Recommended
This is a review for both seasons. I would have classified this as "Mixed Feelings" for this season alone, but as a whole I consider it "Recommended". Gravion is a fruit of it's time: Early digital animation, a ton of tropes (An older sister character with big boobs, a Char clone, interactions between it's male protagonists that make fujoshi's minds go wild, a meganekko dojikko maid, etc), Ohbari's levels of ecchi, future ultra-famous seiyuu at the start of their career (Fukuyama Jun, Mizuki Nana, Kugimiya Rie), a character voiced by Masamune Shirow, songs by JAM Project, the list goes on. Structurally, it is a bit... weird: Weare led to believe that the full story was already decided from the start from the OP's Lyrics, but if that's the case, it just leaves too much stuff for it's second season (We don't even have a glimpse at the villain during season 1, and we have at maximum some glimpses on the series mysteries). It's first season it's mostly structured as a "monster-of-the-week" formula with obligatory battles every episode, which might set some red-flags for some people who might think this is like Turn A Gundam, where character interactions are interrupted so we can have our sponsor-mandated fights, but this couldn't be further from the truth here: If the fight must be only one minute long so we have more time to see our characters interacting with one another, the series has no problem doing so. It's because of that that all the episodes I would call "my favorites" are located in season 1.
The things is... if that was the case, why structured season 2 as if it was a two-cour anime in itself squished into 12 episodes? Season 1 ends in a high-note that things are scaling and you can't go back, yet the first half of season 2 chooses to not work with the new characters it introduced until half it's episodes were already out, that first half mostly being composed of episodes that, while not all that bad (Some are good), feel more like "Extra Episodes"/Bonus OVAs than anything else. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making it's last six episodes feel especially rushed.
There's this weird weird character who sells chicks on season 1, which reappears on season 2 as seemingly being a friend of Sandman... and then is never addressed again until the last episode where it appears as a background character? Was this supposed to be some kind of joke or reference of the time?
A certain character dies in season 2 (Won't spoil who), but their death lacks a certain sense of gravitas since they were one of the only characters who never had a dedicated episode to them. Even if the previous or current episode of their death focused on them (Which would make it very "death-flaggy") it would be preferable to not having anything.
There's the subject of animation and art quality... honestly, episode one of season one is the best episode of the show by far, in every single aspect (Especially pacing), of which I consider one of the best anime episodes I've ever watched, period. It has a nice animation and artstyle. Another one of my favorite episodes, episode 9 of season 1, also dabbles in a different style of art and animation that reminds me of the style of Shinbou Akiyuki at the time. Season 2, in the other hand... here's episodes where the artstyle and character design kind of disintegrates? I don't think simply calling it "off-model" does it justice, and this is a bit of a bother.
While season 2 DID solve the mysteries set in season 1... I don't think it reached it's full potential? I expected it to have more characters (The new ones barely appear at all), become a bit more complex, but that wasn't the case, so it would be better if it had instead just sticked to the type of character-focused, more "personal" type of episodes that season 1 had.
Honestly, it could've been a whole lot better, but is far from being bad.
