Sorry, a bit late I know.

This thread is for discussion of the series "Full Metal Panic". Please post comments, worksafe images and general triva. For those who have seen the series before, please refrain from posting spoilers until the relevant episode has been shown; we don't want to spoil it for the others now do we?

It's up and down this series. I wholly enjoyed the beginning - then it ramped up "magic mecha power" and I started groaning - Dues Ex Machina why the person wins or loses gets a bit silly.

The bits with a fish-out-of-water school protector even had some surprisingly funny bits in (considering a lot of comedy, especially films, do the fish-out-of-water bit, it can get stale). I liked the kidnapping operation bit too. Something unique to do rather then some military operation that is tangential at best to the main characters.

However when it turns to mech battles, meh...seems entirely arbitrary what happens (things do blow up a lot though). It also leaves out the vast majority of the cast, removes anything funny, and tries desperately to pile on the melodrama (ooooh, so much melodrama!) that you kind of get bored.

The big mech attacking Tokyo was a real joke though, funny but in all the wrong ways!

Especially annoying is that cocky laughing villain dude. Man is he the most predictable boring person ever (who has taken professional laughing insanely lessons it seems!), he's also becoming vastly incompetent since he seems to lose every single battle one way or another. I am sure it's all part of his "super plan" but I fail to see why...or see why I'd care.

Notice I didn't mention the actual plot. What little there is (to tie together the vast cast), well, the less they explain of it the better. Magical girls who are some kind of experiment/able to use this technology/totally more advanced then trained military professionals is kinda silly I just ignore their attempts to vainly explain anything with "McGuffin Explanation" - just accepting that they can create super shields with teh magic (maybe, maybe it'll get better this way? heh)

Ooh, quite a lot of critical thoughts. Hopefully they'll get back to comedy soon is all I am saying

Right, my review is up

About matches my reaction reading through it! Having not seen (and am unlikely to see soon) the other series adapted from the source material I couldn't make those quite imposing comparisons though - not that it seems to influence your opinion apart from "It is provably done better in other series under the same name".

I didn't use a bad analogy either but I can forgive you somewhat for that, hehehe, although next time make it a car analogy (sorry, /. joke!)

But yeah, a fair review for this series I think with the comedy/mecha comparisons and on what works and what doesn't.

I posted that first comment what, 2/3rds of the way through? It just lost the comedy aspect completely in the end and thus ended much worse then I hoped it would. It'd get a thumbs down from me just because most of it was a waste of time - and certainly if there are other series' which do it better, it's even more a reason to view them instead!

Richard; You need to start posting forum threads for when you have reviews - not so you duplicate them but so others can comment on the same series.