Gundam Show Thread - MSG thru Witch from Mercury

[no3Ljm]

Gundam Conference Autumn 2023.

 

[Hikuro]

I'm hopeful for this metaverse thing but I don't understand how it's supposed to work. Is this PC, is this literally on the Oculus headset or on any form of VR, etc etc. I'll be honeset, it was hard to watch this 48 minute promo so it might of been covered. 

[azrael]

Spoiler'd for size

Seed Freedom PVs

Spoiler

 

 

[no3Ljm]

Gundam SEED FREEDOM Poster and 3rd Trailer.

Edited October 11, 2023 by no3Ljm

[Sanity is Optional]

...More Seed?

I get that Witch from Mercury wasn't super breakout popular, but so we really need another Seed series?

[azrael]

24 minutes ago, Sanity is Optional said:

...More Seed?

I get that Witch from Mercury wasn't super breakout popular, but so we really need another Seed series?

This was supposed to happen after Seed Destiny back in 2006 (it was even announced back then). But the lead writer, Chiaki Morosawa, got sick (she talked about it in an interview in 2008) and eventually passed away in 2016. Her husband and showrunner, Mitsuo Fukuda, finally got around to working on it and it was finally announced it was in production around the time Witch from Mercury started.

[Big s]

59 minutes ago, Sanity is Optional said:

...More Seed?

I get that Witch from Mercury wasn't super breakout popular, but so we really need another Seed series?

I’m pretty sick of seed as well, then again I wasn’t the biggest fan of it when it started, but still had fun with it, but didn’t care for destiny at all

[Sanity is Optional]

33 minutes ago, azrael said:

This was supposed to happen after Seed Destiny back in 2006 (it was even announced back then). But the lead writer, Chiaki Morosawa, got sick (she talked about it in an interview in 2008) and eventually passed away in 2016. Her husband and showrunner, Mitsuo Fukuda, finally got around to working on it and it was finally announced it was in production around the time Witch from Mercury started.

Ah, that makes more sense. 

Still probably going to skip, dropped Seed Destiny after they bait+switched the protagonist.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Sanity is Optional said:

...More Seed?

I get that Witch from Mercury wasn't super breakout popular, but so we really need another Seed series?

Pretty much my reaction as well...

Gundam SEED was a breakout hit that pulled some of the highest viewership numbers and merchandise sales in the franchise's history, rivaling the likes of Zeta Gundam, and I've read about how the studio was hoping the Cosmic Era could become a second Universal Century and hastily greenlit a sequel to capitalize on it.  That said, I'd thought the relative failure of Gundam SEED Destiny had sunk those ambitions and that what followed was just to tie off the bloody stump left by Destiny's failure to stick the landing.  A movie on top of that uninspiring ending just feels like closing the barn door after the cow's already in someone's burger.

[pengbuzz]

On 10/10/2023 at 10:57 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Pretty much my reaction as well...

Gundam SEED was a breakout hit that pulled some of the highest viewership numbers and merchandise sales in the franchise's history, rivaling the likes of Zeta Gundam, and I've read about how the studio was hoping the Cosmic Era could become a second Universal Century and hastily greenlit a sequel to capitalize on it.  That said, I'd thought the relative failure of Gundam SEED Destiny had sunk those ambitions and that what followed was just to tie off the bloody stump left by Destiny's failure to stick the landing.  A movie on top of that uninspiring ending just feels like closing the barn door after the cow's already in someone's burger.

Almost feels like the same flailing CBS/ Paramount did with SNW when Picard and Discvoery was tanking.

Edited October 12, 2023 by pengbuzz

[F-ZeroOne]

Its just possible one day I will find an anime production somewhere that Hideki Anno hasn't touched in some way...

https://www.zimmerit.moe/hideaki-anno-gundam-chars-counterattack/

[Hikuro]

3 episodes into Meta Build.......I'll be honest this show is just messy. No flow, no direction, just fanservice in the worst possible way that makes zero sense. More importantly, how is it after all the "years" that've passed between shows, that the majority of the original 2 season characters EXCEPT for Fumina haven't aged?! 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Hikuro said:

3 episodes into Meta Build.......I'll be honest this show is just messy. No flow, no direction, just fanservice in the worst possible way that makes zero sense.

That's a fair description of any of the Gundam Build shows.

I guess Meta just makes it slightly more obvious that you're watching a 24 minute commercial for MSV Gunpla.

[lechuck]

Mobile game Iron-Blooded Orphans – Urdr-Hunt is now getting a full animation treatment.

https://gundamnews.org/undam-iron-blooded-orphans-urdr-hunt-animated-video-project
https://hobby.dengeki.com/news/2136529/

Never played the game, but I can only hope the characters and story are more appealing than the main series or at least season two.

[Hikuro]

So what the heck happened to Build Meta? 3 episodes, left it at a cliff hanger and nothing else and almost a month has gone by. That's pretty crappy to be honest.

[no3Ljm]

1 hour ago, Hikuro said:

So what the heck happened to Build Meta? 3 episodes, left it at a cliff hanger and nothing else and almost a month has gone by. That's pretty crappy to be honest.

Looks like it's just 3 episodes as per the initial announcement.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2023-03-27/gundam-build-gets-3-episode-metaverse-series-for-franchise-10th-anniversary/.196499

[lechuck]

Fourth trailer for Gundam Seed Freedom movie.

Bandai is also planning a Virtual Reality anime for Meta Quest.
https://gundamnews.org/mobile-suit-gundam-silver-phantom-teaser-released

[David Hingtgen]

GundamInfo just dropped all of Turn A, subbed, on their channel.  Was this announced before and I missed it? I know what I'm doing this weekend... 

[kajnrig]

1 hour ago, David Hingtgen said:

GundamInfo just dropped all of Turn A, subbed, on their channel.  Was this announced before and I missed it? I know what I'm doing this weekend... 

I'm half-sure it's been uploaded before. IIRC they rotate shows pretty regularly, and have probably gone through the entire franchise at least once by now.

[Hikuro]

I only hope the new GS series is not a dumpster fire like Destiny was. 

[azrael]

4 minutes ago, Hikuro said:

I only hope the new GS series is not a dumpster fire like Destiny was. 

Eclipse? Or Freedom? Eclipse is a manga series which is also currently on the Youtube channel. Freedom is a movie coming out early 2024. There's no new TV series for Seed in production.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, David Hingtgen said:

GundamInfo just dropped all of Turn A, subbed, on their channel.  Was this announced before and I missed it? I know what I'm doing this weekend... 

Nope... no announcements or notifications I can see.

Looks like they also dropped a fair chunk of The Witch from Mercury's dub too.

 

1 hour ago, Hikuro said:

I only hope the new GS series is not a dumpster fire like Destiny was. 

You mean the Gundam SEED Freedom movie?

I dunno... I'm in kind of two minds about it.  On the one hand, Destiny suffered because it was rushed out to capitalize on the unexpected success of Gundam SEED.  On the other hand, IIRC the movie was meant to tie off the bloody stump of the Cosmic Era storyline after Destiny spun in.  Whether they'll go for thematic and narrative consistency with the previous body of work or try to apply lessons learned is anyone's guess.

In a way, the staff working on Gundam SEED Freedom are rather lucky.  Gundam SEED Destiny lowered expectations, they've got years of increasing rose-tint on the glasses of the CE fanbase working in their favor, the story just has to be less incoherent than The Witch from Mercury's, and if they do screw up Urdr Hunt will be along shortly to distract the fans anyway.

[pengbuzz]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Nope... no announcements or notifications I can see.

Looks like they also dropped a fair chunk of The Witch from Mercury's dub too.

 

You mean the Gundam SEED Freedom movie?

I dunno... I'm in kind of two minds about it.  On the one hand, Destiny suffered because it was rushed out to capitalize on the unexpected success of Gundam SEED.  On the other hand, IIRC the movie was meant to tie off the bloody stump of the Cosmic Era storyline after Destiny spun in.  Whether they'll go for thematic and narrative consistency with the previous body of work or try to apply lessons learned is anyone's guess.

In a way, the staff working on Gundam SEED Freedom are rather lucky.  Gundam SEED Destiny lowered expectations, they've got years of increasing rose-tint on the glasses of the CE fanbase working in their favor, the story just has to be less incoherent than The Witch from Mercury's, and if they do screw up Urdr Hunt will be along shortly to distract the fans anyway.

Not so sure I want to see Destiny or Urdr Hunt;  one series I just learned about was Gundam Hathaway (2021), but after WFM I'm kinda burned out on the Gundam franchise as a whole.

[Big s]

1 minute ago, pengbuzz said:

Not so sure I want to see Destiny or Urdr Hunt;  one series I just learned about was Gundam Hathaway (2021), but after WFM I'm kinda burned out on the Gundam franchise as a whole.

Hathaway is kinda the best of the bunch. It’s a lot different visually than I was expecting. It’s kinda different to see mecha combat from the eyes of those that aren’t in the machines themselves. If you didn’t like wfm, then it’s kinda the opposite in most ways 

[pengbuzz]

On 11/23/2023 at 5:36 PM, Big s said:

Hathaway is kinda the best of the bunch. It’s a lot different visually than I was expecting. It’s kinda different to see mecha combat from the eyes of those that aren’t in the machines themselves. If you didn’t like wfm, then it’s kinda the opposite in most ways 

Okay; I'll check it out after I take a break for a bit. 👍

[lechuck]

Looking good so far.

Essentially 08th MS Team, but this time from Zeon perspective. Maybe we will finally get an answer why they were employing Cyrix MX chips. 😄

[Big s]

4 minutes ago, lechuck said:

Looking good so far.

Essentially 08th MS Team, but this time from Zeon perspective. Maybe we will finally get an answer why they were employing Cyrix MX chips. 😄

Looks good, voices kinda suck. I’ll definitely check it out

[Bolt]

On 11/23/2023 at 2:36 PM, Big s said:

Hathaway is kinda the best of the bunch. It’s a lot different visually than I was expecting. It’s kinda different to see mecha combat from the eyes of those that aren’t in the machines themselves. If you didn’t like wfm, then it’s kinda the opposite in most ways 

Agreed. The few episodes of WFM I watched had me totally uninterested. Aside from Thunderbolt, Hathaway is the best thing out there. 

 

8 minutes ago, lechuck said:

Looking good so far.

Essentially 08th MS Team, but this time from Zeon perspective. Maybe we will finally get an answer why they were employing Cyrix MX chips. 😄

This looks great! I'll definitely be checking this out!

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, lechuck said:

Looking good so far.

Essentially 08th MS Team, but this time from Zeon perspective. Maybe we will finally get an answer why they were employing Cyrix MX chips. 😄

It's undeniably pretty... but I have a bad feeling about the story.

Making the Principality of Zeon sympathetic is an uphill battle at the best of times.  MS IGLOO managed it, but mainly because the members of the 603rd Technical Evaluation Unit and the conscripted crew of the Jotunheim were not THAT invested in Zeon's cause.  They were patriotic enough to do their duty but still objective enough about what they did that they were frequently disgusted with the needless loss of life and the questionable decisions coming down from Zeon's commanders.  (So much so that even their most fanatical officer, Captain von Kuspen, is shocked and appalled by Zeon's use of child soldiers.)

Given that this series is set eleven months after Zeon's surrender, it's gonna be a lot harder to make the characters sympathetic given they'd have to be lost causers still waging a needless guerilla war against the Federation out of spite.  It's not that big of a leap from there to the kind of complete monsters that Zeon OVA/movie antagonists often end up as like the baddies in Cucuruz Doan's Island, Ghinias Sahalin in 08th MS Team, or Cima Gaharu in Stardust Memory.

[Big s]

56 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's undeniably pretty... but I have a bad feeling about the story.

Making the Principality of Zeon sympathetic is an uphill battle at the best of times.  MS IGLOO managed it, but mainly because the members of the 603rd Technical Evaluation Unit and the conscripted crew of the Jotunheim were not THAT invested in Zeon's cause.  They were patriotic enough to do their duty but still objective enough about what they did that they were frequently disgusted with the needless loss of life and the questionable decisions coming down from Zeon's commanders.  (So much so that even their most fanatical officer, Captain von Kuspen, is shocked and appalled by Zeon's use of child soldiers.)

Given that this series is set eleven months after Zeon's surrender, it's gonna be a lot harder to make the characters sympathetic given they'd have to be lost causers still waging a needless guerilla war against the Federation out of spite.  It's not that big of a leap from there to the kind of complete monsters that Zeon OVA/movie antagonists often end up as like the baddies in Cucuruz Doan's Island, Ghinias Sahalin in 08th MS Team, or Cima Gaharu in Stardust Memory.

I think that’s the one thing that is interesting about the uc era is that both sides seemed kinda bad and they’ve made more interesting characters out of the Zeon characters than they did out of the feddies.

Char for instance had a much more interesting story than Amuro. Bernie and his team were a bigger focal point in 0080. 0083 was another example of the Zeon being way more interesting, despite Cima selling out everyone. I don’t know if Thunderbolt counts, but I feel more sympathetic towards the Zeon and their pop music than the New York traffic sounds the feds tried to call music. 08th ms team had a more interesting story with the Zeon trying to escape the base with atrocities on both sides taking place. 

I think the focus on the Zeon will be fine and at the time of the end of the war might not be as ideal, they were mostly playing a waiting game til Axis could join up and that might make for a reasonable enough plot to keep things interesting 

[renegadeleader1]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Given that this series is set eleven months after Zeon's surrender, it's gonna be a lot harder to make the characters sympathetic given they'd have to be lost causers still waging a needless guerilla war against the Federation out of spite.  It's not that big of a leap from there to the kind of complete monsters that Zeon OVA/movie antagonists often end up as like the baddies in Cucuruz Doan's Island, Ghinias Sahalin in 08th MS Team, or Cima Gaharu in Stardust Memory.

The date this series takes place is November 6th 0079 and the setting is the European front. That puts this series timeframe at roughly the same time and place as the Federation's Operation Odessa, the big counter offensive to retake Zeon's main resource gathering sites.

 

It's 11 months after the START of the One Year War, not the end.

[Big s]

16 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

It's 11 months after the START of the One Year War, not the end.

That sounds even better 

[Seto Kaiba]

16 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

The date this series takes place is November 6th 0079 and the setting is the European front. That puts this series timeframe at roughly the same time and place as the Federation's Operation Odessa, the big counter offensive to retake Zeon's main resource gathering sites.

 

It's 11 months after the START of the One Year War, not the end.

d'oh... you're right.

Still, I'm not sure that doesn't run into the same problem or worse... the Principality of Zeon's Earth occupation forces were not exactly replete with decent human beings.  They're either full-on space fascists or at least under the command of some M'Quve-type smug snake war criminal.  That's not exactly a formula for a sympathetic protagonist.  It's more like a formula for "watch the arsehole get what's coming to them".

[Big s]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

d'oh... you're right.

Still, I'm not sure that doesn't run into the same problem or worse... the Principality of Zeon's Earth occupation forces were not exactly replete with decent human beings.  They're either full-on space fascists or at least under the command of some M'Quve-type smug snake war criminal.  That's not exactly a formula for a sympathetic protagonist.  It's more like a formula for "watch the arsehole get what's coming to them".

The feds really weren’t much better, it’s one of the big things throughout most gundam stories. There really weren’t good and bad sides, just heroes of each side stuck fighting wars that their leaders started and war crimes were done to each side.

[Seto Kaiba]

28 minutes ago, Big s said:

The feds really weren’t much better, it’s one of the big things throughout most gundam stories. There really weren’t good and bad sides, just heroes of each side stuck fighting wars that their leaders started and war crimes were done to each side.

Eh... I'd disagree with your assessment.

While the Earth Federation are surely no saints and the size of the moral gulf between them and the Zeon faction du jour varies from work to work, one of the constants of the UC-era Gundam titles is that Zeon can be counted upon to be substantially more evil than the Federation at any given time.  The Federation might fall anywhere between "Good is not Nice" and Lawful Evil depending on the writer, but Zeon can be relied upon to start at Lawful Evil and where necessary proceed across the Godwin Line at the first opportunity.

It's not "good and evil" in the sense of moral absolutes... of sainthood vs. eating babies.  That said, it's still "good vs. evil" in relative terms considering Zeon's ideology and modus operandi are pretty consistently in the realm of what your average person would consider "genuine evil".  There's not exactly a defensible case for unprovoked and indiscriminate nuclear bombing of civilians, gassing millions to death in order to turn their homes into an improvised ballistic weapon, or attempting the wipe out billions of people by rendering Earth ininhabitable.

That's the uphill battle facing every attempt to do a story about Zeon characters.  Nobody on the Federation side is a saint, but no matter how individually nice Zeon loyalists are they're still kind of inherently tainted by their association with the atrocities Zeon has committed and its abhorrent policies.  The best you can usually do is make them as close to conscientious objectors as possible like they did in MS IGLOO.  It's gonna be a lot harder to pull off with this new lot, given that they're a frontline unit in the Zeon occupation force and their daily business is oppressing the residents of Earth.  It's not saying it's impossible, but Sisyphus has seen easier uphill battles.