Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2
Short Synopsis: Season 2 of Gundam Mercury, now with 100% more war crimes.
Lenlo: I will admit, I was a little bit miffed that Gundam Mercury returned to the status quo at the school so quickly after the end of the previous season. I was hoping for a bit more time to deal with the fallout of the attack, Suletta committing war crimes and Miorine generally freaking out. But it looks like Gundam Mercury wants to slow-roll us on that by spreading it out across the season and taking us back to the innocence of school, letting reality slowly bleed into it once more. Will that work? Probably, it worked last season and all Gundam Mercury needs to do is stay the course. But there is a chance it gets lost in this school setting and flubs it all away. After all, Guel is still expelled and we have a war brewing. So long as it doesn’t completely turn its back on the more serious war drama happening in the background though, I expect to enjoy this season a lot. Plus it still looks good, and that ED, man, hair-down Suletta looks great.
Potential: 80%
Edomae Elf
Short Synopsis: Shrine deity is a reverse isekai’d elf…who is an otaku shut-in (and weirdly sensitive about her ears).
Wooper: The best part of this episode was the product placement for Red Bull, the brazenness of which had me laughing as though it were a legitimate meta joke. Elda, the elf from the title, is a game-obsessed otaku, so her Red Bull addiction sort of makes sense – as does her NEET lifestyle, which is a major point of contention between Elda and her shrine maiden Koito. Their odd couple energy wouldn’t be capable of carrying the show by itself, but Koito has a life of her own, attending high school and socializing with the townspeople who live close by the shrine. Her sister and her best friend have already made appearances, her grandfather (the attendant before her) has been mentioned, and Elda’s left field connection to Tokugawa Ieyasu could produce a humorous flashback or two in the future, so the show isn’t limited to making jokes about whatever nerdy fixation Elda is saddled with each week. Now if only the visuals didn’t have such a manufactured look to them – all the streets and buildings in the series’ shopping district feel as though they were arranged by last-gen AI with a penchant for clutter, and virtually none of the furniture on screen appears to have been drawn by the background artists. More and more art directors settle for this plasticky look every year, but it’s especially ill-suited for a series that draws on Shinto aesthetics, even if they’re mostly in the background.
Potential: 30%
Amun: Hey, this was a good premiere for one of the flimsier premises of the season. Main leads are solid, the setting is nice, and what I thought would be a longer mystery was resolved in the first episode. Behind the silliness is a pretty interesting foundation: the one girl in the town who isn’t under the elf deity’s spell is her main attendant. Now that’s something I want to see explored a bit more. Can this fizzle out like last season’s “Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten”? No doubt – we’ve seen it a thousand times. But this was a good start, and I liked it. I’ll have more of this, please.
Potential: 60%
The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses
Short Synopsis: A guy plans to sell an old cafe he inherited from his deceased grandma, only to find out there are five girls who live in it.
Lenlo: Is… Is this just Love Hina for a 2023 audience? Because that’s what this feels like. A more explicit, slightly better produced version of Love Hina. If that’s what you’re into, if you literally just want ecchi bait ass and titty, then Cafe Terrace is probably going to be right up your alley. Personally I’d suggest you just go read/watch some porn, you might actually get off from that. But if you really want to just be edged for 24 minutes with 0 actually engaging story and 0 nipple, then Cafe Terrace will give you exactly that. Personally though? I’m pretty content with the amount of nippleless breasts in my life. I don’t need much more.
Potential: 0.001%
Mario: Boy, talking about starting off on the wrong foot. The main guy walks into the house and finds five girls naked for no good reason. To make it worse, these girls (also known as the Goddesses) are like an inferior non-sibling version of the Quintuplets, and throughout this episode they only have one mission in mind: to seduce this guy into agreeing for them to stay. Yes, the show is self-aware enough to know that these efforts are ingenuine, but when one of the girls got her housemate drunk to send her to his room, I dropped the last bit of my interest in investing in them. The creator Seo Kouji is known for his infamously sappy harem romances such as Suzuka, A Town Where You Live, and Fuuka, so this new one is within his comfort zone and unlikely to improve. If you are a fan of the aforementioned titles, by all means watch this one. I’m once again jumping off this train before it goes off the rails.
Potential: 0%
