Gundam Show Thread - MSG thru GQuuuuuuX

[Big s]

41 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The art style is a really REALLY poor fit to Gundam, both in terms of the excessively busy mechanical design ala Evangelion and the cutesy art style used for the characters.

I actually like the art style for the characters. It makes it feel more alive than something like the seed stuff.

Definitely not a fan of the mecha designs, but I didn’t have any problems following what was going on. 
 

Overall, I found it more enjoyable than most recent gundam stuff, but that’s a really low bar these days unfortunately. 
 

The boat horn thing had me laughing though for sure, mostly for its uselessness in space, but it lightened the mood with its ridiculousness.

I think this is a show that’s more lighthearted and silly than previous Gundam projects and maybe that’s what made it more enjoyable to me

[davidwhangchoi]

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Ugh... well... I've put it off long enough.  Time to actually give this hot mess called GQuuuuuuX a whirl.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Barely 30s in and I'm already hitting pause for the first time because the picture is so muddy and indistinct that I can barely tell what's going on.  There are two mobile suits fighting, but they're both dark-colored, heavily shaded, and their designs are so busy that it's hard to tell what's going on.  I'm watching this on a f***ing 4K Neo-QLED TV the size of a Fiat 500... there's no excuse for not being able to tell WTH is going on.

We get to watch two pieces of junkyard vomit slap each other around like sumo wrestlers for a minute before the Sodon rolls up and... honks its horn at them?  It's a f***ing space aircraft carrier, not a big rig.  Moreover, how do you not see something that big coming toward you?

Not even two minutes in, and there's already a Gundam attacking?

Eh... I do not care for this art style at all.  The Mobile Suits are sinfully ugly as expected from Ikuto Yamashita, but the character designs look like they're in the wrong genre entirely.  They look like they wandered in from Pretty Cure.  That's not even intended as a snide remark, they really do look like the main character designs from Futari wa Pretty Cure.  It actually kind of makes me afraid to watch the rest, since I know how Hideaki Anno likes to lewd young teen girls.

So main girl got made a mule for a black market "installer device" to enable a MS's combat computer?  And it's just Tem Ray's circuit?

The "Red gundam" has nothing better to do than graffiti the outside of colonies?  The local police failed to catch it, so Challlia Bull is going to send out the titular Gundam to try and catch it.  Getting our first look at it in animation and oh boy does it look like sh*t.  Someone, likely several someones, at Bandai Namco looked at this turd that Ikuto Yamashita served up and said "Yeah, that's good enough."  Blech.  It's so busy that it just looks like an indistinct jumble of random lines.  It has none of the clarity of line or form that most other Gundam designs have.  There might be a passable design under all that surface detail, but it's like the Michael Bay Transformers... they just stuck SO MUCH surface detail on it that it looks like a moving pile of scrap.

So main girl gets her backpack stolen... and chases the thief all the way to a random Torii gate on top of a building?  They narrate at each other about the latest attempt to include pointless no-stakes mobile suit battles in the setting - a bad idea carried over from The Witch from Mercury - and the whole thing is treated like a shoujo ai encounter at a shrine complete with sparkles.  Turns out the whole reason she's pursued this is because the other girl got her phone broken and wants to be reimbursed.

We see the titular Gundam stalking the Red Gundam through a backdrop of curiously square debris covered in surface detail seeminly for no reason other than to make its own excessive level of surface detail look less over-the-top.  The pilot insightfully wonders if the bright red Gundam he's chasing is the red Gundam.  I see winning the One Year War did nothing to help Zeon's education system.  He then proceeds to get absolutely thrashed in short order by the Red Gundam.

The girls deliver the installer to a group living on top of a rundown-looking building in a bad part of town.  We get to see the clan battle team's Zaku in a lovingly detailed pan shot, which just emphasizes how massively overdesigned it is, to the point that it doesn't even really look like a Zaku.  Then the Red Gundam and GQux bust throuhg the ground?  

The visual design of this fight is meant to evoke high speed and maneuverability, but because the designs themselves are so visually busy it just looks like a mess.  We get a closeup of the Red Gundam, and it just looks like someone hastily slapped a V-fin on an EVA unit.

The MPs start trashing the area trying to find the Red Gundam, and don't seem to care how much death and destruction they cause doing it because the inhabitants are refugees living there illegally.  They apparently can't actually fight back because the key is broken... apparently not, as it works just fine, just in time for them to get kicked into a pit and for the MPs to find the GQux and its pilot and try to arrest him.

So main girl throws herself out of the Zaku and steals the Gundam effortlessly without actually doing anything and activates the "Omega Psycommu" without trying?  Seems like it's a direct thought control system like the Newtype Destroyer.  She ends up tossed out the airlock and into another shoujo manga glitter storm. 

They keep using the word "Mav", contextually to refer to a partner... but considering how heavily shoujo ai this feels like it's trying to lean I'm going to incorrectly assume that it's LGBTQ slang.

The Red Gundam does a flyby of the Sodon as if to mock it, and Challia remarks it's not Char in there.

The art style in the previous for next episode is completely different and looks much more in line with Origin and the original... and looks infinitely better by comparison.

Ever since I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time, I've always felt Hideaki Anno is one of the worst and most overrated creators in anime.  GQuuuuuuX is doing little to change that view.  

This show has two main problems:

1. The story is basically just a route from Gihren's Greed.
2. The art style is a really REALLY poor fit to Gundam, both in terms of the excessively busy mechanical design ala Evangelion and the cutesy art style used for the characters.

I can't wait for Char to manipulate a young girl and use her for the end game. 

I don't want Zeta Char... I want CCA drop a colony Char. 

Edited yesterday at 07:03 AM by davidwhangchoi

[Big s]

2 hours ago, davidwhangchoi said:

I can't wait for Char to manipulate a young girl and use her for the end game. 

I don't want Zeta Char... I want CCA drop a colony Char. 

I don’t think it will get to super petty pedophile Char. He didn’t lose the war, spacenoids gained independence, and wasn’t turned into a cyber newtype with a taste for the underage, and I don’t think he has the ability politically to do a colony drop.

For all we know, his soul could have been swallowed by the gundam and may have become part of all the gundams and will lead to some kind of human instrumentatality

[pengbuzz]

"Colony drop".... as in "thousands of people screaming as they plummet to their deaths aboard a giant metal colony about to impact with a city that also has thousands of people screaming as they're all about to die?"

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ColonyDrop

Or do they just drop an empty colony in the middle of nowhere and turn it into a Walmart or something?

Edited yesterday at 12:39 PM by pengbuzz

[Big s]

52 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

"Colony drop".... as in "thousands of people screaming as they plummet to their deaths aboard a giant metal colony about to impact with a city that also has thousands of people screaming as they're all about to die?"

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ColonyDrop

Or do they just drop an empty colony in the middle of nowhere and turn it into a Walmart or something?

I guess it depends on their mood 

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

"Colony drop".... as in "thousands of people screaming as they plummet to their deaths aboard a giant metal colony about to impact with a city that also has thousands of people screaming as they're all about to die?"

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ColonyDrop

Or do they just drop an empty colony in the middle of nowhere and turn it into a Walmart or something?

So, two points here... both of which make it worse.

1. The O'Neill cylinder-type space colonies used in Gundam's Universal Century (and other timelines) typically have a population of several million people, not thousands.
2. Those people aren't usually alive by the time the colony is launched as an improvised ballistic projectile.

One of the many, MANY war crimes perpetrated by the Principality of Zeon during the One Year War was the use of poison gas to indiscriminately massacre the populations of entire colonies in the Federation-aligned Sides.  Island Iffish, the colony from Side 2 that was used in the original colony drop ("Operation British"), had its population gassed to death with GG gas as part of Zeon's preparations to convert the colony into a ballistic weapon.  Just in case the audience needed to be reminded that the Principality of Zeon's forces are Complete Monsters, the previously backstory-only massacre was animated as part of Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin's fifth episode showing how unbothered those Principality forces planning and carrying out the massacre were.  (Ironically Stardust Memory depicts the rest of the Zeon forces as being disgusted by this after the fact, to the extent of deliberately leaving the forces responsible for it behind during the retreat to Axis.)

As for the goal of colony drops... well... it's usually a terror weapon, meant to cause mass death through both the impact and the environmental damage caused by such a huge object impacting Earth's surface.  The Zabis were arguably the most reserved of the lot, aiming only to destroy Earth Federation Forces HQ in a massive nuke-proof underground complex in South America.  Delaz's forces tried to cause mass starvation by dropping a colony on central North America to destroy farmland, the Titans were trying to destroy a factory-city (Von Braun) that was supporting the AEUG, and both Neo Zeon and Char's New Neo Zeon were trying to destroy the Federation capital (wiping out Dublin, Ireland and Lhasa, Tibet in the process.)  Char's endgame was different, though... he wanted serial colony drops to render Earth completely uninhabitable rather than just win some war.

 

10 hours ago, Big s said:

I don’t think it will get to super petty pedophile Char. He didn’t lose the war, spacenoids gained independence, and wasn’t turned into a cyber newtype with a taste for the underage, and I don’t think he has the ability politically to do a colony drop.

Char wasn't a cyber-newtype.

Mind you, this timeline's Char might be more insane than the one in the main UC timeline.  Zeon didn't lose the war, but he sure as hell did.  He wasn't able to carry out his plan to arrange the deaths of the entire Zabi family under the cover of the One Year War the way he did in the prime timeline.  According to promotional materials...

Spoiler

... Char went missing during the Second Battle of Solomon, when he tried to assassinate Kycilia Zabi by sabotaging Zeon's efforts to prevent the Federation from dropping Space Fortress Solomon on the Zeon-aligned lunar city of Granada where Kycilia's forces were headquartered.  He disappeared during a psycommu runaway event similar to the Axis Shock and hasn't been seen since.  If he's still alive, and not reduced to a Ghost in the Machine like the pilot of the Unicorn Phenix in Narrative, he's probably quite mad and hellbent on destroying Zeon and the Zabis.

 

[davidwhangchoi]

8 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

"Colony drop".... as in "thousands of people screaming as they plummet to their deaths aboard a giant metal colony about to impact with a city that also has thousands of people screaming as they're all about to die?"

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ColonyDrop

Or do they just drop an empty colony in the middle of nowhere and turn it into a Walmart or something?

i laughed so hard reading this 

50 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So, two points here... both of which make it worse.

1. The O'Neill cylinder-type space colonies used in Gundam's Universal Century (and other timelines) typically have a population of several million people, not thousands.
2. Those people aren't usually alive by the time the colony is launched as an improvised ballistic projectile.

One of the many, MANY war crimes perpetrated by the Principality of Zeon during the One Year War was the use of poison gas to indiscriminately massacre the populations of entire colonies in the Federation-aligned Sides.  Island Iffish, the colony from Side 2 that was used in the original colony drop ("Operation British"), had its population gassed to death with GG gas as part of Zeon's preparations to convert the colony into a ballistic weapon.  Just in case the audience needed to be reminded that the Principality of Zeon's forces are Complete Monsters, the previously backstory-only massacre was animated as part of Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin's fifth episode showing how unbothered those Principality forces planning and carrying out the massacre were.  (Ironically Stardust Memory depicts the rest of the Zeon forces as being disgusted by this after the fact, to the extent of deliberately leaving the forces responsible for it behind during the retreat to Axis.)

As for the goal of colony drops... well... it's usually a terror weapon, meant to cause mass death through both the impact and the environmental damage caused by such a huge object impacting Earth's surface.  The Zabis were arguably the most reserved of the lot, aiming only to destroy Earth Federation Forces HQ in a massive nuke-proof underground complex in South America.  Delaz's forces tried to cause mass starvation by dropping a colony on central North America to destroy farmland, the Titans were trying to destroy a factory-city (Von Braun) that was supporting the AEUG, and both Neo Zeon and Char's New Neo Zeon were trying to destroy the Federation capital (wiping out Dublin, Ireland and Lhasa, Tibet in the process.)  Char's endgame was different, though... he wanted serial colony drops to render Earth completely uninhabitable rather than just win some war.

 

Char wasn't a cyber-newtype.

Mind you, this timeline's Char might be more insane than the one in the main UC timeline.  Zeon didn't lose the war, but he sure as hell did.  He wasn't able to carry out his plan to arrange the deaths of the entire Zabi family under the cover of the One Year War the way he did in the prime timeline.  According to promotional materials...

  Reveal hidden contents

... Char went missing during the Second Battle of Solomon, when he tried to assassinate Kycilia Zabi by sabotaging Zeon's efforts to prevent the Federation from dropping Space Fortress Solomon on the Zeon-aligned lunar city of Granada where Kycilia's forces were headquartered.  He disappeared during a psycommu runaway event similar to the Axis Shock and hasn't been seen since.  If he's still alive, and not reduced to a Ghost in the Machine like the pilot of the Unicorn Phenix in Narrative, he's probably quite mad and hellbent on destroying Zeon and the Zabis.

 

so...

Spoiler

there's to be a colony drop 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, davidwhangchoi said:

so...

  Hide contents

there's to be a colony drop 

 

In the next episode?  Probably... though it's a flashback so it's technically already happened several years ago by the time of GQuuuuuuX.

Whether there will be a third one, or some other atrocity, will really depend on the direction the story goes.

 

One thing about GQuuuuuuX's story that really worries me is the sneaking feeling that it's going to continue where Requiem for Vengeance left off in terms of trying to make Zeon characters sympathetic by avoiding the whole subject of their war crimes.

Spoiler

The whole Solomon thing just feels like it's designed to facilitate "both sides"-isms even though in this timeline is no different from the main UC prior to Side 7 in September 0079.

 

[Big s]

2 hours ago, davidwhangchoi said:

i laughed so hard reading this 

so...

  Reveal hidden contents

there's to be a colony drop 

 

Possibly not. The episode may just show things from the point of time where char steals the gundam and might be events after the colony drop. I guess we’ll find out soon though