Reviews

It's funny that the original MSG—as well as many other mech titles of the 1980s and onward—would get ragged on for being the equivalent of overly long toy commercials, but as time went on and the genre became more sophisticated and scripting improved, this ceased to be a common criticism, yet it seems like we've come full circle and now it looks more like a toy commercial than ever, as the overcooked CGI varnish slathered all over the mobile suits makes them look like stop-motion action figures, zipping around through space and firing lasers and satellite weapons everywhere.

I don't want to be too harsh with The Witch from Mercury prologue, as it's essentially a short 24-minute 1-episode teaser/pilot for the upcoming series, but it looks like it'll be another stale rehash of the CGI era of the Gundam universe, and certainly not up to par with Thunderbolt. The action is okay, but this is far from the glory of 0083, 0080, Zeta, and countless other series.

It starts fast and there's no real personality to any of the characters or time for them to stand-out more than the cardboard characters they use in the backgrounds for Mawaru Penguindrum or whatever. TWfM features an alternate timeline, as the plot appears to involve greater human integration with technology to even venture into space and colonize the stars. Why? I don't know. They seemed fine doing whatever and making colonies and dropping colonies like it was nothing, even without any shiny add-ons in all the other series. Apparently, if they don't, their face gets red and it looks like they have hundreds of fire ant bites on their face—ouchie!

There's a bunch of political blather and something about feuding corporations—apparently, the "good" guys want to expand into space, and the "bad" guys want to prevent that from happening, probably because of opposition to the transhumanist aspect or corporate competition, but it's not very clear.

Of course, we get classic scenes such as the baddies waltzing into the old girlboss's office, and they're like "You're gonna die today, granny." Then they just sit there and gab with each other for a while, pointlessly. I've never understood these scenes. Is the idea to make them piss their pants and beg for mercy and embarrass themselves? Why not just shoot them? Guess the credits weren't long enough... there's nothing that compelling about the script, but you can't expect much from 24 minutes.

When we observe wider shots of the art, the CGI percentage tends to be high, but it's not too bad for the character art and tighter shots. The music reminds me a tad of Penkin because of the style of the choirs, but most of the tracks are pretty humdrum and sound about as good as the bland gray textures of the hallways of the space shuttle look.

Definitely not a good start, but here's hoping to them pulling through and producing a good story.