Name: The Illusion of Progress Through Paper-thin Writing, Full Metal Panic Fails to be a Jack of All Trades
Item: Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid
Rating: 45
Author: MozillaMudkip

Waifra

The Illusion of Progress Through Paper-thin Writing, Full Metal Panic Fails to be a Jack of All Trades · Waifora

Full Metal Panic is an standout amongst the anime of the early 2000s which from what Ive seen at least, always seems to go somewhat under the radar in recent years. As a mecha/millitary/action show, Full Metal Panic saw popularity around the release of its first two seasons and spin off in 2002 and 2005 respectively but seemed to fade way from the popular consciousness in the way of more popular series that take on many of FMP's ideas. With the being said, FMP acted as something of a forerunner in its content; that being a series creating a mix of serious conflict and engaging drama like what is found in many scifi/action series supported with lighthearted feelgood moments, even occasionally comedic, more typical of slice of life. At least, on paper, that is the goal of FMP as a whole. Since Full Metal Panic aired, many series I enjoy, like Code Geass or The Fruit of Grisaia, successfully achieve this careful blends of genres. In an effort to expand my list and watching older series that have faded from popular view, I watched Full Metal Panic's first two seasons and spinoff expecting a comfortable and enjoyable blend of serious and lighthearted like these other series. Little did I know, I was fated to sit through 2 seasons of what could have been one of the most shocking failures to present any sort of satisfying story or character writing in the genre I have ever seen.

In this review, I will breakdown what I liked and disliked about Full Metal Panic and will try to illuminate what exactly I think accumulated into the mess that this series turned out to be in a portion free of spoilers. Ill then follow it up with a portion with spoilers to more specifically illustrate my grievances. Also please note that while I will talk about season 1 briefly, this review will be mostly focused on The Second Raid, Full Metal Panic's second season.

Summary__ Full Metal Panic tells the story of Sagara Sousuke, a 17 year old mech pilot who fights terrorism on behalf of a private military organization called Mithril. Having grown up on battlefields in active war zones, Sousuke is suddenly forced to adapt to life as an ordinary Japanese high school student after being assigned to guard Kaname Chidori, a seemingly ordinary girl whose subconscious secretly harbors a mysterious power that gives her an extremely in depth understanding of powerful military knowledge. While Sousuke tries to balance his two drastically different lives, various terrorist organizations attempt to capture Chidori in an attempt to uncover carefully guarded military secrets, namely being the Lambda driver; mysterious technology allowing mech pilots to unlock the full power of their mind's desire to fight.

What I Liked__ Truthfully, Season 1 of FMP left me with very mixed feelings of the series and season 2 only furthered my feelings of negativity of many of the series aspects. With that being said, I would be lying if I said there was not anything here I enjoyed. For a large portion of the series, Sousuke proved to be a consistently enjoyable main character who's struggle to balance his two lives proved to a very strong way to create the serious/lighthearted vibe FMP set out to achieve. Additionally, strong character writing can be seen in Tessa, Sousuke's commander from Mithril. While she doesn't appear as often as I would have liked her to, especially in season 2, she consistently has scenes that show her internal conflict of being the revered and stoic commander of Mithril's submarine Danaan while also wanting to provide support to Sousuke as a friend. In these moments, Tessa's character really played to the strength of some of FMP's serious moments. From a technical production standpoint, there were drastic improvements in the series between season 1 and 2. Originally made by Studio GONZO, a studio with a hit or miss reputation, season 2 was entrusted to Kyoto Animation which was at the time not yet well known. In watching The Second Raid and Fumoffu, the FMP spinoff, its pretty interesting to see that this is the very first series that Kyoani led on their own, especially with FMP's genre being pretty far from what anime fans typically tend to expect from the studio. With that being said, Kyoani's typical very well done high quality animation is on full display here, drastically improving improving upon GONZO's season 1 production in both hand drawn animation and CGI while being accompanied with admittedly not super memorable but very pleasant music, both for its OP and ED and for its OST.

A Messy Season 1__ Season 1 of FMP very quickly shows very blatant flaws in quite a few areas. I think all things considered, the very way the idea of the serious/lighthearted approach was handled was extremely flawed in its balance. There were many serious moments that would be very jarringly forced into a more lighthearted light through very "anime-esque" means. Many of these serious moments rightfully so set the tone to be very somber and thought provoking. Sousuke being forced to make difficult decisions and dealing with the consequences only for Chidori to start smacking him back and forth with a Japanese paper fan like something out of a Looney Toons cartoon. It leaves very little room for the viewer to get anything out of it as usually, upon switching up like this, the show abandons the particular serious idea all together and just like that, it moves on. Additionally, I personally didn't really find any of the comedic elements very funny. Lot of the humor is crude and I didn't find it very thoughtful but humor is subjective I guess, so to each their own. In regards to the actual story of FMP, there is a plot but its so poorly explained its very hard to follow beyond just a surface level. The entire first half of the season feels like it tries to juggle 2 or 3 different plot lines and it leads to none of them feeling very well defined. The second half does become a bit more focused in on one plot line but it also starts to go off on strange little tangents that feel very out of place in context of the main story.

The bigger issue for me though was the severe lack in any sort of meaningful character writing. The most blatant example is Chidori herself. Chidori has to be one of the most paper-thin static main characters I've seen in an anime in a very long time. Throughout season 1 she doesn't really show any growth or any sort of change at all. Chidori exists in this show to be the token tsundere love interest and really not much else. This issue compounds itself in multiple moments though when it becomes clear that there really isn't much thought at all put into how her power works or what exactly she is capable of. In moments where she uses her powers, it kinda just feels like she pulls out the perfect little thing that Sagara and company need to overcome whatever obstacle is in their path. They never really give any sort of explanation to how any of it works so you as the viewer is forced to just rationalize it as an "I guess that's how it works???" whenever it is brought up. Chidori doesnt understand herself how her powers work or even why she has them and the show makes little attempt to rationalize it. Its just shocking to me how this character is presented as being the person of paramount importance, central to the conflict and her character is so poorly defined, I can barely tell you anything about her after watching nearly 50 episodes in total of this series.
Speaking of not being able to explain things, the villains of FMP are some of the most generic antagonists I have ever seen in an anime. The main villain Gauron (I had to look up his name because I literally already forgot) is the classic "Hey! Im evil!" antagonist that don't have any sort of motivation beyond being evil and wanting to kill people. All of the other antagonistic characters are just nameless, faceless goons who don't have any importance at all and just exist for Sousuke to kill.

In terms of production, I already pointed out a few things indirectly. Studio GONZO was in charge of season 1 and the animation is pretty poor. The animation quality not very sharp at all and the 3D CGI asset were extremely jarring, looking like assets pulled straight out of a Playstation 1 game. I know computer tech wasnt nearly as good as it is now in 2002 but even amongst other series Ive seen that aired around the same time, FMP looks particularly bad. Another little odd thing was that the coloring and lighting was very noticeably weird. I found it most obvious with Chidori's hair, presented as a blueish-turquoise color, which would turn what I can only describe as a sickly green color any scene where she was outside. Little details like that kept popping out to me which was very odd to me as this is something hasn't ever really stood out to me before in any other series Ive seen. Finally, in regards to FMP being mecha, I personally found it to be more military than mecha but I digress, the mech design was extremely boring and generic. There wasn't really much imagination put into the design work, making FMP's mechs look like generic Walmart brand versions to the premium, memorable designs we see in other popular mecha anime like Code Geass.

Ive gone on and on about things I didn't like about FMP season 1, be it the poorly defined mechanics of the world, the very lazy character writing or lack of it. All in all, put simply, it all ties back in someway to this season's failure to handle the mixture of genre it wanted to incorporate. This series tries to "wear many different hats" across its run time but in trying to do so, it stretches itself out so thin that it just doesn't really do any portion of it justice. It feels very half baked and devoid of substance that it consistently had me asking for more of literally anything, only to always not getting anything in whatever would happen in the next episode.

A Disastrous Season 2__ Immediately upon starting season 2, the shift in the way the series is being handled becomes immediately obvious. Right away, the show take a much more pointed and gritty approach with far more emphasis on the serious aspects of season 1. The action is noticeably better and the general direction does the series so much more justice. As season 2 progresses, while lighthearted school portions with Chidori still show up for time to time, there is far more emphasis on the more impactful content that pulled the weight in season 2. Truthfully, I thought season 2 actually had a pretty strong start compared to season 1. At least, that's what I thought until I was forced to face the fact that many of the critical issues from season 1 were practically shelved and were once again about to rear its ugly head yet again with a vengeance. Yet again, the new antagonist of this arc has no substance at all. Yet again, none of the actual way any thing works in this world is explained. Yet again, it goes off on little tangents that give off the illusion that its doing something but its only taking away from the main conflict in reality. Yet again, Chidori is just there existing off in her own little tsundere world not doing anything of any substance. It was truly infuriating to see after a first few episodes that felt so promising.

Along with the many issues that came along from season 1, the way season 2 is handled opens a whole new can of worms that has almost entirely killed my interest in this series. This season makes the correct decision to put the lighthearted content that weighed down the first season on the back burner and instead try to build more meaningful individual aspects of the main cast and personally, I thought the way they set up the first half of the season for this was pretty great. The internal conflict facing Sousuke hits a climax right at the halfway point and it is right at this moment where the fragile foundation built up of issues from season 1, only amplified by the content of season 2's first half, gives way leading to the second season's complete collapse. The show allows Sousuke and Chidori separate time to make big shifts in their characters but it completely fails to make anything meaningful out of it. Chidori, who at this point still has next to no characterization at all is forced to carry her own episode. The episode feels like a bizarre fever dream of her interacting with a bunch completely underdeveloped antagonist characters with very poorly depicted action and conflict scenes. Sousuke, forced to face the uncertainty that had been building up inside him over the series up to this point is suddenly forced to actually follow through with the actual serious portions without the comedic backbone Chidori offers that allows the show to just gloss over it without any real conflict. Without this, Sousuke proceeds to make a complete 180 in becoming a complete hindrance to progress, making the next 4 episodes almost painful to get through as the empty husk that was once our main character sluggishly drags his feet across the finish line leading into the final episode. The climax and finale of this season is just a complete mess from any direction you look at it. Faceless antagonists die and the plot moves along ambiguously in the background as Sousuke wanders around brooding over his decisions. Once the final episode finally comes along, suddenly like magic, Sousuke has his answer and and is all too willing to turn on his protagonist powers to save the day and make the complete mess of a conflict come to an extremely anticlimactic halt. I found the ending of season 2 to be extremely off putting and almost slightly conceited in the way the show felt like it could wrap up the meaningful conflict it built up and let stagnate in an overly idealistic "everything is fine now" ending. This truly without exaggeration may be one of my absolute least favorite endings I have seen to a season of anime in a very long time.

The Season 2 Crashout (Spoilers)__

Spoiler, click to view

I want to take a minute to acknowledge the nearly constant pure absurdity that was season 2. Like I said earlier, I enjoyed how the first 6 or 7 episodes of season 2 was handled for the most part. It was quite a big shift from the absence of any progress that came along with season 1 but there were still some things here in season 2 that made me upset. First off, the new antagonist characters. We have trigger-happy goofball (I cant be bothered to look up his name) and his two stone faced twin servants. Goofball was somehow an even worse version of Gauron from Season 1, where instead of having the paper-thin reasoning of being evil for evil's sake, this dude is purely just a deluded weirdo who is wiling to just randomly kill his own guys in absurd ways just because he wants to. I found him to be extremely off putting, not in a way that would be typical to good antagonists, but in a "this guy is a clown" sort of way. Additionally, the twins who he commands have almost no writing at all. I think we're kinda supposed to feel bad for them because it becomes known that they were only cooperating with goofball out of necessity but they're not given any sort of backstory until the final to last episode AFTER one of them is killed by the real enemy (maybe???). I couldn't find myself to care about them even slightly and I felt like just about every scene with these two and goofball were a complete waste of screen time.

The big problems come out in the second half of the season. The story hits a big peak when Sousuke receives orders from command to remove himself from his guard duties with Chidori and return to the submarine for his next operation. This comes after the immediate concern of the person tasked with taking over from him not really obviously doing their job, as this person had apparently also been watching over her over the last 6 months and had done absolutely nothing to protect her in any of the events up to this point. More importantly, this also comes after the gradual shift in Sousuke's feelings against his life as a soldier had really become prevalent. Being raised on the battlefield, he was always forced to act as a soldier and for the first time in his life, he has been able to enjoy a (somewhat) peaceful life with Chidori. Now that he is forced to leave, I thought for sure that this would be the moment where we would see Sousuke go against orders and opt to protect Chidori against the incoming threat that was already starting to make itself known. Instead, nope! While hes sad about it, he doesn't really put up any resistance and returns to the sub, effectively abandoning Chidori and falling back on his old ways. Now, is this fine? Somewhat. I get that Sousuke has lived his entire life up to this point following orders and I didn't expect him to completely throw that away immediately, but what I didn't expect was the complete absence of any backbone what so ever from Sousuke in every single episode from that point on up until the final episode. It suddenly made him a complete burden on the series as he absent mindlessly wandered about like an empty husk while his comrades were forced to do all the heaving lifting offscreen.

Then there's Chidori. Like I said, I never really cared for Chidori in season 1 and in season 2's first half, while she doesn't really grow as a character at all, she also plays less of an active role on screen which I was ok with. This was true at least up until the second half where she gets her own episode. The way I understood it, the intention behind this was to allow Chidori to have her own time to grow as a character independently in Sousuke's absence which on paper isn't a bad idea but because Chidori hadn't ever really had any reason to support herself with any real character writing, always being able to riff off Sousuke and whatever absurd antics hes up to, she just did not have the means to support this episode. I thought this episode was atrocious. It features Chidori anxiously wandering around the city trying to hide from her stalker, checking into a love hotel with some random dude all to ditch her clothes in exchange for a robe then jumping around from rooftop to rooftop in the neon filled rainy city. It was unbelievably edgy and incomprehensible. Eventually, she finds her stalker, which is the person tasked with "guarding" her replacing Sousuke. I don't really know or understand who this person is but the show didn't really give me any reason to care. Right after, one of the goofball's twins, who had gone rogue at this point turns up, shoots Chidori's guardian and then chases her across the rooftops. Keep in mind Chidori is just a regular 16 year old girl, somewhat athletic admittedly, and she somehow outmaneuvers this women who is essentially a trained assassin who has aim with her gun so comically terrible it would give a stormtrooper a run for their money. This conflict is almost laughably absurd until the show somehow manages to completely uproot this entire sequence with something completely out of left field. Its at this climax of the fight when suddenly, Tessa's brother (cant be bothered to look up his name), another Whispered only brought up once or twice up to this point, shows up with two combat androids. He kills the assassin and then starts spouting complete drivel about his evil plans, and how Sousuke isn't a good guy and how he is more just than Sousuke. Before he leaves, he casually drops the "Btw, I love you" before disappearing never to even have another speaking role for the rest of the season. Why was this character handled in such an atrocious way??? I have no idea. The person who had the potential groundwork to be an actually interesting villain as the mysterious sibling of one of the series most strong characters who was only spoken in whispers up until now was handled in a way that threw any hope in making him a compelling character out the window. Thankfully, this is where this episode ended and none of what happened in this episode is relevant again so what a good use of 20 mins.

The climactic final fight was painfully tedious to watch. Sousuke upon entering the fight decided that he just cant and he decides to leave and just wander around Hong Kong like a complete NPC. There's this whole scene where he finds this prostitute who looks just like Chidori and he just vents to her for 10 minutes which had to have been one of the most eye-rollingly stupid scenes they could have possibly included for this stage of the series. After this point, he wanders into a park where he tries to drown his sorrows in liquor (what???) only to discover a cryptic riddle on a discarded newspaper that seems to be targeting him. This then takes Sousuke on a wild goose chase around the city in pursuit of who ever he thought was targeting him in this riddle, resulting in him arriving in a derelict building. When they reveal Gauron was there waiting from him and that this ENTIRE plot had the goal of getting Sousuke to come to this one specific building using this ridiculous chain of coincidences, I genuinely had to pause the episode and compose myself. This had to have been one of the worst plot lines I have EVER seen in an anime without exaggerating. They're telling me this entire scheme of releasing the rogue mech in the city, having goofball's terrorist group increase political tensions in China leading to Mithril's intervention, putting this cryptic riddle all over the city's newspapers all leading to Sousuke arriving at this one random building to confront Gauron who should have died in his self destructing mech in the ocean last season who was spared via fantasy magic and plot armor was all a masterfully orchestrated scheme? That is complete lunacy. What was the point of any of this? Any of the political conflict of the series up to this point? The massive military operations to these war zones in China? The capture of the Mithril traitor who had been a part of the hinted at corrupt intelligence branch of Mithril? Tessa's mysterious brother, shockingly aligned with the bad guys appearing out of nowhere? Nothing. That's it. No purpose. All of this progress lead to the only thing this series had to begin with. Gauron wanting to see Sousuke suffer. This show never had any intention to make any sort of progress. It just set up the the illusion that it was going to improve on the groundwork setup by season 1's poor writing and opted to just pull a reason out of the season 1 playbook to wrap it all up with a pretty little bow in a way they thought was convenient. What a sorry excuse for writing and what a sorry excuse for any sort of deeper thematic reasoning that would make this season worth watching.

The final episode ends with Sousuke deciding to turn on his protagonist powers. After killing Gauron (for the 3rd time), Sousuke sees that Chidori was alive (the show never really have any reason for him to believe she was dead besides Gauron saying so). How she got to Hong Kong, I have no idea, it all happened off screen. Tessa drops in Sousuke's mech and he unleashes the Lambda Driver to save his new squad leader (who I was maybe supposed to care about but didn't) and to one punch vaporize goofball and his mech like something out of One Punch Man using his magic robot powers. And just like that, everything is fine and dandy. Sousuke gets off his desertion of orders with a slap of the wrist and a pay cut and is allowed to watch over Chidori again. The fact that command he told him stop guarding her was kinda just glossed over so I guess he is allowed to again? Sousuke is free to resume his regular life at Chidori's side. Truly an overly idealistic ending all too willing to gloss over and be blind to all of the consequences of what happened before it. Kinda just like the entire series up to this point. Kinda ironic...

The Aftermath (In Conclusion)
TL;DR - Full Metal Panic is a classic mecha action show of the early 2000s which attempted to pioneer the blend of serious and lighthearted genres made even more popular in series to come later. Over its first two seasons, Full Metal Panic has a massive glow up in terms of production, moving away from studio GONZO's functional but unimpressive animation to showcase one of Kyoto Animation's first ever company lead project in season 2, containing many hallmarks of what fans come to expect in a KyoAni production. With the occasional good character moment from main characters Sousuke and Tessa, Full Metal Panic stumbles through its all around poorly written first season and makes a vein attempt to make a more thoughtful and well written season 2. What starts off as a seemingly more sound and enjoyable season with far better thematic and character rich story writing ends in complete disaster as the series falls back on just about every sin made in season 1 in a hackneyed attempt to resolve character and plot conflicts into a satisfying ending. Full Metal Panic almost completely fails to embrace its Jack of All Trade genre mix and proves just why this series has faded into a certain degree of obscurity. If you haven't seen Full Metal Panic, there just isn't really anything here that makes it work watching over other series that take on this same concept and manage to deliver a far superior result. For people who watched this series back in the era in which it aired, I encourage you to keep on looking at Full Metal Panic with rose tinted glasses and not revisit it as I fear you will be sorely disappointed. With that being said, in an odd way, one of the only ways I can justify this series is to appreciate the roll it took in paving the way for other series like it that far exceed it. At least we get something out of this series in the long run as we surely wern't getting anything out of the series itself.