It’s March, and that means I’m once again going to take a dive into the Mecha genre. Now, I’ve looked at Mecha shows before, both in and out of March, but the Mecha shows I reviewed last time have something in common: they’re all more “Super Robot” shows.
For those who may be unaware, the Mecha
genre often makes a distinction between different shows. “Super
Robot” shows are ones where the Mecha (scientific explanation or
not) is more of a fantastic element. They’re big, powerful,
sometimes questionably machines, and defy or ignore what we think we
know about physics. Little time or effort is taken to make the
mechas “realistic” or believable; instead, it’s more about what’s
cool. Not every Super Robot show is bright Shonen (after all,
Evangelion and all its tortured, psychological offspring are still
Super Robot) but many are.
In contrast, a “Real Robot” show
presents mechas more as real (if futuristic) war machines. They
often still get a couple technical hand-waves to explain how and why
humanoid robots are the tanks or battleships of their setting, but
they still try to build their robots out of nuts and bolts and make
you believe that you’re dealing with a machine that humans could
build and that the viewer could understand. As such the shows
themselves tend to be about (relatively) realistic warefare, rather
than punching out giant monsters.
This isn’t to say that Super Robot
shows can’t have engineering or treat their mechas as machines, or
Real Robot shows can’t have supernatural elements; it’s a spectrum,
not a sharp divide. But, by in large, those are the poles.
When it comes to Mecha, Super Robot shows are more my wheelhouse, but I wanted to look at at least one Real Robot show for Mecha March this year, and thus I’m leading off with the most down-to-Earth Mecha show this side of Robotics;Notes, Full Metal Panic.
Full Metal Panic takes place in a world
very much like our own. The fastest way to explain its setting would
be that it feels like the “near future” if the Cold War never
really ended. The serial numbers are filed off almost everything and
the players in the plot (rather than the world) tend to be more
extranational forces, but that’s the kind of story we’re in, so that
it’s kind of surprising that Full Metal Panic debuted in 1998 (and
the anime in 2002) rather than ten or fifteen years earlier.
The kick off of the main plot involves
the secret organization, Mithril. Mithril is a group that works with
Western nations against terrorists and probably the USSR, and that
has a greater than average supply of ultra-tech including high-grade
Arm Slaves (mechas, the likes of which are used the world over). The
main mission that starts the show: protect seemingly ordinary
Japanese High School Student Kaname Chidori from the various
nefarious forces liable to be coming after her. To that end, a small
team is dispatched to keep watch over her, most especially including
Sergeant Sousuke Sagara. Sousuke, because of his age and heritage,
is inserted as Kaname’s new classmate, but has a little trouble
because he seems to have no concept of what life away from the
battlefield is like; he’s all “mission” and zero-percent subtle
(beyond not, you know, actually spilling beans he’s not supposed to).
Complicating matters, Kaname has a firecracker temper (playing
somewhat to the Tsundere type) and doesn’t appreciate being followed.
The reason for this, not that we’re
told right away (It’s need-to-know, and neither Sousuke nor Kaname
need to know, at least not initially) is because Kaname is something
called a “Whispered”. Whispered are young women who, because of
a Soviet experiment messing with reality at the minute of their birth
elsewhere in the world, have archives of otherwise impossible future
technology locked in their minds (along with some other nebulous
psychic powers), making them extremely valuable when they become
self-aware and start inventing. Kaname isn’t aware of her abilities,
and at first it’s only suspected that she might be a Whispered.
Sousuke and his team, Kurz Weber (a womanizing sniper) and Melissa Mao (who’s basically Misato from Evangelion, and the ranking officer for the mission) initially have a fairly easy task, more concerned with school comedy tropes than mecha combat, but that changes when the school trip has its plane hijacked by the Terrorist-for-hire Gauron and taken to a secret Whispered research facility just outside of Russian borders, leading team Mithril to scramble to rescue Kaname (and the rest of the hostages) in a several episode long and fairly intricate military action.
These episodes are, in my opinion, the
highlight of the show. We have some decent school comedy (not
amazing, but good enough) followed up by the action that really sets
the show apart. The escape from the base, including Sousuke
hijacking an Arm Slave and help coming from his Mithril buddies as
they fight Gauron, is really dynamite. It has a gritty feel to it
without getting grim, and works hard to make the nuts and bolts feel
real, as well as the danger and struggle. There’s a real weight to
the Arm Slave mechas, and a tremendous screen presence to the
elements in a fight including luck and strategy or (in the more
granular level) elevation, visibility, terrain, and so on. Nothing
is trivial and it’s all milked for drama rather than being used as
set pieces for “high flying” action. At the end, we even get
some good teamwork between our leads as Kaname taps her Whispered
abilities to provide Sousuke vital intel to defeat Gauron by using a
mysterious piece of Whispered tech called the Lambda Driver.
The first seven episodes are an
extremely promising opening for the show. They establish our
characters, with both connections and conflicts. They strongly
establish our world and plot as well, with the mystery of the
Whispered, the Cold War conflicts, and an enjoyable (in a “Khan
Noonien Singh” sort of way) antagonist in the form of Gauron
(Presumed dead by the end but clearly recurring). We saw our
characters at rest, and in an extreme crisis, getting to know them
and how they operate very well.
The next arc is also quite strong. For
starters we properly introduce Tessa – Captain Teresa Testarossa,
the highest-ranking Mithril officer we see and also, incidentally, a
Whispered responsible for the cool submarine that she captains and
that serves as Mithril’s base. She forms the third corner of the
show’s main love triangle, competing with Kaname for Sousuke (as is
appropiate for their age, if not so much for their rank and
position), but that element is fairly underplayed. I would say
mercifully so. She’s in the area checking in on a person of interest
when an attack by terrorist forces sends her scrambling to Sousuke’s
safehouse. Kaname visits, getting tangled up in the situation, and
from there the night just gets crazier and crazier as the conflict
escalates from being hunted and on the run, to a high-tension
prisoner exchange, to a rampage by a behemoth Arm Slave.
The Behemoth is another element that
I’ll call well-done. It’s in a size category that’s normally
reserved for Super Robots – more of a battleship with feet than a
next-gen tank replacement – but for all its destructive power and
vast toughness, it has all the flaws and weaknesses you’d expect of a
catastrophically oversized design, including being slow, unwieldy,
and prone to overheating. Compared to Gauron’s appearance at the end
of the last arc, the Behemoth presents a threat that feels and plays
very different. Fighting it isn’t a matter of gladiatorial combat or
contesting the skill of the pilots; the behemoth is all threat, and
the Mithril team all response. The stakes are also different. While
Kaname is once again in peril (and Tessa as well this time), we’re
now in a major city rather than a remote enemy instillation and the
wilderness alongside. That alone makes for a huge shift in how the
fighting feels.
From there, we get a couple “down
time” episodes before launching into the next major arc.
That arc is… an interesting beast.
It takes place as Sousuke is loaned to a different Mithril squad,
traveling with them to the (fictional) country of Helmajistan to stop
Gauron from selling a stolen nuclear missile on the black market.
Complicating matters is the fact that Helmajistan is where Sousuke
grew up, a child soldier before Mithril took him in. And, wouldn’t
you know it, one of Sousuke’s old friends is here… except he’s not
a friend any longer, he’s a deadly enemy, working for Gauron and
helping Gauron read Sousuke’s every move.
So, I’ll start with the good: This arc
is somewhere that the gloves really come off. The main cast is, by
in large, too tight to really sustain meaningful deaths. At most we
might be able to bleed Kurz or Melissa; if Sousuke, Kaname, or to a
lesser extent Tessa is threatened with an imminent demise, we know
that they’re going to be saved, and we suspect it strongly for the
other recurring characters. Plot armor is a thing, and isn’t even
necessarily a bad thing. Here, Sousuke is teamed up with a bunch of
extras, who the writers not only can kill, but do.
Character death alone, though, isn’t a
plus. It’s all in how those deaths are used. To an extent, there’s
a slight mark against since everyone did bring their red shirts, but
some effort is spent given Sousuke’s teammates at least quirks if not
proper characters, making them connectable people rather than
faceless goons. And when they die, they die like characters with
more import rather than less. We see them struggle to survive, and
get stripped of their lives in a brutal and desperate battle, at
least after the first engagement where they get into a bad position.
Everyone is trying to get the heck out of Helmajistan with both their
lives and the mission intact, but sometimes the enemies are too much
or the mission too valuable, and one of these soldiers pays the
ultimate price.
This arc really does play out like a
war story. And not just any war story – a tortured Apocalypse Now
sort of war story where there aren’t shining heroes or unambiguous
right answers, just a dirty situation where anyone can die and
suffering is sometimes unavoidable. The fact that Sousuke ends up
the sole survivor is a big part of getting that feeling, as is his
conflict with his old friend, that ultimately ends in a fight to the
death. The last image of the arc is Sousuke in a half-wrecked Arm
Slave, dragging the warhead of the nuclear missile off into a dusty
sun, hopefully to safety with Gauron out of the action, and it’s a
powerful and memorable image that speaks strongly to the emotions of
the arc.
On the bad… it’s really out of place.
This is an arc with no Kaname, no Tessa, and no relief from the
bitter and oppressive atmosphere. It’s the shortest arc of the show,
really, but it feels like a marathon, and not necessarily in a good
way. We’re being asked to sink a lot of time without the majority of
our cast, and with themes that are… present in the whole show, but
not really representative of it. The first two arcs had a good
interplay between school comedy, normal life, realistic warfare, and
science fiction mystery. The Helmajistan arc just goes all in on the
war, leaving out everything else. As strong as its strong points can
be, I do think it’s much weaker for only being a slice of what Full
Metal Panic can be.
While the Helmajistan arc felt like a
marathon, the final arc of the show really is one, being basically as
long as the first arc but with not so much of the puttering that was
allowed before the plot really kicked into gear. Gauron, once again,
is our villain, but we start with Sousuke taking Kaname on what she
sees as a romantic vacation to a southern island. Unfortunately for
her, they’re meeting up with Mithril forces, and Kaname ends up being
welcomed aboard the cool submarine base. We recount how Sousuke and
Kurz were first recruited by Tessa and Melissa and even get some
Whispered talk between the two main girls.
Gauron, though, proves to be one of
those very problematic hostages who ruins everything from a state
where he should be powerless. With the help of some insider
traitors, he takes control of the sub and takes Kaname and Tessa
hostage.
This is, unfortunately, where he starts
to break down as a villain. He’s planned this out really well, and
has up until this point been a very cool and controlled villain with
a deep enjoyment of what he does but a suave and business-like
approach; clearly a man more motivated by squeezing the world for
whatever he wants than by any ideology. In this, though, his goal
seems to be to bring down Mithril, presumably seeking revenge for his
previous defeats. The weird thing is that while he starts off just
as cool and in-control as previously, he’s ultimately shown to be
more at the end of his rope, and willing to give up his life to spite
his enemies.
I guess the idea is that he can’t
really live with the failure, but that wasn’t the impression I
generally got out of him. He always seemed like more of a survivor,
who’d do anything to get out with his life once the chips were down.
I guess this way he gets to go out on a high note, before he degrades
further and starts embarrass himself, and we might not believe that
we really got him this time without his acceptance of death, but it
still seems a bit off.
In any case, Tessa and Kaname hatch a
plan to take the ship back. Well, it’s mostly Tessa’s plan, but
Kaname has to execute it since she’s the one they’re able to get out
of “captive” status. With Sousuke’s help, Kaname is able to use
her Whispered ability to insert herself into the ship’s AI and take
control from Gauron, allowing Sousuke to then go and rescue Tessa and
the bridge crew. Gauron scrambles, determined to sink the ship come
hell or high water, ending up with Sousuke and Gauron ending up in a
mecha battle in and then on the ship (it surfaced) that sees Gauron
ejected before his Arm Slave’s self destruct can fire, leaving him to
blow up alone.
The emotions of the final battle are…
strange. Normally, the baddie in this kind of situation would be
acting in a wrathful manner, but Gauron seems to be in a manic mood
where he just loves everything, loudly proclaiming Sousuke to be his
buddy as he tries to hold on to Sousuke so they’ll both get blown up.
It’s weird and kind of uncomfortable, but extremely memorable.
On the whole Full Metal Panic is in a
weird place. Going over it for this review, I found that it had a
lot of strengths and not a lot of weaknesses… at least not specific
ones that I could cite. Even the last two arcs, that were weaker
when it came to the core themes of the show and where the fighting
seldom had quite the intricacy of the earlier conflicts, had some
extremely memorable moments, images, and characters. Yet, for all
that, I never really made an emotional connection to the show.
Sousuke, Melissa, Kurz, and Kaname don’t really leave an impact, and
Tessa leaves only a faint one. They’re not bad characters, but
they’re not memorable characters either. The scenarios as well tend
to just fade into the background once you’re done with them, leaving
only the dream-like impressions of a few specific moments that
managed to stand out and remind you that, yes, this was a show.
I suppose that means that overall I
would recommend Full Metal Panic, but it leaves me kind of at a loss
for what letter grade to give it. The impression it left behind was
a strong C or C+, but the actual quality of the material was probably
better than that. Well, for Mecha March I’m going to err on the side
of generosity and offer the final grade of B. Perhaps I just wasn’t
the right audience for the show. I can enjoy Real Robot, Military
Fiction, and Alternate History, but they aren’t exactly my
wheelhouse. If you’re more into that spectrum, certainly give Full
Metal Panic a watch.