Getting canceled just might be the best thing that could have happened to After War Gundam X, because the difference in entertainment quality between its first and second halves is like night and day. When the show begins so sluggishly, there's simply no option but to pick up the pace for it to wrap up by the end of the year as ordered. Suddenly, when this 20th century show is told with 21st century pacing, it gets a new lease on life. The Gundam X story adapts into a master juggler, balancing the conflict's complexities in both the Earth and space theaters from the perspective of an increasingly likable main cast. A concise final arc resolves neatly into a satisfying conclusion. Had it not been canceled, Gundam X might have risked overstaying its welcome. Instead, it showed itself out at the perfect time.

This is a story about duality, and once you notice the parallels the first time, you start to see them everywhere. Throughout the course of this second collection, the same story of “opposites attract” is told over and over again, with increasingly high stakes. Still, there's nothing uncreative about this consistency—it's more of a reminder that Gundam X never forgets what it wants to be about. The collection begins with a chance meeting between the Freeden Crew's Toniya and adversary Ennil El, who become fast friends before realizing each other's opposing identities. It ends with a comparison between the Newtype Tiffa and the ordinary Garrod, strongly suggesting that even if Tiffa can see the future, Garrod's determination will create it. It's also no coincidence that the leaders of the S.R.A. and U.N.E.—who view Newtypes in opposition as gods or tools—look and act almost exactly the same regardless. The only issue is that characters risk being oversimplified in order to prove a point, and indeed the villains' motivations for acquiring power are typical.

There's a lot to love about this main conflict: a divide between the wartime generation and the post-war one. Characters' ages are constantly referenced because if they are older than 15 and remember the war, they see events completely differently from Garrod and his peers. “This is what you adults are all about,” Garrod fumes. “You dredge up trouble from before we were born and drag us into it!” Later, when Jamil is captured by the U.N.E. to exploit his Newtype abilities, his captor uses age to sympathize with him: “I belong to the same generation as you.” To the wartime generation, Newtypes are a “curse” to be worshipped or exploited. But to Garrod, “they've been around since before we were born, and everybody wants them, but what the heck are Newtypes, really?” Newtypes, people with inexplicable psychic powers, are resolutely bound to Gundam storylines, usually as a reason to explain why the protagonist is so darn special. (Gundam X shows restraint in this; Garrod is just a regular teenager with more moxie than most.) But in Gundam X part two, we discover that Newtypes are a concept, maybe even an illusion—and different generations have different understandings of who they are and how they work. It's a completely different way to riff on one of the Gundam canon's most established tropes.

While picking up the pace worked better than expected for the story, it didn't do anything for the art. With dull backgrounds and gooey cartoon faces, there's not much to catch the eye here. Tiffa's boring black-crayon drawings are a microcosm of the drab color palette. The animation is worse, with noticeable repeated sequences. While the Gundam Double X is a seriously neat-looking suit, most of its battle choreography is shown through still images. The second half of the show reveals a lot of neat mecha, coming to a special zenith when four unique super soldiers commission to kill Garrod, but battles are barely animated and conveyed mostly through stills and blurry explosions. With such bland visuals, it's up to the musical soundtrack to set the mood, which it does expertly by rising to orchestral crescendos at key moments.While I wouldn't exactly want to listen to it standalone, it proves versatile for a range of emotional responses, from tense battles to an eerie moon encounter.

In the second half of After War Gundam X, the creators had to either speed up their storytelling or risk delivering a half-finished Gundam show to the world, and they wisely chose the former. A speedier story, with new challenges and discoveries being uncovered every episode, has aged Gundam X far better than the average sluggish '90s show. Since a faster pace means characters return more often instead of disappearing for nebulous swaths of time, it's easier to care about their deepening story arcs. If the first half of the series was about casting a wide net in a search for Newtypes all over the universe, the second half was about filling in the results. Without leaving any loose strings hanging, Gundam X gives us an ending that satisfactorily addresses every character in a way that made me feel like it ought to have been only 39 episodes all along.