If you missed seeing pretty girls piloting giant mechanical hulks, Kazuhiro Takamura heard your prayers. The director behind Strike Witches and Vividred Operation just released the first trailer for Vertex Force, an original anime landing in October 2026.
He’s been disarmingly blunt about the project: a love letter to everything that fascinates him in animation, gathering his creative fingerprints in one place. Most creators deflect; he put his personal recipe card on the table.
The Strategy Behind the Reveal
Studio SMDE could have fire-hosed the internet with every character and plot beat at once. They didn’t.
- A drip feed builds gravity β it invites audiences to lean in, theorise, do the marketing themselves
- They unveiled one character: Haruka Todo
- 16 years old, from Okinawa, radiating wholesome muscular buoyancy
Haruka isn’t a delicate parcel needing rescue. She’s pure muscle, inexhaustible energy, and charmingly artless charisma. No seiyuu named yet β just a design poised between schoolyard gag and metallic apocalypse.
The Dream Team Behind the Machines
Where they did open the wallet: the veterans behind the mechs themselves.
- Kanetake Ebikawa β the genius behind Mobile Suit Gundam 00 and The Witch from Mercury β leads engine design
- JNTHED β ENIA designs
- Masashi Suzuki β working closely with Takamura on scripts
You don’t assemble a lineup that looks like the back of a collector’s art book unless you intend for the machinery to stand toe-to-toe with the protagonists.
What We Know So Far
Vertex Force fuses adorable character aesthetics with high-intensity mechanical combat. The story introduces athletic young women β like the cheerful Okinawan student Haruka Todo β thrown into dynamic battles using advanced technology.
Through a mix of relaxed slice-of-life moments and pure action sequences, the series will explore the mysteries of these machines and the weight on the shoulders of those who pilot them.
The Open Question
By giving you one anchor character, a date, and a production roster that serves as a handshake of quality, they’ve set a small, controlled fire of curiosity.
When a creator openly calls a project a love letter
, does that make you an invited guest reading over his shoulder β or a late arrival wondering if the message was ever meant for you?
In an age of total algorithmic certainty, what’s more seductive: knowing everything by Tuesday, or being asked to imagine what a grinning girl from Okinawa looks like after she’s just levelled a city block?
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