, the anxious and naive but skilled Gundam pilot. On the other there is Miorine, the sharper and more worldly but very vulnerable heiress to the biggest arms manufacturer. They play off each other well, offering new perspectives drawn from their differing backgrounds, but also hurting each other because they are damaged people without the emotional tools to properly relate all the time. They are also pawns in a larger game being played by their respective parents and indeed pretty much everyone around them. There is a pervasive sense of threat as the duplicitous schemes to rob them of their dignity, agency, and lives play out. Suletta's mother Prospera is the series resident masked villain, at once cloyingly sweet and ruthlessly driven, and is a particularly memorable creation. The series has a fairly large supporting cast and cannot give them all interesting things to do in its short length, but still covers more than you may expect. There is one miscellaneous criticism I have which is that the leads don't get to kiss on screen - a bolder emphasis that this was a love story would have made the ending work just a little better for me.

To sum up, while the deficiencies of The Witch from Mercury are very evident, this is still a triumphant assertion that Gundam still has a place in the anime landscape, delivering moments of tragedy and triumph with the incomparable, genre defining image of a mobile suit in motion.