After finishing watching The Second Raid (TSR) around 20 minutes ago, I was left with a feeling of fulfilment anime rarely ever gives me these days. As an action series it's hard to fault: The action was enjoyable to watch, helped by the high production values, and it had a strong cast of characters that painted over the story simplicity. It did everything it needed to do right and ticked all my boxes, meeting my overly critical standards.
This wasn't the case with the original FMP series, though. Back when I watched that I was left a bit underwhelmed by an experience I'd expected to be a lot more enjoyable than it turned out to be. The constant switching between school comedy episodes and anti-terrorism/mecha action stories let it down, interrupting the flow and making it difficult to get into the serious episodes. And, with the quality of the serious story arcs and comedy varying from decent to very good, the quality of the content wasn't enough save a series suffering from an identity crisis. I gave it 7/10.
Thankfully, someone with a brain obviously decided it would be a better idea to separate the serious and comedy elements into two series, removing the problems caused by the conflicting genres. The comedy side of things got its very own series first in the way Fumoffu and, as you'd expect, lots of school insanity involving Sagara and Kaname followed. It worked out far better without any robot goings on getting in the way, helped by the comedy scenes being far more funny than most of those shown in the original series. I gave it 8/10, but I would've probably scored it higher if not for my sense of humour failure.
TSR, which came out after Fumoffu, did the reverse and focused on the anti-terrorism side. I wasn't really sure what to expect after ending up disappointed with the more serious sections of the original series, not even the high ratings making me confident. I only got around to watching it after I saw and won an auction for the art box + entire series on eBay.co.uk, the motivation not having been there when I had finished Fumoffu many months earlier. But, when I did finally get around to watching it, I found myself struggling to find faults, and even the faults I found were only relatively minor things such as the use of abbreviations without any explanations being given.
As you'd expect with TSR being an action series, the story wasn't memorable: The threat of civil war appears, Mythril send out Arm Slaves to intervene, the threat of war is averted and the cycle starts anew. Mixed in is an organization called Amalgam that creates wars to test out weapons and profit from doing so. None of it is hard to understand or what I'd consider to be memorable.
So, what made TSR better than most other action series? The characters. Since most watchers would've viewed the previous series before getting into this, most of the character introductions and basic development wasn't necessary, leaving more than enough time for the new characters to get introduced and allowing for the already established characters to get additional development. Talking of new additions, the new characters were pretty good, the insane new villain Gates and a pair of sexy Chinese twins being the best of the lot.
Unsurprisingly, The Sagara/Kaname relationship received the most time and, as a result, was the strongest non-action point of the series. I came to like/love/want to sex Kaname far more by the end, the determination and emotions shown by her raising my opinion of her even higher than it was prior to watching. Sagara, on the other hand, was more hit and miss: I hated him for a lengthy period of TSR for being a coward, but I did end up warming up to him towards the end; when the interaction between the two resumed. The one consistent thought that ran through my mind when watching Sagara was that without Kaname around him he's neither likeable nor very interesting...
Overall, I can't help but rate TSR highly. It successfully pleased someone hard to please, meaning it's a show that I'm sure the majority of anime fans out there that haven't got around to watching it yet would love to bits. Looking for a short and high quality action/mecha series? If so, this is for you.
9/10
