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Lieutenant General Gundam

tankdrop24 said:
I feel like Kira had the beginnings of something interesting in Destiny with his aimless interventions into the war ultimately causing more harm than good. It might have even been meaningful had the show had the guts to actually kill him off in his fight with Shinn. But like, it doesn't work when afterwards Durandal just causally reveals himself as the obvious bad guy and makes stopping him really straightforward.
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Durandal was doing the "just as planned" smile every other episode and dropping cryptic quotes left and right. He was voiced by Ikeda the same guy that voiced Char. He was literally playing chess in a dark room, for God's and Glenn's sake. He might as well just hold a giant neon sign that says "I am the designated scheming chessmaster antagonist of the show."

Like, the Destiny plan really did came out a too late, other than a few tiny hints of how he want people to "find their place" sprinkled earlier. Destiny really shoudl've get to the point faster and more obvious yeah, but Durandal being the bad guy really should not be a surprise.
 
Facepalmer said:
Durandal was doing the "just as planned" smile every other episode and dropping cryptic quotes left and right. He was voiced by Ikeda the same guy that voiced Char. He was literally playing chess in a dark room, for God's and Glenn's sake. He might as well just hold a giant neon sign that says "I am the designated scheming chessmaster antagonist of the show."

Like, the Destiny plan really did came out a too late, other than a few tiny hints of how he want people to "find their place" sprinkled earlier. Destiny really shoudl've get to the point faster and more obvious yeah, but Durandal being the bad guy really should not be a surprise.
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Nobody thinks Durandal wasn't a villain. The issue is that he's terrible as a villain, constantly doing things that could only harm him and having a high school book report of GATTACA in place of an end goal.
 
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Facepalmer said:
Durandal was doing the "just as planned" smile every other episode and dropping cryptic quotes left and right. He was voiced by Ikeda the same guy that voiced Char. He was literally playing chess in a dark room, for God's and Glenn's sake. He might as well just hold a giant neon sign that says "I am the designated scheming chessmaster antagonist of the show."

Like, the Destiny plan really did came out a too late, other than a few tiny hints of how he want people to "find their place" sprinkled earlier. Destiny really shoudl've get to the point faster and more obvious yeah, but Durandal being the bad guy really should not be a surprise.
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The issue with Durandal is that he goes from 'that guy is up to something' to 'it's the eleventh hour before his evil plan succeeds' while the actual machinations between these two points are extremely vague and poorly telegraphed to the audience.
 
tankdrop24 said:
AGE is the series you watch after Destiny to appreciate the fact that despite how poorly written it was, there was something about the music, character work or whatever that was amusing enough to be memorable, to live rent free in the heads of Gundam fans rather than just getting memory holed like Age was.
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On the other hand watching AGE after either SEED show really highlights how incredibly ugly those shows are lol. AGE is a bad show but it has some genuinely incredible animation.
 
Ford Prefect said:
On the other hand watching AGE after either SEED show really highlights how incredibly ugly those shows are lol. AGE is a bad show but it has some genuinely incredible animation.
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I would argue that SEED has some really neat mechanical animation - mechs, vehicles, etc - especially in the early arcs. Quality is definitely spottier though (and definitely stock footage for days iirc), and AGE easily blows SEED out of the water when it comes to animating humans for sure.
 
okay i can't resist the urge to post

you think this is funny?

In a cosmic sort of way, yes

Well, Mr. Funny man, is this how you get your sick kicks?



What? It's just an ordinary character desi-

DRAMATIC SCARE CHORD



OH MY GOODNESS!!!!

HIRAI!!!!!
 
tankdrop24 said:
AGE is the series you watch after Destiny to appreciate the fact that despite how poorly written it was, there was something about the music, character work or whatever that was amusing enough to be memorable, to live rent free in the heads of Gundam fans rather than just getting memory holed like Age was.
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Aurora is banging enough that it turned my 7 year old daughter into a J-Pop fan. I also consider the Dark Hound to be the second best Gundam design.
 
I still can't quite decide if I like the Crossbone X-3 or the X-1 Full Cloth better, but they're both better than the Dark Hound.

The Dark Hound is not bad, but they already did Pirate Gundam better.
 
43 episodes into AGE. I think I've found the Gundam Singularity.
Girard/Reina Spriggan is like this amalgamation of both cliche and derivative storytelling for this franchise. Antagonist Newtype woman, betrayed the Federation, so traumatized by her boyfriend's death that she took his name, did so because the Federation acted like cartoon villains for no reason, but then also they were tricked into doing it so the even more cartoon villain antagonists could get her to join them. But also she also utterly hates Gundams and has psychic powers so strong that she can paralyze people's mechs and steal their psycommu weapons while in pain and laughing like a maniac. And then she dies to a good guy to hurt the hero's feelings, but not before having a psychic conversation with the resident Char upon death.
Her character's derived from three already hyper-derivative characters in Anew from 00 and Marida and Loni from Unicorn. And her powers are taken straight from the Newtype Destroyer system of Unicorn, which itself was taken from the Zero System in Wing, which was both a shortcut to having Newtypes in a setting without Newtypes and taking cues from the Psyco Gundam from Zeta.
 
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Greener223224 said:
Is this just what Gundam is? Self-references as substitute for writing because the creators and marketers are just as uncritically enamored with their childhood memories of Zeta as audiences are? In that sense, why is Victory even seen as a pariah when it's just Zeta, but more?
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The whole reason you're on this insane quest is because you already knew Gundam was very self-referential so I'm not sure why you're treating this as new information. Likewise, everyone in at least this thread has been in pretty consistent agreement that AGE is at BEST in the bottom 3 Gundam TV series of all time. We WERE saying that for a reason: because it's bad.

But calling this shit "all Gundam is" is a ridiculous statement when you've dedicated like a year of your life to watching the vast majority of Gundam. This is the nadir of the self-reference, by a wide margin, and you know it. Yeah, Gundam is a self-referential Ouroboros that's constantly putting new actors in similar situations and seeing if there's new development. Yeah it, like many long-running, lucrative franchises, is steeped in nostalgia. But nine times out of ten, the artists making it have something new to say, rearranging the same pieces and tropes into a new mosaic. You know this, and I know you know this, because you won't stop live blogging about it. Asking if the worst possible example of a franchise is all the franchise is is the most nonsense response to a bad show I can think of when you've devoted all this time and effort and emotion to watching the 90% of that franchise that's better, including stuff that came out after this low point. And all that is to say nothing about your aggressive swipe at the people who like the show for liking garbage when, again, we all told you AGE is shit.

Also people don't like Victory for being "Zeta but more" because the "more" is the misery porn and misogyny. Even the people who liked the misery porn and misogyny didn't think there needed to be more of it at the cost of a coherent plot.
 
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Greener223224 said:
Yeah, sorry, slipped my mind and I got hyperbolic. I apologize and I'll retract that part of my post.

Still floored at how this show was allowed if not encouraged to yoink characters, setpieces and plot points from the concurrently running and still not finished Unicorn. Like, shouldn't there be some kind of law that prevents you from doing that?
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Can I point out that the Unicorn OVAs are based on a bunch of novels? That were released as far back as 2003?

Like, bro, that's not even fair. You're complaining that a show is similar to another show, even though the source material for that other show had been out for nearly a decade at that point. Of which I specifically mean Unicorn.

How do you even get to that point?
 
Greener223224 said:
I thought the novels were going from 2006 to 2012?
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Okay, I was wrong about the novels starting at 2003, but they ended at 2009, a year before the first OVA was released, iirc.

And honestly, why is it such a crime that AGE lifted ideas from technically a bunch of novels that Sunrise had a different studio making a direct adaptation of at the time? Gundam is Sunrise's main animated franchise, they can do whatever the hell they want.
 
G2BattleConvoy said:
Okay, I was wrong about the novels starting at 2003, but they ended at 2009, a year before the first OVA was released, iirc.

And honestly, why is it such a crime that AGE lifted ideas from technically a bunch of novels that Sunrise had a different studio making a direct adaptation of at the time? Gundam is Sunrise's main animated franchise, they can do whatever the hell they want.
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I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken offense to it.
 
Finished AGE.
You know, the narrative people like to tell is that "They got a video game writer to make this/it was based off a video game, that's why it's bad", except I've seen a lot of this same plot done way, way better in games. Xenoblade pulled off the Vagans better, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War pulled off the generational story better, and there's tons of SRW fans who attest that they've managed to adapt and recreate the plots and characters of shows they cover better than their source material. It just feels like a conversation-terminating excuse in the same way people use "Tomino had depression" for Zeta and Victory's problems but then go all in on attacking ZZ despite never having watched it.
Really, I think the comment I heard on Reddit (man I need actual sources for these things) about "the writer watched a ton of Gundam AFTER getting the greenlight for Gundam game his company had pitched" is a bigger culprit - that AGE was a cargo cult show like RWBY that shoved in a bunch of things that "feel" like anime/Gundam without any of the proper context or substance, just the assumption that since these things seemed cool and were in other Gundams, they're sure to work with whatever audience this show gets. It's a problem that had to have come from both the creatives and the producers, given how often the "imitation with zero substance or effort to improve" criticism kept showing up in Seed and 00.
 
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Greener223224 said:
You know, the narrative people like to tell is that "They got a video game writer to make this/it was based off a video game, that's why it's bad", except I've seen a lot of this same plot done way, way better in games. Xenoblade pulled off the Vagans better, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War pulled off the generational story better, and there's tons of SRW fans who attest that they've managed adapt the plots and characters of shows they cover better than their source material.
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Here's the issue I find with this: just because a plot works in a video game, it won't necessarily work as well in a 50-episode anime. Like, yeah, Level 5 were involved in making AGE, that is true, but I think part of the reason why AGE didn't work with what it had was that, it wasn't properly worked out with the internal consistency an anime series made for television should have.
 
Greener223224 said:
You know, the narrative people like to tell is that "They got a video game writer to make this/it was based off a video game, that's why it's bad", except I've seen a lot of this same plot done way, way better in games. Xenoblade pulled off the Vagans better, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War pulled off the generational story better, and there's tons of SRW fans who attest that they've managed to adapt and recreate the plots and characters of shows they cover better than their source material. It just feels like a conversation-terminating excuse in the same way people use "Tomino had depression" for Zeta and Victory's problems but then go all in on attacking ZZ despite never having watched it.
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You're demonstrating the opposite of your intended point here. Xenoblade, Genealogy of the Holy War, and Super Robot Wars made this kind of story work BECAUSE they are video games. AGE didn't in part because it is not. Video games are a completely different medium and telling a story intended for one in the other requires a solid idea of what the story is SUPPOSED to be and a competent team to handle the transformation (and even then, video games adapted into anime are usually mid at best). AGE had neither of these things and was a mess of bungled production from the start.

That said I do agree that AGE being a video game wouldn't really "fix" it except perhaps to adjust expectations. Even a stopgap measure like giving it another 12ish episodes to let the gigsntic cast have more rom to breathe and develop is slapping a bandaid on the problem that it's a Universal Century rehash released when the LAST Universal Century rehash was still fresh in cultural memory, and still quite divisive at that.
 
Greener223224 said:
Finished AGE.
You know, the narrative people like to tell is that "They got a video game writer to make this/it was based off a video game, that's why it's bad", except I've seen a lot of this same plot done way, way better in games. Xenoblade pulled off the Vagans better, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War pulled off the generational story better, and there's tons of SRW fans who attest that they've managed to adapt and recreate the plots and characters of shows they cover better than their source material. It just feels like a conversation-terminating excuse in the same way people use "Tomino had depression" for Zeta and Victory's problems but then go all in on attacking ZZ despite never having watched it.
Really, I think the comment I heard on Reddit (man I need actual sources for these things) about "the writer watched a ton of Gundam AFTER getting the greenlight for Gundam game his company had pitched" is a bigger culprit - that AGE was a cargo cult show like RWBY that shoved in a bunch of things that "feel" like anime/Gundam without any of the proper context or substance, just the assumption that since these things seemed cool and were in other Gundams, they're sure to work with whatever audience this show gets. It's a problem that had to have come from both the creatives and the producers, given how often the "imitation with zero substance or effort to improve" criticism kept showing up in Seed and 00.
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This would work if Level 5 didn't try to make their own mecha game (two in fact) and didn't absolutely suck at it, with the writing showcasing the exact pitfalls that AGE later also stumbled upon. Then again both the games and Gundam AGE had the same head writer, president of Level-5 Akihiro Hino, so the quality was to be expected.
 
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