Gundam Reconguista in G

Reconquista has drank from the Show don't tell fountain quite deep. You will get the plot, and the setting from the mouth of the characters, no exposition whatsoever.

edited 6th Mar '15 6:08:33 PM by vandro

Sort of. Sometimes characters talk about things for no particular reason

Show, Don't Tell is great when you actually show things. G-Reco hasn't done much of that so far. Lots of teasing about stuff, but no actual information.

I agree with you, actually, and I remember feeling that way too at the beginning. I'm finding G-Reco to be a fun watch, but that I would count as its greatest flaw.

Show, Don't Tell is an excellent storytelling trope that we need to see more of, but Tropes Are Not Good. There's too much happening in too little time on this show, that I think a bit of exposition would help a great deal. And while that isn't a dealbreaker for me, that doesn't mean I wholeheartedly like it.

edited 6th Mar '15 8:37:06 PM by DarkHunter

There is more explanations as it goes on, but that's when the pacing goes to hell

Yeah, all of this is kinda why I had trouble getting into the series myself. :P

I think it's largely a case of it being a very specialised experience. If you like diving headfirst into an alien world and having to puzzle things out for yourself, then this show scratches that itch. If not, go for something a little more straightforward and user-friendly. It's basically The Malazan Book of the Fallen gone (even more) anime.

There's way more wrong with G-Reco than just being difficult to get into

I do sort of wonder if the manic pacing is actually the point. Even Tomino's fifty-episode shows were never half this busy.

"Reconguista" is hard to pin down. A lot of it has that lax quality that "King Gainer" had, but it also seems to be heading into very Gundam-ish territory.

Finally caught up to episode 23. I'm actually following the factions pretty well, except for the ones that advocate Operation Reconguista. It seems Towasanga's Operation Reconguista is different from G-IT's. Just about every faction on this show is suspect, to the point that I'm thinking Kill Em All may make a resurgence. Team Megafauna will probably make it out okay, but I think Dorette/Ameria and G-IT/Capital Army are probably going to destroy each other along with the Capital Tower, especially now that they don't seem to give a damn about the taboos anymore. For SU-Cord's sake, they took the Space Pope hostage!

Word is that Tomino's voicing a character in the final episode. Ideon ending confirmed, I guess.

So, I finally started to watch this series.

Initially I thought the art design for character was really old and they look like off model in default...

...then I saw everything else and holy shit, I have a feeling that the animation wouldn't look bad even after a decade.

Like...wow. That's some serious animation quality right there.

The animation quality isn't actually spectacular, and the show is fairly cheap - it's pretty much all in the choreography of the fights and the careful deployment of their limited resources. There are some incredibly talented people working on this.

Speaking of the fights, does anyone know the name of this soundtrack? I really love it, but can't find it.

I love the "old-school" craft in this show, especially in light of "The Origin" and its sprite/polygon video game vibe. The animation itself isn't that great outside of the combat scenes, but the backgrounds and the use of color are excellent. (This show illustrates John Kricfalusi's point about how Japanese animation excels at color styling.) Whatever the next Gundam TV project ends up being, I really hope they don't use CG for the battle sequences.

The OST is going to be released in April, I think. In the meanwhile, I recommend digging around the FF Shrine forums if you're looking for audio rips of the music.

edited 13th Mar '15 2:28:56 PM by reconguista

Episode 3! Everyone seems remarkably nonchalant about the fact that a POW and a girl in protective custody are escaping. And bringing a pair of students with them. Even the pair of students in question. It didn't occur to Bell that he might want to seize the controls from the prisoner who was simultaneously escaping from custody, stealing the Gundam, and kidnapping him and his not-girlfriend? Very strange. The Research Division guy was totally expecting it, though. He even gave Aida a pilot suit (or pilot undersuit, anyway) to wear instead of her prison clothes. I wonder what the deal with that is?

Better than the first two episodes, if still not great. At least the thought was "these characters are acting improbably bizarrely", rather than "this whole thing is weird and confusing".

The nonchalance will make sense later. Colonel Cumpa and the Space Pope are privy to information that the audience doesn't know yet. As for Bellri and Noredo, Bell's got the hots for Aida, and Noredo just wants to tag along with Bell.

Also, Bellri saw this fantastic opportunity to infiltrate the Capital's enemies. He was only mostly thinking with his dick.

edited 13th Mar '15 8:36:22 PM by Iaculus

I didn't really get the impression that Bell wants to play hide the salami with Aida (well, any more than any normal teenage boy wants to with an attractive girl) — his interest seems to be more based on her mysterious origins, at least to me. Noredo was jealous of Aida, but that's mostly because she's obviously got her sights set on him and Bell doesn't pay any more obvious romantic attention to her than he does to Aida.

I could see the "secret plan to infiltrate the enemy group" thing except for the fact that everyone just seemed so blasé about the whole thing. There was no arguing about the plan or fighting over the G-Self's control or "behave or else" type threats from anyone. They spent episode 2 half rescuing Aida from the half-demolished building and half keeping her out of enemy hands, and then in this episode they have her tag along when they go to check out the G-Self and then utterly fail to bat an eye when she announces that she's taking it and returning to her unit. On her part, she doesn't try to recruit them ("abandon the selfish ways of the Capital and join our fight for Freedom and Justice!") or try to get rid of them so she can return home on her own without worrying about passengers, or anything like that. None of them seem to consider the whole escaping/defecting/being kidnapped thing to be a big deal at all, which is just friggen weird.

Not sure if I should be saying these stuff(because there are people here who just started this show), but...

Episode 24:

Bellri really has a crazy knack for realizing who he's fighting right before accidental murder kicks in. Although, Barara couldn't keep her green monster in check, and Luin did say it was gonna get her killed...

Luin refuses to get along with Bellri. But, he seemed to have gotten along with him before he donned the mask. Being reminded of his Kuntala pride makes me think he had always resented him...

The Yggdrasil had colorful and artsy beams. And a freak death happened when it malfunctioned. Poor Aida.

Cumpa's mad ticked about Earth's war-mongering ways... Except he brought social darwinism to its doorstep, so he has no right to complain.

Cumpa's mad about Earthnoids being stupid and subhuman. What they're actually doing is largely irrelevant (though the fact that this particular example could get him killed certainly doesn't help).

New episode time!

The Dorette Fleet is completely out of the game, due to Mashner going completely bonkers. With Salamadra gone, Ameria's remaining forces entering the Earth are Klim & Mick and the Megafauna. The show has come full circle to Earth, and every remaining person is armed to the teeth with Venus Globe tech. On a side note, it seems Aida is now the commander of the Megafauna, in light of Gusion's death.

The preview shows a Crocodile ship with Jahannams launching from it, along with another Rattle-Python ship, so it looks like Ameria has reinforcements ready for the Big One.

How's it going to end?? (I still think Capital Tower is going to get destroyed.)

edited 20th Mar '15 10:24:31 AM by reconguista

Episode 4 on Youtube!

Everyone continues to act completely insane. Aida is demanding that Bell be judged "under space pirate law" one moment, then comparing notes with him on the G-Self like old chums the next. And then Bell agrees to fight against his allies because... well, first it seems to be "to protect Noredo and Raraiya" (when grabbing them and making his escape with the G-Self would be a much less stupid idea), but the next-episode preview has him mentioning that he owes a debt to Aida (what debt? when did that happen?) so he has to defend the Megafauna. To misquote another Gundam show, she's the enemy, you idiot. Still, he fights against Dellensen (in what's probably the only example of two pilots on opposing sides not being able to talk to each other during combat, because that would make things too easy), and doesn't seem to give a shit that half a dozen of his allies (his friends, as far as he knows, given Dellensen's presence) end up dead in the process.

Seriously, no one in this show makes any goddamn sense.

Apparently there's also an "Ag-Tech" (agricultural-level technology?) taboo that exists to prevent scientific development because science causes wars, I guess. Except that everyone's been ignoring it (the Capital included), so wars are starting anyway. I'm glad that makes so much sense.

Oh, and Reconguista in G is far from the only anime (or even the only Gundam show) to do this, but it really annoys me when shows have mooks getting killed off as casually as they did in this episode. Combat vehicles like mecha are fantastically expensive, and trained (especially experienced) pilots for them are, if anything, even more expensive. Losing one is a big deal, and losing seven as Dellensen mentions in this episode is a loss that would take months-if-not-years to recover from, even above and beyond the loss of life. And yet stuff like this (barring Dellensen's lament for the dead men) is portrayed as a minor skirmish, no big deal in the long run. You can make interesting fights without having stuff exploding left and right, you know? Hell, that was one of the best parts of 08th MS Team — the fact that mission kills and mobility kills were far more common than hard kills, and even heavily-damaged units were recovered and repaired rather than exploding into bits.

Yeah, I really want to like Reconguista, but so far it's just been completely bizarre all around.

They're not really Bellri's "allies". Bellri is part of the Capital Guard, not the Capital Army. The Guard is simply a defensive force that protects the Capital Tower. The Capital Army, on the other hand, is a new organization that embodies everything that Bellri and other SU-cordists stand against. (i.e. using technology to militarize, which would lead to repeating the wars of the bygone U.C. era.) As far as Bellri is concerned, his friends are still in the Capital Guard and he's just fighting Captial Army goons. That's why it's a shock to him when he finds Dellensen among the Capital Army's numbers.

Also, the Ag-Tech taboo isn't about preventing scientific development, but regulating it. The idea is to promote peaceful technological development while deterring militarization. That the factions in G-Reco are ignoring it and possibly dooming what's left of civilization is the whole point of the show.