Gundam Show Thread - MSG thru Witch from Mercury

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, azrael said:

*clap clap* He's the result of mankind's dream and future. *evil laugh* And he must vanish! Muhahahahahah! (you'll get to there later)

One thing I'll say for the Cosmic Era as a whole... among villains, it's a World of Ham.

Were it not for current events, I'd have been completely thrown out of the series by a critical failure to suspend disbelief that anyone could mistake Patrick Zala, Muruta Azrael, or Lord Djibril for a sane leader.  (Then again, with that purple lipstick and terrible dress sense, maybe the OMNI troops were convinced that Djibril was actually Boy George on tour...)

Durandal's putting up a pretty convincing facade of sanity so far, without descending into either the territory of the smug snake or the magnificent bastard.  His villainous "oh crap" after seeing the real Lacus Clyne shut down his Lacus impersonator was the first sign of him not actually being in complete control of the situation.  

(That said, Meer seems to actually be behaving more rationally than Lacus in terms of the content of her speech.  The only person in this whole Orb invasion more sensible than her seems to be that one Orb general who points out that ZAFT is still attacking after Yuna's statement that Djibril isn't there is because they know he's lying.

[Seto Kaiba]

Two episodes left to go in the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remaster dumpster fire... and I'm honestly left wondering if the Cosmic Era has a lot lead paint in its buildings.

Durandal has come out on top in the "which faction has the most blatantly evil leader" contest between the Atlantic Federation, Orb, and ZAFT.  Djibril's dead, having had his entire body vaporized by a DRAGOON from the Legend Gundam.  Yuna Roma Seiran's dead, having been beaten up by his own troops several times and then completely accidentally getting squashed like a bug by a GOUF his forces shot down.  I'm guessing Star Wars has been forgotten in the Cosmic Era, because nobody seems to come down with any ill presentiments when he shows up to announce that he is large and in charge from a throne in a room that looks suspiciously like he and Sheev Palpatine hired the same architect.  To complete the Death Star II comparison it's even got a GENESIS gamma ray laser cannon.  I keep waiting for him to start using "forseen" every other sentence and calling Rey his "Young apprentice".

When Patrick Zala build one of those damn things and tried to actually USE it on Earth that was the point where his own troops up and turned on him.  How does Gilbert Durandal manage to authorize building ANOTHER ONE just a year or two later and nobody in ZAFT sees that as any kind of a red flag?  Moreover, this one wasn't hidden by a mirage colloid, so how did nobody know that he'd been building it?  Come to that, why didn't it send up any red flags when he had ZAFT seize control of the Requiem and asks them to repair the sodding thing so it can be used again.  This series has enough "I was just following orders" idiots to keep Nuremberg busy for the better part of a century.  (They still should've shot Orb first, then done the Atlantic Federation's moonbase.)

Meer's dead.  Whoop-de-doo... it's the biggest anticlimax of the series.  A character we've barely seen and who is generally kind of annoying gets whacked and everybody's supposed to be really broken up about it, except she's batsh*t crazy and started to really believe she WAS Lacus Clyne before she died.  Little drama queen did an incredibly phony looking pirouette after she was shot...

 

[azrael]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Two episodes left to go in the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remaster dumpster fire... and I'm honestly left wondering if the Cosmic Era has a lot lead paint in its buildings.

You should have seen this when it originally aired. Your complaints would have taken on a whole new level.

I'm guessing 

Star Wars has been forgotten in the Cosmic Era, because nobody seems to come down with any ill presentiments when he shows up to announce that he is large and in charge from a throne in a room that looks suspiciously like he and Sheev Palpatine hired the same architect.  To complete the Death Star II comparison it's even got a GENESIS gamma ray laser cannon.  I keep waiting for him to start using "forseen" every other sentence and calling Rey his "Young apprentice".

Wrong apprentice. It's the one with anger issues. It's like watching Anakin getting his limbs chopped off, only replace Anakin with Destiny.

And now that you're there...

Like clone-father, like son, like clone...

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/873/882/ee2.jpg

..., except she's batsh*t crazy and started to really believe she WAS Lacus Clyne before she died.  Little drama queen did an incredibly phony looking pirouette after she was shot...

That girl has dem crazy-eyes. Her Lacus-obsession took fandom to a whole new meaning. And when you look at it that way, it takes that little incident in Athrun's bed to fatal attraction-levels.

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, azrael said:

You should have seen this when it originally aired. Your complaints would have taken on a whole new level.

I've just finished the final episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remastered Edition, and I have to say that I'm glad it's over and - machine god willing - I will never clap eyes on it again.

That sh*t was awful!

It's a really, really bad sign when you watch a series and you can only sympathize with the villains because they're the only ones in the story who seem to realize what a bunch of pillocks the protagonists are.  I know Gundam's favorite theme is "war is hell" and it strives to end on a high note of fostering peace but this was a mess.  Just like in the Universal Century, and like Durandal told Kira to his face, they have solved NOTHING and they'll be at war again in a heartbeat.  All they've done is kill the latest round of would-be despots who deposed and killed the previous generation of painfully native morons running the governments of the few major power blocs.  Their endgame?  Install the painfully naive moronic children of those painfully naive morons as new heads of state for those very same power blocs.  That's what started this mess!  Borderline autocratic rule by the most naive and incompetent is pretty much a surefire recepie to ensure that peace won't last very long.  I mean come on... the only put Cagalli in charge of Orb in the first place because her dear old dad whose hypocrisy caused a holocaust was so beloved of the people before he died, and in short order her administration was a powerless joke and the nation was really being run by the Seirans.  Who'd put her in charge of Orb AGAIN knowing that she hasn't learned her lesson yet?

Kind of weird how the end that Gundam SEED's protagonists fought so bitterly to avoid - having genetically engineered supermen making all the decisions - was the good end in Destiny with genetically engineered superman Kira deciding what's best for all of humanity.

Badly written, stuffed to the gills with flashbacks, and so full of hypocrisy that it's squirting out of every pore like a firehose, this show was absolute trash.  I didn't think it was possible to find a Gundam character I'd dislike more than Relina Peacecraft or Saji Crossroad... boy was I wrong!  Kira Yamato, Cagalli Yula Athha, and Lacus Cline have grabbed the top three spots on the List of Loathing.

 

(If you've ever seen Red Dwarf and remember that one early episode where the ship recovered a pod and Rimmer thought it was an alien spacecraft for most of the episode, only to have the credits pause twice so he could shout "IT'S A GARBAGE POD!  IT'S A SMEGGING GARBAGE POD!" at the end?  That's pretty much how I reacted to the last two episodes of Gundam SEED Destiny.)

Edited January 7, 2018 by Seto Kaiba

[kajnrig]

I gotta say, these last few pages have been cathartic.

[azrael]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I've just finished the final episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remastered Edition, and I have to say that I'm glad it's over and - machine god willing - I will never clap eyes on it again.

That sh*t was awful!

I know. But like I said, you should have watched when it originally aired. It took a special redo of the last episode, 4 compilation movies and finally the HD remaster to fix just the horribly animated and pacing issues. And it didn't even fix the story. The HD remaster makes this show remotely palatable (and it is still bad) compared to the original airing. If you watch the original airing, it would have made Macross Delta's original airing look great. And imagine sitting through it for entire year. One episode/week instead of binge watching.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I gotta say, these last few pages have been cathartic.

Well, if you enjoyed my slow descent into near-madness as a result of Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny, stay tuned for me coming completely unglued because next up in my and @BlackRose's queue on Crunchyroll is the high definition transfer of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing, followed by Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096.  Then, hopefully, I'll be moving on to something more enjoyable than unanesthetized oral surgery.

 

1 hour ago, azrael said:

I know. But like I said, you should have watched when it originally aired. It took a special redo of the last episode, 4 compilation movies and finally the HD remaster to fix just the horribly animated and pacing issues. And it didn't even fix the story. The HD remaster makes this show remotely palatable (and it is still bad) compared to the original airing. If you watch the original airing, it would have made Macross Delta's original airing look great. And imagine sitting through it for entire year. One episode/week instead of binge watching.

That's an awful lot of effort for a series that was marginally less preferable to the Off button on the TV.

 

[anime52k8]

Leave Wing out of this, I still love that show.

[Seto Kaiba]

Just now, anime52k8 said:

Leave Wing out of this, I still love that show.

To be fair, I actually did like Gundam Wing when I first saw it back in the day.

All the side-switching that went on did get a bit confusing the first few times though...

[kajnrig]

I didn't, mainly because of the constantly reused animation. (It's comparable to Seed in that respect... and others...) My sister liked it, but I quickly stopped paying attention somewhere around the time the pilots left Earth.

[Sandman]

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I've just finished the final episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remastered Edition, and I have to say that I'm glad it's over and - machine god willing - I will never clap eyes on it again.

That sh*t was awful!

It's a really, really bad sign when you watch a series and you can only sympathize with the villains because they're the only ones in the story who seem to realize what a bunch of pillocks the protagonists are.  I know Gundam's favorite theme is "war is hell" and it strives to end on a high note of fostering peace but this was a mess.  Just like in the Universal Century, and like Durandal told Kira to his face, they have solved NOTHING and they'll be at war again in a heartbeat.  All they've done is kill the latest round of would-be despots who deposed and killed the previous generation of painfully native morons running the governments of the few major power blocs.  Their endgame?  Install the painfully naive moronic children of those painfully naive morons as new heads of state for those very same power blocs.  That's what started this mess!  Borderline autocratic rule by the most naive and incompetent is pretty much a surefire recepie to ensure that peace won't last very long.  I mean come on... the only put Cagalli in charge of Orb in the first place because her dear old dad whose hypocrisy caused a holocaust was so beloved of the people before he died, and in short order her administration was a powerless joke and the nation was really being run by the Seirans.  Who'd put her in charge of Orb AGAIN knowing that she hasn't learned her lesson yet?

Kind of weird how the end that Gundam SEED's protagonists fought so bitterly to avoid - having genetically engineered supermen making all the decisions - was the good end in Destiny with genetically engineered superman Kira deciding what's best for all of humanity.

Badly written, stuffed to the gills with flashbacks, and so full of hypocrisy that it's squirting out of every pore like a firehose, this show was absolute trash.  I didn't think it was possible to find a Gundam character I'd dislike more than Relina Peacecraft or Saji Crossroad... boy was I wrong!  Kira Yamato, Cagalli Yula Athha, and Lacus Cline have grabbed the top three spots on the List of Loathing.

 

 

What's wrong with Saji?

[Seto Kaiba]

13 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I didn't, mainly because of the constantly reused animation. (It's comparable to Seed in that respect... and others...) My sister liked it, but I quickly stopped paying attention somewhere around the time the pilots left Earth.

For me, the constant shifting in animation quality for the Gundams themselves was the most jarring point... they made the designs so complicated that they could only be properly animated when standing still, so there's a noticeable animation bump every time we see a static shot of a Gundam.

 

9 hours ago, Sandman said:

What's wrong with Saji?

Apart from the fact that he's an indecisive extreme doormat, habitual whiner, and dirty coward who gets a bunch of people killed because he doesn't want to accept that he can't just go back to his life like nothing happened after being arrested on suspicion of being a Katharon operative, sent to a forced labor camp, rescued by Celestial Being during a massacre at said camp, and then sheltered by Katharon on Earth?  If he could dial the self-righteousness up a bit I'd be calling him Man-Relina.

I know in season one he was supposed to be "This loser is you" to the audience, but in season two he graduated from that to being simply insufferable until near the end when his testicles finally dropped. 

(I suppose one of the ways Gundam 00 improved on the Gundam Wing basic plot was that its annoying pacifist princess spends basically the entire series being rather brutally shown that peace is something you have to WORK for, and that it's not as simple as telling everyone to join hands and sing Rainbow Connection.  She's just sort of there, and she's useless... except as Setsuna's morality pet... which was a lot more believable than what happened to Relina.)

[azrael]

Saji Crossroad's roll in S1 was forgettable and I never could sympathize with his character. As he gained a more substantial role in S2, my opinion of him was cemented in S1 so I could never connect with his roll in S2. Yes, he was Louise's counterpoint, but it never felt strong enough. When compared to Setsuna & Marina, Saji & Louise needed more work for me to sympathize with. A lot more.

[Seto Kaiba]

Watched the first episode of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over lunch today... 

I'd quite forgotten how weird the space colony designs in the After Colony era are.  What's up with that weird double-Stanford torus thing they've got going?

(Every time I hear that opening narration I can't help but mentally replace it with "IN AFTER COLONY ONE NINE FIVE, WAR WAS BEGINNING".)

I'm also so used to the gags about Heero being an emotionally-vacant stoic that it came as a bit of a shock to see that evil laugh he does when he finds he has the opportunity to attack an Earth Sphere Alliance military transport on the way down.  Almost as jarring is his reaction to Relina having taken off his helmet... he's genuinely pissed, but his dialog is something more like what you'd expect from an angry standard anime girl-next-door when her crush accidentally saw up her skirt.  What was that explosive packet on his chest meant to actually do anyway?  (Come to that, who are the other four talking to when they're doing these dramatic self-introductions?)

Gotta hand it to OZ and the Romefeller foundation... their dedication to dressing up their soldiers like they've got a sideline modeling for the decorative art on cigar boxes is truly inspiring.  Also Treize's subtle burn on that other foundation member for valuing war machines more than the men who're piloting them.  (And you know Treize is wicked cultured right off the bat, the man owns his own pair of opera glasses.)

Relina's a girl with strange tastes... she's reintroduced to the strange man who she found laying half dead on the beach, who blew up part of his spacesuit and then mugged half a dozen paramedics for their ambulance, and her first impulse is "gee he's dreamy, I'll invite him to my birthday party".

There's the famous "I'll kill you" at the end too, the line that launched a thousand snarky responses to her constant shouting for him to come and kill her...

[dizman]

Oh yeah that reminded me I forgot to post this, poor Relena.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

So, three episodes into New Mobile Report Gundam Wing and I gotta say I am quite spectacularly annoyed with Bandai and Crunchyroll.

For reasons unclear, the video isn't stretched to fit the player.  It's centered, so the effect is that it's horizontally and vertically letterboxed.  They didn't even have the good grace to move the subtitles down to below the picture to take advantage of that extra space.  The subs themselves are a whole other problem, since the subtitles they're using are the ones from the first DVD release... the ones with the blind idiot translation.  Someone please reassure me that the Gundam Wing blu-rays have had proper subtitles done, because this is only one step better than the frigging Hong Kong sub job for Macross 7 over a decade ago.

The show's still pretty enjoyable if you don't mind it trying to be seriously highbrow.  Heero's still a hardcore mental case... yanking his arms out of restraints with untreated bullet wounds, setting a broken leg with his bare hands, repeatedly trying to commit suicide, laughing maniacally while he's blowing sh*t up.  

You really have to admire Quatre and Trowa's musical ability.  They're SO GOOD on the flute and violin that they not only summon an invisible orchestra for accompaniment, their music goes back in time to make their parts audible before they even pick the instruments up!  Now that's talent, ladies and gentlemen!

Wufei... oy.  Dude has ISSUES (well, they all have issues, but his are BAD).  Thank goodness he blew up that cheesy disco in the Victoria Base barracks.  I don't think my brain could take much more cognitive dissonance from seeing two officers dressed like they're about to go give that lad Napoleon a good seeing-off at Waterloo hanging around a room with multicolored disco club lights everywhere.  (Plus I kept getting this incongruous memory of Stephen Fry playing the Duke of Wellington in Blackadder the Third... can you imagine Zechs, or Treize, voiced by him?)

I swear, Heero's best moments are his deadpan troll ones.  Like telling Duo he'd have no problem being ready for an attack op the next day, but that Duo would... then flying off before Duo could discover that Heero'd stripped the Deathscythe for parts overnight.

[azrael]

Wing was done in the 4:3-days, i.e., the days before widescreen became the norm. There should be large vertical bars. I’d check YouTube to see it’s any better. 

Concerning Heero, that’s what makes him loveable, if you love deadpan psychopaths with giant robots with really big guns. He still out does Setsuna “I-am-Gundam” F. Seiei from Gundam 00.

[Seto Kaiba]

19 minutes ago, azrael said:

Wing was done in the 4:3-days, i.e., the days before widescreen became the norm. There should be large vertical bars. I’d check YouTube to see it’s any better. 

Yeah, I'm well aware that Gundam Wing was made at a time when 4:3 was still very much the standard for displays of all sizes.  After all, I grew up in the 90's.  What I'd expected in this case was that, like most older shows, Crunchyroll's video stream would be either pillarboxed (with black bars to the left and right of the 4:3 image) or enlarged and cropped such that it fits the 16:9 aspect like they'd done with many of their older shows like Lupin III, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, etc.  

What they've actually done is windowboxed it:
(Yes, I had to look the correct terms for this up on Wikipedia...)

... which is super bloody annoying if you're watching it full screen on something like a 4K display, a big TV, or a tablet.

They could've at least taken advantage of the windowboxing and moved the subs below the image.

 

Quote

Concerning Heero, that’s what makes him loveable, if you love deadpan psychopaths with giant robots with really big guns. He still out does Setsuna “I-am-Gundam” F. Seiei from Gundam 00.

Honestly, the best part of Heero is the reactions other people have to him.  Duo's having a conniption over Heero's antics, and Heero's so expertly winding him up further that you'd swear he's grinning like a loon off-camera.

Edited January 11, 2018 by Seto Kaiba

[Sandman]

Yeah they did that window box thing with the zeta remaster too when it was on gundam info's YouTube channel. Looks feeakin stupid.

[azrael]

Checking Youtube....Youtube is fine.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Sandman said:

Yeah they did that window box thing with the zeta remaster too when it was on gundam info's YouTube channel. Looks feeakin stupid.

Well that's beyond lame... I can understand wanting to not give the full HD experience when you're trying to sell Blu-rays, but still... 

Come to that, I need to get on that Blu-ray train.  What's the word on quality for those releases? 

[Kelsain]

And they've done it again!
GundamInfo pulls their ZZ remaster off of YouTube, right as I get to the point where 

Spoiler

Leina buys the farm.

Dang it!

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Kelsain said:

And they've done it again!
GundamInfo pulls their ZZ remaster off of YouTube, right as I get to the point where 

  Hide contents

Leina buys the farm.

 

Did they indicate that it's moving to another streaming service?

 

Since today's a holiday and I don't have to work, I took advantage of the extra free time to watch more New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over breakfast.  After the 13th episode I'm increasingly convinced that either OZ or the United Earth Sphere Alliance hit on a surefire way to detect seditious behavior: they outlawed internal monologues.

Every sodding character in this feels compelled to announce their inmost thoughts to the world regardless of whether or not their thoughts are contextually appropriate.  I left me thinking of the Leela musical episode of Futurama where the Robot Devil takes to the stage to complain about the writing, declaring "You can't just have your characters announce how they feel!  That makes me feel angry!"  The Alliance commander of that base in Mogadishu announces OUT LOUD "I had no idea this fortress was so fragile" when it comes under attack by just a handful of mobile suits and is collapsing around his ears, and every time Zechs is using the Tallgeese he's muttering to himself constantly.  

Then there's this perplexing tendency of Gundam pilots to commit suicide.  Heero tries to off himself at every opportunity, to such an extent that he's done about fifty times more damage to himself than any enemy has.  I can only imagine what he could manage as a Gundam pilot if he turned that frightful urge for self-harm to hurting others instead... it's probably make those ZERO system-induced rampages later in the series look like a blank round exercise.  Last episode, it was Trowa's turn to try to kill himself for no reason, apparently instigated by Heero.  The only reason he manages to put his plan into motion is that security on OZ airbases is apparently on the honor system... absolutely nobody noticed the huge tractor trailer with the one-of-a-kind mobile suit wanted by every authority on the planet even when said mobile suit was standing in the big top with them.  Not sure if OZ troops just all need corrective lenses, or if hundreds of trained elite soldiers all failed a spot check together.  (How the circus staff didn't notice Trowa installing a giant mobile suit in the circus tent is another matter entirely...)

[Sandman]

18 hours ago, Kelsain said:

And they've done it again!
GundamInfo pulls their ZZ remaster off of YouTube, right as I get to the point where 

  Hide contents

Leina buys the farm.

Dang it!

 

Noo I was 5 episodes from the end. frakk. They did this to me with Zeta too. How about some notice gundaminfo.

Edited January 16, 2018 by Sandman

[dizman]

New trailer for the last Gundam Origin movie is up, if everything goes well the movie should end right before the series starts. Now we gotta wait and see if they actually remake the original series.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Just finished episode 31 of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over lunch.

I've been forcibly reminded of my original reaction to the series when I watched it for the first time... the unshakeable feeling that the writers had a complexity addiction.  I'm barely halfway into it, and I have completely lost track of which side I'm supposed to be rooting for.  Who were the bad guys?  Is it the Alliance?  OZ?  Other OZ?  The do-nothing stuffed shirts in the Romefeller Foundation?  All five Gundam pilots?  The five scientists who created the Gundams and trained them?  It's like watching a slow-motion game of pass the parcel where the parcel is a villain ball.  And I KNOW that isn't all the factions who'll poke their oar into this one by the end... there's still White Fang, the Bartons and the Marimaia faction, the Preventers...

I really, REALLY want to see an Abridged version of this where Heero is voiced by the guy who does Alucard for TFS's Hellsing Ultimate Abridged.  "HEERO! COME AND KILL MEEEEE!" "B*TCH I MIGHT!".

[dizman]

Sometime in the distant future, gunpla battles still rage on....

 

 

Edited February 2, 2018 by dizman

[Seto Kaiba]

2 minutes ago, dizman said:

Sometime in the distant future, gunpla battles still rage on....

 

 

Sometime right about now, we're still actively pretending Gundam Build isn't just a commercial for ugly MSV gunpla kits thinly disguised as a boy-friendly version of Angelic Layer.

And to think Yoshiyuki Tomino fought bitterly to prevent Mobile Suit Gundam from becoming one of those toy commercial robot anime... kind of puts me in the mind of this quote from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum:

Hysterium: "My father would turn over in his grave if he saw me like this."
Pseudolus: "Your father is alive."
Hysterium: "Well... this will kill him."

 

[dizman]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Sometime right about now, we're still actively pretending Gundam Build isn't just a commercial for ugly MSV gunpla kits thinly disguised as a boy-friendly version of Angelic Layer.

And to think Yoshiyuki Tomino fought bitterly to prevent Mobile Suit Gundam from becoming one of those toy commercial robot anime... kind of puts me in the mind of this quote from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum:

Hysterium: "My father would turn over in his grave if he saw me like this."
Pseudolus: "Your father is alive."
Hysterium: "Well... this will kill him."

 

Ehh at this point I doubt there are people out there that think Build Fighters is anything but a way to market kits with slight tweaks so they can sell them 5 different ways (including P-Bandai variants of course). I wouldn't doubt Tomino wanting to die so he can finally roll over in his grave 

[Marzan]

I thought Gundam Build did extremely poorly in Japan?

 

Then again, if it sold a lot of figures it might be a moot point.

[Kelsain]

I finally finished ZZ this weekend and wrapped it up with CCA. While I knew that ZZ wasn't necessary for the movie, it did make it a more satisfying capstone to this saga that I embarked on last year, when I started watching Origin. Originally, CCA was the only UC Gundam that I had seen, aside from a raw Japanese 0080. Seeing nearly the entire animated history of the UC* up to CCA now, it made a whole lot more sense! Also, sticking with the subtitles and original VA's gave it some very nice consistency.

As for ZZ, I thought it was pretty good overall. Once everyone left Shangri-La, I actually liked it a lot. 

While I'm kind of interested to see where Unicorn takes the series, I think I'm ready for a break for a while. 

*Excepting Thunderbolt; really can't get into that.

Edited March 5, 2018 by Kelsain

[Seto Kaiba]

10 minutes ago, Kelsain said:

I finally finished ZZ this weekend and wrapped it up with CCA. While I knew that ZZ wasn't necessary for the movie, it did make it a more satisfying capstone to this saga that I embarked on last year, when I started watching Origin. Originally, CCA was the only UC Gundam that I had seen, aside from a raw Japanese 0080. Seeing nearly the entire animated history of the UC* up to CCA now, it made a whole lot more sense!

Are you planning to go all the way to the far end of the Universal Century with Reconguista in G?

I know it wasn't well-received, but I found it different enough from standard Gundam fare to be actually pretty interesting.  Especially the setting, which manages to be both horrifying and also weirdly optimistic at the same time.  The art style gives it kind of a Eureka Seven flavor.

 

10 minutes ago, Kelsain said:

While I'm kind of interested to see where Unicorn takes the series, I think I'm ready for a break for a while. 

Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn was a beautifully animated OVA that was saddled with an excuse plot best be summed up as "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".  It's one of those side stories in which the plot revolves around a macguffin that the characters all insist [could/will] turn the world on its ear, but the audience knows that's a load from the outset because there are pre-existing TV series in the franchise set after it.  (Y'know, the Macross Zero problem.)

 

[Kelsain]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Are you planning to go all the way to the far end of the Universal Century with Reconguista in G?

I know it wasn't well-received, but I found it different enough from standard Gundam fare to be actually pretty interesting.  Especially the setting, which manages to be both horrifying and also weirdly optimistic at the same time.  The art style gives it kind of a Eureka Seven flavor.

*Shrugs* I don't know. I forgot about Victory too. Is TurnA considered UC, or just whatever?

The first 3 series were both very different and very repetitive at the same time, so I'm definitely feeling some Gundam fatigue. 

[Seto Kaiba]

Just now, Kelsain said:

*Shrugs* I don't know. I forgot about Victory too. Is TurnA considered UC, or just whatever?

Turn A and Reconguista in G are considered the far end of the Universal Century timeline, yeah.  At least technically, since they make explicit reference to coming after the UC era even though they're set under different calendar systems (the Correct Century and Reguild Century, respectively).

 

Just now, Kelsain said:

The first 3 series were both very different and very repetitive at the same time, so I'm definitely feeling some Gundam fatigue. 

Completely understandable.  Gundam's Universal Century has some pretty serious issues with that, and the unrelenting war-is-hell stuff in the original, Zeta, the second half of ZZ, Victory, etc. can really drag at you.  Reconguista in G is straight up WEIRD on that front, in that it actively rebels against the grimdark and instead remains bizarrely cheery.

[dizman]

Unicorn is great fun when the action is happening, that's about it all it has going for it though. F91 has some good ideas but not enough time to work with any of them, it's only a movie so it'll be easy to get through. I'd stay far away from Victory if you are already feeling the fatigue, that series can be such a slog to get through at times.

I'd say to try out an AU series like G Gundam if you are up for something a little strange. Reconguista is also a fun time and has some great mech designs, though it does end abruptly.