Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury

機動戦士ガンダム水星の魔女 (Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo)

7.8(94,736)

MAL Score

Ranked #1062

Popularity #1489

Sci-Fi
Mecha
School
Space

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Oct 2, 2022 to Jan 8, 2023
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Suletta Mercury leaves her home world at her mother’s urging and enrolls at the Asticassia School of Technology, where status is settled in student duels. Victory carries an unusual reward: the school’s top duelist is granted an engagement to Miorine Rembran, a condition imposed by Miorine’s father.

When Guel Jeturk—the academy’s ace and Miorine’s current fiancé—tries to force Miorine to live with him, Suletta steps in and is challenged to a duel. She wins, only to be taken into custody on suspicion of piloting a banned GUND-ARM mobile suit, known as a Gundam, and her triumph is declared invalid. Refusing to let the decision stand, Miorine pushes for a rematch with harsher terms: Suletta must win again or face expulsion, and the Gundam Aerial she cherishes will be destroyed.

Otaku Consensus

The Witch from Mercury lands as a successful modern gateway Gundam: Hiroshi Kobayashi’s first cour uses Sunrise’s polished duel animation, sharp mobile-suit staging, and a school-to-corporate-politics escalation to make franchise ideas legible without Universal Century homework. Reception around its 7.84 MAL and 78 AniList scores is positive but divided, with the clearest criticism being the tonal whiplash between the darker prologue/traditional war expectations and the academy framework that dominates these 12 episodes.

Why You Should Watch

Watch this if you want Gundam’s political machinery, class anxiety, and prototype-mecha mystique without needing decades of timeline context. The first cour is built for viewers who like the tactical pageantry of Code Geass and the institutional pressure-cooker feel of elite-school anime, but want the hardware treated as consequential military technology rather than pure super-robot spectacle. Its hook is not “giant robots at school” so much as how status, corporate ownership, and family power get converted into ritualized combat. Newcomers get a clean entry point; longtime mecha fans get Sunrise craft, Kanetake Ebikawa and Kenji Teraoka machine work, and a female-led Gundam story that sparked unusually broad discussion around audience expansion, yuri subtext, and what a 2020s Gundam can look like.

Key Characters

S
Suletta Mercury(VA: Kana Ichinose)
Suletta stands out as a Gundam lead whose nervous social awkwardness and overwhelming pilot presence create a deliberately unusual contrast for the franchise.
M
Miorine Rembran(VA: Lynn)
Miorine is the series’ sharp-edged political counterweight, popular with fans for turning personal rebellion into strategy rather than simple defiance.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Sunrise treats the TV mecha action as prestige animation: web critics singled out the battle scenes as a visual spectacle, and one review summary rated the animation 10/10 and mobile suit design 9/10.
2
The first cour’s structure foregrounds school hierarchy, corporate authority, and class struggle before conventional battlefield warfare, matching AniList’s unusually high tags for Class Struggle at 92%, Politics at 83%, and Boarding School at 66%.
3
It is a standalone modern Gundam entry designed to court new viewers, a point repeatedly reflected in user reviews from first-time Gundam and first-time mecha watchers.
4
The production separates identity and machinery through distinct design leads: Mogumo is credited with original character design, while Kanetake Ebikawa and Kenji Teraoka handle mechanical design.
5
Its fan conversation is shaped by the combination of Female Protagonist at 93% and Yuri at 79% on AniList, making its character framing a major part of its franchise identity rather than a side note.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The original creator credits list both Hajime Yatate and Yoshiyuki Tomino, tying this standalone 2022 entry back to the foundational Gundam creator lineage while still positioning it for new audiences.
Fun fact 2: The first cour ran for 12 episodes from October 2, 2022 to January 8, 2023, making it a compact seasonal Gundam entry rather than a yearlong broadcast in the older franchise mold.
Fun fact 3: Critical and fan discussion frequently compares the prologue’s darker space-drama tone with the main cour’s academy setting; that mismatch is the source of several mixed and negative reviews, not the animation or mechanical craft.
Fun fact 4: Across databases, its reception is notably consistent: 7.84/10 on MyAnimeList from 94,622 votes and 78/100 on AniList, with 2,485 AniList favourites.
Fun fact 5: The character design pipeline is unusually visible in the credits, with Hirotoshi Takaya, Juri Toida, and Marie Tagashira all credited on character design alongside Mogumo’s original character designs.