It's a Gundam thread!

You looked at the Defurse didn't you.

SEED suits, by and large, are pretty ugly. They look like boxy, plasticky overgrown toys rather than weapons of war, making the show's mech action distinctly unconvincing, and are amongst the franchise's worst offenders for random, meaningless, and thoroughly unaerodynamic fins and antennae sticking out all over the place. AGE also has weak mechanical design - the Federation machines are, with a few exceptions (you left us too soon, Woolf) aggressively boring, while the wild experiments of Vagan have a poor hit-to-miss ratio (hi, Xamdrag, Gurdolin, how're you doing?) and little evidence of thought and attention to detail being put into their designs. The removable tail-swords that plug into the beam saber emitters on some suits' hands are especially dumb - I mean, why do you even need those?

The MSV aquatic suits like the Juaggu definitely win the So Bad, It's Good award, though.

The worst AGE suit has to be the friggin Lemon thingy.

I agree 100% about the SEED suits, and would like to add that some of the color schemes are downright atrocious. Case in point: gratuitous gold parts on the Strike Freedom and the inexplicable presence of bright green on the Infinite Justice. I've been exposed to those two for a while now on SDGO, and it's wearing away at me (that, and the fact that for a series where Gundams are supposed to be prototype ubermachines SEED has way too goddamn many floating around in the game).

AGE, on the other hand... At the very least, I gotta respect the AGE-2 and its variants, and the Genoace. If nothing else, Sicon's kicked my ass in them way too many times for me not to appreciate them. Also, more pirate Gundams! :P

I liked the Strike and Impulse for being the Red Mage of Mobile Suits.

I never had a problem with SEED's designs, but then again, that might just be my love of the show talking. Of course, I'm fairly easy to please in the tech department; a design has to be really, really silly for me to notice. The O's crotch lasers do it, but that's about it.

the Arios actually has beam sabers under the skirt armor, and the stabilizer doubles as a GN Sword. so that makes three phallic weapons :D

And let's be honest here, Paptimus designing a suit that can murder you with its bifurcated penis-swords is totally in character.

Zeta does have some weaker designs, though. I mean, where the fuck is the Barzam's pelvis?

But it's beam sabers holding hands coming from below the front skirts, that isn't a dick. (I have the HG in my backlog, talk about a big...rear skirt.)

I don't have much problems with most of the gundam/grunt designs. Unless it's really really bad. (yes you lemon)

I forget it's name, but the final mobile suit that Jerrid piloted was pretty bad, and the garish color didn't help at all. The fact that he was killed in such an off-handed manner in such a stupid-looking suit was like the icing on the pathetic cake that was his character.

The Baund Doc was rather stupid in Zeta.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam Reborn though did make it work though oddly enough.

If we're talking about weakest main character suit: The 00 Gundam.

If we're talking about weakest elite designs, SEED.

If we're talking about weakest mook suit designs...Crossbone Gundam. (Don't look at me like that, Tobia! I still love you!)

The Baund Doc is a major pain in the ass in Gundam vs Zeta Gundam as well, both as an enemy and as a usable MS. If it's an enemy, it's freakishly fast for its size and since it's an endgame MS, it tends to appear as a final boss and accordingly has huge HP. If you're in it, the gigantic hitbox makes it hard to dodge enemy attacks.

edited 8th Mar '15 11:56:33 AM by amitakartok

Warning: Incoming quote is from 4chan. You have been warned.

Anyone agree with what's said here:

Episode 10. Welp, there Goes the Gundam Wing.

Here's the thing—saying the cast is purposefully unlikeable doesn't make them any more likeable. The author told the story he wanted to tell is not a defense if somebody doesn't like the story to begin with. Speaking from my own personal opinion, I can tolerate Zeta's worst moments, but I've got a high tolerance for unlikeable characters to start with (reading Berserk back in the day sort of necessitated it). If someone else doesn't, and wanting to strangle the cast ruins the show for them, I can't say I blame them.

The problem with that interpretation is that Zeta gives us a bunch of irrational and unlikable characters and then asks for us to root for them anyway. Kamille is a seething ball of misplaced rage in the shape of a person and Char is composed primarily of hypocrisy and moral cowardice, yet they remain the faces of the show, the people that the audience is supposed to empathize with. There are some characters that are better, yeah, (like Bright and Emma, for example) but they're secondary characters who exist primarily to give the main characters someone to interact with. The focus is 100% on Kamille and Char from start to finish, and they're both terrible people, and not in the Tragic Hero sense where their failures are at least noble ones.

You can make a good story about bad people, but you have to at least acknowledge the fact that they're bad people. Zeta Gundam doesn't.

edited 9th Mar '15 10:17:53 AM by NativeJovian

You don't have to "acknowledge" anything. What is the author supposed to do? Issue a disclaimer? The audience should be smart enough to decide whether the protagonist is in the right or not.

I get why some people feel they need "likable" characters to invest themselves in a work of fiction, but it's not a rule. If you can't enjoy a work of fiction without a character you can "root" for, then you're going to have a hard time tackling a lot of high level art and entertainment.

edited 9th Mar '15 11:03:18 AM by reconguista

I'm sorry are you trying to suggest that Zeta is somehow too high-concept for Jovian and I to handle? Because that's my take away from your crack about "high-level art". And no the author doesn't have to issue a disclaimer, they just have to have the characters called out on their behaviour in-universe.

Isn't one of the big things in storytelling that you should be able to root for a character otherwise you have no reason to be invested in a story?

Is the cast of Zeta really so bad there is no one to root for at all and invest time in?

There are two schools of thought when it comes to Zeta Char and his Quattro Mask:

1. Char is acting this way for his own selfish goals and is lying through his teeth about everything he says.

2. Char is honestly trying to be a better person and "Quattro" is his attempt to make up for his past.

In the end, even if the second idea is correct - which I believe it is - he was overcome by how fucked up he and the world he lives in are.

As such it was very easy to like and sympathize with Char. Which should be obvious because a lot of people do exactly that.

I'd say you're also wrong about Kamille not being tragic. He comes from a home where both his parents pretty much paid no attention to him and if either of them did anything for him, it was his father and what he "did" for Kamille was beat him. So kamille hails from an abusive, neglected background. On top of all of this, his home is taken over by Space Nazis.

Being a teenager with emerging Newtype sensitivities and having the background that he does, it's only natural Kamille has issues with authority and he can't really control himself.

Then you have stuff like how he watches his mother dies...and theN Char takes him to the colony full of millions of dead people...

Kamille hated the Titans from Episode 1 and in the next few episodes he had every reasont o commit himself to annihilating them.

I recall Jovian that in the past you have said "just because Kamille wants to take down the Titans doesn't make him a good person." I called BS on that then and I say it now as well. Kamille never hurt anyone innocent, he's committed no war crimes, all in spite of being so full of RAGE like you say, He just fights Space Nazis.

Sounds heroic to me.

edited 9th Mar '15 12:05:45 PM by Nikkolas

Yes to your first point. If there's nobody in a story I can sympathise with, I'm not going to read that story.

As to the second, I don't find Zeta that way (I have a fair amount of sympathy for Kamille, wacko that he may be) but I can't blame anyone else who does.

There is nothing to sympathise with in Char. Most of his problems are of his own making, and his moral cowardice is pretty repulsive. The fact that there are people out there giving him leather pants doesn't alter my opinion of him one bit, particularly since there are people who give Griffith and Johan Liebert leather pants.

edited 9th Mar '15 12:06:30 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Exactly. But rooting for a character can also be different from liking them, though not mutually exclusive. So long as they're not outright unlikeable, you can still root if them you still have some sort of sympathy for them, of if they have some sort of charisma, or if they're still interesting in some way, etc. And to Quattro's credit, he's still very interesting, if not very likeable. But Kamille is neither likeable nor interesting, and the same goes for several other characters in Zeta too.

I haven't seen "Zeta", so I can't really judge whether it's high concept or not. I was commenting on the general notion of requiring "likable" characters to enjoy a work of fiction.

I don't understand the need to have an "in-universe" moral referee. My school of thought is that the audience can watch something and judge for themselves if a character is doing the right thing. The author has no obligation to tell the audience how they should feel about a character or their actions.

There's no rule that says you have to be able to root for a character to be invested in a story. A story is not a sporting event.

edited 9th Mar '15 12:19:32 PM by reconguista

Actually there is a rule. The Eight Deadly Words have that rule. You can root for a villain because the story is about them and their arc is interesting.

It's not a sporting event but we should still care about what the characters go through. If we have no reason to then a story has failed.