It’s definitely been a while since I checked this one out so lets dive into season 2. I really enjoyed season 1 with the awesome music and fights around every corner. In a lot of ways season 2 does keep up although I would give 1 the slight edge. I thought it had a better climax and wrapped things up a little better. This one gets a bit too ambitious towards the end so some things have to be rushed like the two cosmic beings and one of the main characters looks horrible here. Still, we do get the big fight scenes which is always a plus and the soundtrack is still great which is what counts.

After the events of the first season, Arshem and Yamato are split off into two different plots. Arshem is helping a resistance group get their bearings as she still works to become leader of the aliens. If she can do this, then she will really be in a good position to stop the war once and for all. The main problem is that their commander right now is Grieffas who is not about to listen to her and wants to conquer the remaining humans. She will inevitably have to fight with him at some point about this.

In the human plot, Yamato is still blasting away at the aliens but his heart isn’t quite as into it anymore. He used to want to wipe them all out, but now that he knows a lot of them are just ordinary people, it’s not something he can put all of his heart into in quite the same way. It’s not like he is a mass murderer after all. He just wants to defend his right to live. He also sees more of the shady dealings that his own government is doing, this will not be easy.

Yamato is a great character as always. He still has a lot of fire within him and is always ready for a fight. He hasn’t lost that enthusiasm. He may have less time to show off his punk side but near the beginning of the season he does get to fight the new transfer student which was fun. Yamato is definitely not someone who will go down without a fight and you can always appreciate that. I was a little surprised when the first season threw in a bit of a romance for him and season 2 doesn’t shy away from it either. His romance with Arshem is treated as a legitimate plot point that actually comes up and get focus on numerous occasions. It can definitely be really dramatic at times to be sure but it’s definitely handled way better than the average one. It helps that they are both quality characters.

This is one of those romances that I can actually point to as a great example on how to do this. Both characters liked each other without any rebounds or other people getting in the way. We get a lot of time so it’s not like they fell for each other immediately, etc. There were just a whole lot of positives to be had here. The series tries out some other romances which don’t work quite as well since they weren’t the focus but when you manage to do the main one right, the rest all comes into play.

Arshem is also a great character here with good ideals. At times she may feel a bit naive with her hopes for world peace though. The fact of the matter is that there can be no chance for peace until there is a cure allowing the aliens to live peacefully on Earth. Without that, they will have to keep relying on the injections over and over again which isn’t a long term strategy. If anything it is just something that will make the forces uneven which will breed more resentment. So finding the cure is really the first step…or just gaining absolute power and that’s really the route that she went. So her goals were good but I do think she was missing the big picture.

On the human side we also have Ryugo as one of the original main characters but I wouldn’t say he gets a ton to do after a while. His abilities are fairly low compared to the rest of the pilots. He pulls his own weight and everything but it always feels like he is lagging behind the other characters when it counts. He works well enough for the banter but it would have been great if he could have gotten some kind of a power up at some point.

Teru is the brainy type of character and he was solid in the first season but he really falls off a cliff here. The character doesn’t have enough strength of will to make the right decisions effortlessly. Instead he has to actually wonder what the right call is even when it’s obvious. He had a kid and isn’t sure if the kid should be alive? That’s rather crazy and he doesn’t do much about the experimenting for a while.

Then at one point he attacks a cleaning maid because it looked like the girl he was in love with. Teru’s absolutely deranged and he ended up being one of the most annoying characters. I was sort of rooting for his downfall for a while there. It’s just crazy how you can fall so hard after being a rather sensible character.

Reiji is still a solid character with his super abilities. It would have been nice if he could have used them more though. It felt like there was a lot more to that plot point that never really got addressed. Later on Yamato seemed to be able to use similar abilities so it’s maybe something that humans just have innately as opposed to it needing to be artificial but I dunno, it wasn’t given quite as much focus as you’d expect. Reiji does have one critical battle near the end where he holds off a top tier though.

Jun is always a super fun character. She enters a bit of a slump later on when she suffers some PTSD but the whole plot is actually handled rather well. It’s not rushed and we are given a lot of time to see her fighting through this and trying to get her old confidence back. Once Jun pushes past this, she goes back to her fun moments of banter and messing with everyone. It can be hard to get a read on when she’s joking vs being serious but that’s part of her charm.

The Queen gets a rather big role here and she is another character who was handled super well. She had to make the really hard calls as the leader and accepted the role as villain. She still is a villain to be clear and there’s no real way to explain her wanting to murder Arshem. So she ended up being too far gone and no amount of damage control could fix that. That being said, while I will continue to criticize her for that, taking down the Earth seems like a reasonable strategy from her perspective. There’s no way any planet will willingly give up to another and additionally, if they wanted to accept the aliens, that wouldn’t be possible either since the planet isn’t big enough for the two of them.

She decided that with all of this in mind, she may as well launch the first strike and knock them all out immediately. There was only one flaw with her plan which is that she couldn’t destroy all of them without finding the method for being able to breath in Earth’s atmosphere. If not for that, she could have finished the job and that would have been that. I do think you could make the case that they should have captured more people then and there are different ways you could play this. At the end of the day, the humans pulled through anyway.

Grieffas is a more extreme villain. He believes in the first place that the aliens should not have run away when they were being annihilated by Adam and Eve. So under his leadership the whole race would have been wiped out before this series even began. That would have certainly been one way to go. I definitely sympathize with not wanting to run away but it’s clear that the gap in power between the two races was extensive. There’s nothing that could have been done. Then he gets obsessed with being together with Arshem and is madly jealous of Yamato the whole time.

He goes way down in this second half for basically being a creep and spending all of his time on the throne. In season 1 he was fighting and at least getting stuff done. In this second part his main priority was Arshem at the cost of his own plans and ultimately he went down like a chump. Definitely not the way you want to lose when the stakes are this high. The other villains in the show all ended up being a lot more fun. First off you have Zaskar who actually doesn’t get a whole lot to do. He is introduced as one of the top fighters on the villain’s side but he shows up super late into the game. He would have gotten more to do in the end but the show didn’t quite get to that part. Still, I always enjoy the elite villains like this and the guy has a very serious attitude that is appropriate for a fighter of his station.

Then we have Yugra who starts out as a villain that just follows orders so that he can prove himself. From there he ends up being a really solid villain overall who questions his orders and follows his heart. His character arc has to go through rather quickly but it was a good one and he ended up being likable. The same goes for his partner Miysis although it takes longer for her to really join the heroes side. You sort of feel like she just came along for the ride for a while there but in the end as long as you join the heroes I suppose the reason itself isn’t quite as important.

Veloa is another villain who starts out as being evil and then sees the light. When you think about it, quite a few of the aliens were ready to turn good and I think it helps to support the overall premise of both groups not wanting to be evil. At the end of the day they committed the murders under the Queen’s orders but before that they were never a villain group like this. So going back to their old ways will end up being normal. There are still a lot of grudges that will never go away but that is to be expected. So this guy gets to prove his worth of why he is a good bodyguard even if he does lose his main fight.

Then we have Dixenberg who is a reasonable villain. He’s basically an old guy who can’t really fight so you do have to keep that into consideration. What I like about him is he represents the corrupt humans who will always show up from time to time. He plans to take advantage of the chaos that arose when 99% of each race’s population was wiped out. Now he can be king and rule over it all! It’s truly an ambitious plot and so I get that. Ultimately it’s not like you ever think he would stand a chance against anyone but he is still fun enough.

Kojiro is more of an intense villain because he gets a big backstory and a lot to do in the present. He has trouble with a second personality that takes over and makes him murder people all of the time. It’s definitely tough to make friends that way and he really starts to crack by the end. I thought that he was a reasonable rival but the low willpower definitely did hurt him in the end. He sort of holds the heroes back for most of the series and only gets it in gear by the very final part of the climax. Better late than never though.

We also have the other human resistance group led by Victor. He’s a solid character who has a big backstory. I give him massive amounts of hype for being able to survive in the wilderness while the entire planet is covered in poison. That’s a really difficult thing to have to put up with and yet he took it like a champ. So definitely kudos there. He could have introduced himself to his daughter a lot sooner though. He really took his time there.

Then there is Masamune who gives us one of the most enjoyable fights at the start of the season. I like the idea of a pro agent being thrown into the mix. He may not be a street fighter like Yamato but his skills still translate themselves into the battles very well. He gets his own romance plot which is rather rushed I have to admit but all in all he’s good. Near the end of the series he lets his guard down and gets stabbed which is a really cheesy scene. There’s no way the villain should have been able to land a hit on him there. That whole thing felt rather forced.

Shizuka gets the least to do by far. She’s good at covert ops and infiltration but we don’t really get to see her fight. She’s a solid member of the team either way and pulls her own weight but the first two undoubtedly get a lot more to do. It feels like Shizuka needed a friend or family member of her own so that she would have a relevant plot going instead of just waiting around on the sidelines.

Finally we have Adam and Eve who are rather huge as you would expect. These two are villains with cosmic abilities that are vastly above what you may expect from anyone in this series. They usually don’t get to actually show these abilities off though and that’s in part because they don’t do anything until the very end. Just one of their mechs gives the whole crew a tough fight and they can create millions of them. Only a very specific kind of ability is able to negate this and they happen to fight her. Still, I really enjoyed Adam and Eve. They make for a good team and the only shame is that they didn’t appear more. There is absolutely still a whole lot you can do with them. Considering that they wiped out the aliens so easily who wiped out the humans with the same lack of difficulty, the power creep was intense.

The show perhaps bit off a little more than it could chew there. I don’t think it is always able to handle the power level concerns that come up when the characters start introducing stronger and stronger mechs. That being said, the show is still very interesting all the way through. There is never a shortage of action so you will have those scenes in every episode but at the same time there are much deeper plot threads going on the whole time. The series really dives into topics like the cycle of violence and why wars need to be stopped.

The animation is definitely really solid. I would say it’s very consistent between the episodes and I always really enjoy the hand to hand fight scenes. The robot fights are a lot of fun too of course and there are more of those but that’s why the human fights stand out. They happen so rarely that you really feel the impact. Then for the soundtrack, we have a number of lyrical songs that pop up and the usual battle themes which are really good. They all balance out really well and so there is a lot of variety here. You won’t be feeling that the osts are too overused or anything like that. This is a show that will keep you guessing.

There are some themes that the show does gloss over a bit that I would like to see addressed in a sequel though. One of these is of course the fact that the “heroes” are brainwashing all of their civilians so they don’t panic. That still doesn’t justify the whole time. If people are going to panic then your job is to minimize that, but mind controlling them is just taking away all of their agency. This was never really addressed and we see that the humans really got desperate when they were almost wiped out. Ultimately they had a lot of flaws that just weren’t really acknowledged so that’s something I would like to see more beyond all of the extra fighting that I would want to see as well.

Overall, Megaton is a great show all the way around. It may be a little under season 1 but I still had a really good time here. There are a ton of characters to root for and a lot of action scenes to keep your pulse racing. The animation and soundtrack are good and there is a whole lot of ground that is covered here. I can definitely recommend it to any mecha fan or anyone who even just likes a good romance plot. There is a whole lot of screentime for both things and the show does a great job of juggling all of the plots. A story of two people from warring factions falling for each other is always a classic after all.

Overall 8/10