It been awhile since I wrote anything for this site as I have been quite busy over the last few months and the summer season of anime didn’t interested me all that much. Having previously covered the first season of Iron-Blooded Orphans (on another site), I’m compelled to cover the second half in its entirety. Having experienced the mediocre quality of the Gundam franchise of Seed Destiny, 00 and AGE of the past decade, Iron-Blooded Orphans is the best alternate universe that has been put out in a very long time. I just love the brutal scrappy nature of mecha combat, music and its harden cast of characters that doesn’t fall into the trap of being whiny teenagers with flaky morals. Season two continues to follow the precedent set by the first season and add more varieties of mobile suits, new antagonists and a shakeup of the players within the Iron-Blooded Orphans universe.
Starting off with a rather lengthy slideshow that fills in the gaps between the two seasons, I rather like the progress that been made with all the main characters and the organizations that they are in charge of. Sporting very fashionable suits and pantsuits, Orga and Kurdila have professional reflect all the new changes all around them. While Tekkadan and Kudelia have achieved their primary goals of the first season in bringing economic independence to Mars and making a name for themselves, things have taken a turn for the worse as everyone else decides to invest in more potent weaponry and conflicts against fractured Gjallarhorn have increasingly sprung up. I can’t say that I like the new characters all that much, especially when it comes to the fresh new recruits. They lack the fighting spirit that what made Orga and his organization so famous within the Sol System and the new character of Hash is a particular annoyance with his appalling disrespect and pigheadedness. The sob story of his brother’s failed surgery doesn’t hold weight in his driving motivation to surpass the pilot of Barbatos. I hope he dies soon because he is just dead weight to the entire story and all I want to see is Mikazuki kick ass .
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Despite the massive acceleration in the mobile suit arms race, new characters and the introduction of more factions, this episode was almost identical in its structure to the very first episode. There was a ton of information to go over, Kudelia is the target of yet another assassination attempt and Mikazuki comes in to save the day once again. It’s not a complaint since I thought that Iron-Blooded Orphan’s beginning in the first season was fantastic. Rather, the parallels between the two beginnings only highlights the great strides that Tekkadan has made where instead of being caught off guard and outgunned, the new Tekkadan had an advanced warning and mobile suits of their own to counter. As opposed to rising from the dirt, the way that the Barbatos came slamming down onto the enemy from space like Titanfall is an indication of exactly what direction Iron-Blooded Orphans intended to go.
The upcoming conflict will, for the first time, features a multiple-factorial fight with Tekkadan/Gjallarhorn taking on the large pirate group of Dawn Horizon. Interwoven into the spectacle of mobile suits smashing into each other is a new masked man scheming away. I’m not too sure about having two Char clones in one series, but I’m looking forward to finding who it is and the ever increasing scale of conflict that Tekkadan finds themselves in.
