Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans

Edit — IBO is now airing on Saturdays at midnight on Toonami! Please use spoiler tags for people watching the dub.

The newest Gundam show, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, premiered today. You can watch it for free at Daisuki.net and Gundam.info, or on Hulu if you've got a subscription. Episodes are going up on Crunchyroll and Funimation on a one week delay, as well.

The premise of Iron-Blooded Orphans is that Earth has colonized Mars, but a faction on Mars is seeking independence. The protagonists are Child Soldiers, members of the Third Group of Chryse Guard Security, a Private Military Contractor hired by Earth to police Mars. They're hired to escort Kudelia Aina Bernstein, a young woman who is the leading voice in the independence movement, to Earth. However, after Kudelia arrives in their care, CGS is attacked by Gjallarhorn, a unit in Earth's military. The Third Group is deployed to stop them while the rest of CGS flees — which prompts the Third Group to abandon CSG and go rogue rather than letting themselves be discarded as Cannon Fodder.

Since this show is currently airing, expect spoilers abound if you haven't seen the most recent episode. Please use spoiler tags if it's a spoiler for something that hasn't aired yet (via staff interviews or the like), but otherwise, feel free to discuss things without them.

edited 6th Jun '16 6:10:19 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Well, I guess I'll just copy what I said in the other thread then:

really, really liked the first episode! It did good job establishing the characters, and showing their lives and relations. The political background is bit vague beyond "Mars wants independence, Earth doesn't want it to be independent." but since this is Gundam, it will be greatly expanded in the near future. There's also some talk about technology.

The main characters are interesting group, sort of band of brothers who know they can count only on each other. While Orga appears to be the leader Mikazuki is the ace of the group and the two seems to be very close knit. Mikazuki has this calm but no-nonsense attitude, that could prove interesting in Gundam pilot.

I really like Aina! She has the right ideas and attitude, but seems to be bit sheltered and will probably have to learn a thing or two through her character arc. She has makings of excellent heroine.

The action was great, especially at the end, when Barbatos showed up. Can't wait for the next episode, to see more of it.

This could be the Gundam series I've been waiting years for, as long as they can keep it as good as this episode promises.

edited 4th Oct '15 5:48:02 PM by Shlugo_the_great

And my impressions of the first episode:

The pacing seemed pretty slow, particularly the first half of the episode. They dropped a lot of exposition and introduced a lot of characters, though there wasn't much that hadn't already been mentioned by previews and teasers. I'm still not sure how I feel about the character design — most of it's fine, but you get the occasion weirdness like Orga's bizarre hair or Kudelia's distractingly purple eyes. That said, it's not bad enough to be annoying, like Gundam Age's was.

The combat seems to be more down-to-earth, reminiscent of 08th MS Team or 0080 more than anything recent. We see a lot of casualties, but not just scores of people standing there letting themselves be slaughtered without fighting back (like Unicorn was fond of doing), and they make use of non-mecha weapons like landmines and artillery, which was nice.

All in all, no surprises in the first episode if you've been keeping up with the previews, but that's not a bad thing. I'm not completely sold on the series yet, but I'm not put off on it, either. We'll see where things go in the next few episodes.

edited 4th Oct '15 5:57:40 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I'm hoping so hard that Kudelia's arc includes getting whiskers and becoming a pilot so she can reach Full Understanding. It's a snowball's chance in hell, but I want to dream! I want her to get her hands dirty! I want her to reach out her hand all covered in oil and have it be accepted.

If I can't have that I at least want Biscuit to live through the last episode.

edited 4th Oct '15 6:10:26 PM by Bur

i. hear. a. sound.

I quite liked it. The first half suffered from needing to establish a lot of information, but the second half was great

Pros:

• Entertaining combat that still feels like warfare
• Music
• Some interesting, atypical characters
• Is giving Aldnoah Zero the finger

Cons:

• Some odd character designs
• What's subtlety?

I have never seen Aldonah.Zero before all because Aniplex claimed it to be "bigger than Gundam" (Gundam is still obviously bigger). Can someone explain?

Aldnoah Zero was a disappointment after the first 3 episodes, that's all you need to know.

It seems people Had Big Expectations for Aldnoah Zero but i Heard it ended up as very Unerwhelming, and Some People claim Iron Blooded Orphans is 'Aldnoah Zero Done Right'

edited 4th Oct '15 6:56:39 PM by dood9780

"Death's vastness holds no peace. I come at the end of the long road—neither human, nor devil... All bends to my will." -Demifiend.

There's some pretty significant plot overlap between this show and that one. It kind of feels like they're trying to show how it would go down in a setting that makes sense

a) Biscuit is a fucking boss, and his name owns.

b) Mika "doesn't hunger for women", huh? Hohoho.

If an Inaho show's up, that would be bad. A Slaine appearing would be acceptable though.

edited 4th Oct '15 7:12:54 PM by majoraoftime

On that note, I suspect the pretty mook is going to have a larger part in things just because he's too pretty.

i. hear. a. sound.

Kind of interested in another of Okada's forays into the mecha genre, because by all accounts, M3 wasn't really well-regarded.

I'm just going to copy and paste what I said elsewhere:

That was a good first episode. While they crammed a lot of things in and introduced a lot of characters it never felt rushed and it was nice to see the characters' normal lives instead of jumping right into the action.

It seems that she very much wants that, too. She tries to make friends with Mika (and gets rejected more because Mika has No Social Skills than anything she did), she offers to help get the Barbatos up and running... I'm not convinced that she'll end up a pilot (though I wouldn't mind if she did, as long as she didn't end up mediocre at it, like a long list of female Gundam characters), much less getting the implants that the Third Group has, but they're clearly setting her up to get her hands dirty both literally and figuratively.

I took that more to mean that he's not interested in anything than a hint at Ho Yay. Not that that's ever stopped anyone, of course.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Mika only wishes to help Orga.

You saw his rejection as accidental? I thought it was entirely deliberate.

i. hear. a. sound.

I don't think it was an accident, but the impression I got was that Mika just doesn't give a shit about social niceties in general (hence No Social Skills) rather than he has something against Kudelia in particular.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

It'd be easy for this to do worse than the first cour of Aldnoah Zero, but much harder for it to do worse than the second.

It's far to early to judge, but the first episode shows promise at any rate. Aina is much more likable off the bat than I expected her to be: She's managed to fill the "naive princess" archetype without coming off as terminally clueless, which is an excellent start.

Soo... ¿Does someone Knows how Many Episodes this New Series will Have?

"Death's vastness holds no peace. I come at the end of the long road—neither human, nor devil... All bends to my will." -Demifiend.

Doesn't seem to have been announced, but probably 4-cour

It has Been a While since a Gundam Series had like 49 or 52 Episodes.

"Death's vastness holds no peace. I come at the end of the long road—neither human, nor devil... All bends to my will." -Demifiend.

SEED, Destiny, 00 (combined), and AGE were all 4-cour. And G-Reco was an outlier in more than episode count

edited 4th Oct '15 8:24:12 PM by Hylarn

by 'While' I Actually Meant Just 2 years.

edited 4th Oct '15 8:37:08 PM by dood9780

"Death's vastness holds no peace. I come at the end of the long road—neither human, nor devil... All bends to my will." -Demifiend.

The last "full length" Gundam show was Age (at 49 episodes) in 2011-2012. Since then, we've had GBF, Try, and Reconguista, all of which were 25 or 26 episodes. Before that was 00, which was 50 episodes total, but broken up into two 25-episode seasons with a six-month gap between the first season finale and the second season premiere. Before that was Destiny, Seed, and on back, where every TV series was 40-50ish episodes.

edited 4th Oct '15 8:47:48 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

And those 50 episode shows had 2-3 clipshows so the studio can keep up with the production lead.

00 style is really the way to go IMO.