Review of Full Metal Panic!

I'm strongly of the opinion that Full Metal Panic is a wasted opportunity. It takes an interesting universe and an interesting political situation which would later be modified and evoked by Gundam 00, and then doesn't quite know if it wants to be a real robot show, a super robot show or a high-school comedy. My main problem with the mech combat is the "gimmick" of the main units - the Lambda Driver. Essentially it's a thing which makes the impossible possible, acting variously as a force field, an energy weapon, a TRANS-AM style turbo boost and more. It doesn't work too well in my opinion.Take it out and you've got the potential for exciting mecha fights ala Front Mission or Armored Core, which is an angle not really explored. Leave it in and fights tend to devolve into shouting, clashing barriers and stalemates.

The main villain for much of the show is an easily hated psycho in the vein of Yazan Gable, Ali Al-Sarshes etc, (female equivalents of course being Anemone, Cynthia Lane and Marida Cruz) with the added bonus of him being smug as hell and very powerful. The parts where he's scheming and fighting are generally very good, although as mentioned before the Lambda Driver makes the fights a little predictable by removing any chance of it being a fair fight.

However, for a roughly equal amount of the show FMP is a romantic comedy about a socially inept boy and a tsundere schoolgirl in the vein of Asuka Langley Soryu. It's not as funny as it thinks it is (it takes the second series, Fumoffu!, to really make the comedy work by removing the mecha parts) and it sometimes seems interminable, relying on a couple of jokes that don't really go anywhere.

If you really like high school comedy, you'll probably like these parts. I found they went on a bit long and ultimately weren't as funny as they could have been - and when the comedy mixes with the serious plot it simply leads to characters acting in completely ridiculous ways that sometimes make horror movie victims seem smart.

What does make FMP enjoyable are the side characters on the mecha half of the show. Tessa and the submarine crew, as well as Sousuke's wingmen, are consistently awesome. There's a good character dynamic set up and I found myself looking forward to their screentime more than the main plot until the very final arc, in which all hell breaks loose.

I think if FMP better balanced the Kindergarten Cop-esque high school parts with the mecha fights, and got rid of the Lambda Driver's ludicrous capabilities in order to make fights more interesting, it would be a good show. However, for me, the slightly dodgy pacing caused by the inability to smoothly mix the two genres and the at times uninteresting mech combat make it only an above average show.