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What about Crossbone Gundam? Something as awesome as Crossbone had to at least have still happened, right?

edited 27th Aug '15 2:22:11 PM by kkhohoho

Never read Crossbone. Not much of a manga person in general.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Ah. Well, even if you aren't much of a manga person, you might want to at least check Crossbone out. It's probably just one of the most plain fun entries in the franchise next to G Gundam, though it still takes itself seriously enough to fit in with the rest of UC. Plus, it was written by Tomino himself, so it's also got that going for it. I admit that some of the post-CCA works can be... underwhelming, but Crossbone is an exception to that, and well worth a read.

Agree with you. Even Crossbone feels like "other" timeline...a man can dream, please just get who the UC Earn a Happy Ending

edited 27th Aug '15 3:22:48 PM by KazuyaProta

Watch me destroying my country

I Found something funny Regarding Crossbone, In the notes at the End of Every Volume left by the Translators (Zeonic Scanslations) one of the Translators Left... a Rather Offensive comment about Crossbone wich i think is this one 'I dont Know why People like this Piece of Shit'

Well there is Always Super Robot Wars if you Want a Definitive Happy Ending

edited 27th Aug '15 5:01:14 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.

That's just it, the UC does get a happy ending.

...in the Correct Century.

Just wait a few of centuries. Yikes !

Well...yes, but LOL about the Alpha series. Just a few years after CCA...hi Gundam SEED. Poor EF, they can't get their things in orden. Poor guys. (I want more info about that commentary, that is the only negative commentary of Crossbone who i know. Is good know all the posibles opinions).

edited 27th Aug '15 7:03:40 PM by KazuyaProta

Watch me destroying my country

Yeah i find it strange Too since Generally everyone Thinks Crossbone is Awesome (Including me)

"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.

Perhaps I'm showing my Battle Tech origins here, but here's a question: Do we ever see a mobile suit take a penetrating hit that does not immediately destroy it in early UC? Logically, it presumably happens; there are places in the arms and the torso and head that shouldn't make the suit immediately explode, you'd think.

But aside from the Ground Gundams and Sayla getting the RX-78's foot chopped up, none are coming to mind.

Nous restons ici.

"Penetrating hit" meaning something that gets through its armor? Taking a solid shot like that without dying immediately is basically the realm of plot-important characters. If you're a nameless, faceless mook, then your job is to show up and be mildly threatening until you're inevitably destroyed by someone important.

Though I just rewatched the first few episodes of Gundam Seed recently — it's not UC, but there's a few examples there. Mu damages a mook GINN outside Heliopolis without destroying it, and the Strike blows an arm off Le Creuset's CGUE with the Launcher. Kira also lights Migel's GINN up with vulcans at one point, but that doesn't get through the armor.

edited 27th Aug '15 10:14:12 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

It happens a lot in Gundam 0080. It seems to be just beam weapons and bazookas that explode whatever they penetrate - beam weapons because they cook off anything vaguely combustible in the area, and bazookas because giant explosive warhead, duh. Solid-shot guns tend to deal less spectacular damage.

On the idea of a Ple as a protagonist, I'm afraid a certain degree of doom would be hard-coded in. Like most cyber-Newtypes of their era, they have significantly reduced lifespans and are addicted to the drugs that keep their biochemistry vaguely stable-ish. An adult Ple as a protagonist of a Gundam show would basically guarantee their story was The Last Dance. Might be a neat mentor-student thing, though, with, say, a dying Ple acting as a surrogate mother-figure to a young, powerful Newtype orphan during the late Universal Century, making sure the kid doesn't go through what she did. You then get her daughter taking up her sword, kicking Jovian ass on behalf of Tragic Victim Newtype Girls everywhere.

edited 28th Aug '15 10:06:18 AM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

It's kind of a shame; I had an image of a Zaku zombie-ing on through a dozen non-critical tank hits because rookies don't know where to shoot it to make it stop. Each one does something that reduces it, but doesn't stop it.

Perhaps it's my Battle Tech heritage, but mobile suits aren't tanks; presumably you can hit them and penetrate armor without instantly killing them in some places.

Nous restons ici.

I don't think I've ever heard that in reference to UC cyber newtypes. I always figured that they tended to go nuts through a combination of the fact that a) tinkering with people's brains has plenty of room for unintended side effects, and b) they were largely unwilling test subjects rather than volunteers, so they're basically being tortured anyway. It's notable that later cyber-newtypes seem rather more stable than earlier ones (compare Four in Zeta and Gyunei in CCA, for example) — I always attributed that to both improvements in the medical process and the subjects' mental stability pre-procedure.

The idea that they need constant maintenance seems more like CE's Extended than UC's cyber-newtypes. I don't recall Marida needing any special treatment to remain stable, for instance.

That sort of scenario is certainly plausible from an in-universe perspective, we just don't see that sort of thing happening in the various shows because Gundam tends to be about high adventure with a military sci-fi skin, rather than a gritty down-to-earth life-in-the-trenches depiction of giant robot warfare. As you note, the show that gets closest to the latter is 08th MS Team, which features more nuanced battle damage than "just a scratch" or "catastrophic explosion" with nothing in between. Specific instances include Sanders getting his Gundam mobility killed when Magella Attack tanks shoot out his leg, and Karen getting hers mission killed when an Acguy smashes her cockpit displays (and punches her head off). Shiro very nearly gets his catastrophic killed by the Apsaraus II, but they manage to "repair" it (by virtually rebuilding it from the ground up), so that's a marginal case.

edited 28th Aug '15 10:59:22 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

CE has a lot of that, mostly due to Kira and his disabling ways meaning any shot that doesn't hit the chest doesn't disable the suit.

The one that stands out the most though is probably When Shinn stabs Athrun's stolen Gouf right through the chest, and while it's lopsided in direct jab that doesn't kill the people in the cockpit, it also doesn't make the Gouf explode either, it just falls into the water, completely intact.There's also when Shinn stabs through Freedom, but nobody's really sure what happened there as far as what exactly exploded.

edited 28th Aug '15 2:14:11 PM by AJSthe2nd

That was almost certainly a steam explosion from the seawater coming into direct contact with the reactor.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

A nice expanation. . Yes, was weird see how Kira survived to this. Very weird, seriously that was a good explanation.

Watch me destroying my country

It's actually a big concern, since a significant percentage of the world's nuclear reactors are either floating or submerged.

Nous restons ici.

It's Bad Movie Night. G-Saviour just started. I have a laptop and eight people in my living room ready to mock this movie. Let's go.

The space background for the credits? Reminds me of Star Trek. In a good way. The music, on the other hand...well it's also Star Trek, but it's somewhere between the best theme of Voyager and the theme to freaking Neverending Story.

edited 28th Aug '15 11:11:11 PM by Night

Nous restons ici.

The opening pan of the movie shows us...a colony cluster, in visual range, with individual colonies ACTUALLY ROTATING. And you know, I've waited my entire Gundam fan existence for this shot. It was fucking worth it, late '90s CGI or not.

But then we get what I swear is a lost opening to a SeaQuest DSV episode, and honestly that's a crossover I could get behind. Nathan Bridger and Bright Noah teamup. Plasma torpdoes, 50% charge, let's bust some Z'Goks.

Apparently I shouldn't say that, as what I presume to be our main character is piloting what seems to be a cross between a Z'Gok and a JIM suit. Honestly it doesn't look bad, and I kind of like it. (Seriously though this whole underwater sequence I'm waiting for like the edge of the SeaQuest to poke in or a WHSKR to sneak through the background of a shot.) After our obligatory opening action scene the movie continues briskly through introducing who I presume will be our villain and also...

...fucking really? Those Starship Troopers armors? Those have been in everything. They were on Power Rangers' for chrissakes. Also come on man, you're on Earth, don't tell me you don't know about the Antarctic Treaty and how it deals with surrender.

We get a flashback/nightmare to when our protagonist piloted mobile suits in combat presumably. Now they're on land, and a scene with his girlfriend, and a party, and then an interview, and then somebody kills a prison guard and blames it on our lead and then our people go down the chute to morgue and land in a pile of bodyparts and medical waste and this scene should be way the hell bloodier and they should probably freak out a little more. Yes, he's a vet, but he's a mobile suit vet. That's a little cleaner than being line infantry, y'know?

Incidentally, this has more black people in it than probably the entirety of the rest of the franchise. Hell, the female lead, the doctor who was raiding the platform (without a gun) and surrendered and is now running the escape.

More people show up, resistance types I guess, also interns for the doctor. The uniforms of the faction in charge of Earth are a weird kind of half-Zeon half-Feddie thing, they've got the Zeon little "bib" part outlined in gold braid, but not actually separate, and the Federation's red collars, but they're navy blue or black overall because Putting on the Reich I guess.

And now we get a mobile suit on the move again. Two of them. They're moving fairly slow, but it's not a bad scene if they're at a walk. It also demonstrates, contrary to the usual claims about this movie, that the suits are actually more advanced than Victory-era ones. These suits may not have panoramic cockpits or Wings of Light or crap, but they ARE capable of atmospheric flight under thruster power alone, something only a few UC suits, mainly modified Goufs, ever achieved. Even the Victory had to cheat with its Minovsky systems. They look surprisingly like a GINN, and I'm heavily reminded of the FMVs for MechWarrior 4 as well.

The shuttle design, on the other hand, looks awful and moves too slowly.

The colony shot of Side Four's New Manhattan makes up for it, and now we get...

IT'S A GUNDAM. They called it the G-C or something, though. And now we are putting on the Reich extra super special hard. Our protagonist got drummed out of the army for saving one of his buddies when their suit malfunctioned. Honestly the whole thing sounds pretty stupid, it was apparently an open-space rescue during an exercise, there was no logical reason to order him not to save the guy. It was apparently done out of sheer dickishness.

And now they call it G-Saviour. Okay movie, titular suit's first flight. Impress me.

...The cockpit impresses me as actually looking way more like I'd expect a cockpit to look than any other Gundam cockpit. He's got a beam rifle, plus a gun on the other arm. Beamsaber too, not sure where it's stored.

Side Eight, Gaea, interior of an Island Three, bloody gorgeous. The colony's been hacked, though, and it's the girlfriend's fault, so the colony's anti-debris defense systems are responding to a baddie destroyer as a valid target. Frankly that we've never see a colony with these before doesn't bother me since it makes sense they'd have these. The destroyer is hit, but it doesn't look too bad on the surface. The bad guys are happy about it now since they've just sent in the mobile suits.

Main character discovers girlfriend is pulling a Katejina and getting the whole colony killed just so she and him can go home and live happily ever after. Well, it was Gundam, I suppose it had to have SOME moment where a woman acts crazy and irrational.

Wait, is that Starbuck powering up a mobile suit? Holy crap, this movie's heavy on the crossovers. Okay, Gaea just launched mobile suits. They look...pretty GM-like, honestly. They don't look bad. And scratch several. They don't die like GMs though. They're completely ineffectual; outdated, it seems, not professional pilots; or at least not professional combat pilots. It's not as curbstompy as Unicorn could be, relatively few of them are dying and a lot of them are still dogfighting when the G-Savior deploys; they seem to be mainly holding their own, but for the bad guy. I should also note that very few people just take a hit and explode in this movie; it takes repeated hits to stop even mook suits a lot of the time.

And now we get the primary villain's suit. We're running a little Alpha Azieru, a little Jagd Doga, and a little Sazabi. It's not a bad look, really.

The G-Saviour finds your mass-production models crunchy, and good with ketchup. A couple of GINNs (not really but they look it) invade the colony and interpret their orders to "secure the settlement" as "shoot up random shit", while Betrayal Girlfriend continues to Betray.

I refrained from calling that beam shield, it seemed ephemeral, but apparently it was. The bad guy definitely had one. So now we get down to it, and for one of the few times in Gundam history, we have a reason why the good guy accepts a beamsaber duel: bad guy cut his gun in half when he went for a "block with the shield, shoot him" technique.

And our climatic duel will, in fact, take place on a colony mirror. And the big bad's historical reference is incredibly stupid. (Caesar? Selective starvation? What?) GM-alike actually gets a kill here. Bad guy has...shoulder vulcans? Okay that's new. Bad guy suit doesn't die, just gets cut up; multiple hostiles turn up only for friendly reinforcements as well.

The general takes a Gaean ship because he's dumb, and doesn't tell anyone BECAUSE HE'S REALLY DUMB. We get a nice fight inside the colony with the G-Saviour having converted for atmospheric flight briefly.

Big Bad does Big No, gets killed by own side.

Trite wrapup.

So, that was G-Saviour. What's my opinion on it?

Within the confines of the budget, they made a good movie. The complaints I've usually heard about its mobile suit action, echoed on our own trope page, are bluntly garbage; no, the suits aren't animated slowly, we simply see them move slowly in a few noncombat scenes early in the movie. When it comes to the actual combat later on, they move relatively quickly, yet with enough weight to preserve the idea they're giant robots.

The movie has a surprisingly quick pace that serves it well by giving the audience no time to dwell on its faults. It lacks focus on the mobile suit aspects, which is to its detriment; they're some of the best parts of the movie. The actor's performances are not perfect but they are far better than might be expected from the movie's reputation, with only the Big Bad (played by veteran character actor Kenneth Welsh) turning in a genuinely poor performance. At least part of that is simply because he's very badly explained, switching from seemingly-reasonable to Jamitov-is-my-role-model about midway through the movie for no adequately explained reason and to little purpose. It didn't add much. We could have just had the colonel be evil on his own.

The effects were genuinely pretty good for a 2000 movie, and the mobile suit design is genuinely excellent; a good, solid gut-check towards mobile suits looking like giant war machines over the tendency to visually busy and durability-questionable designs more recent series have tended to drop at times. (Or all the time.) The battle scenes are actually much better realized mobile suit combat than many of the animated ones were probably capable of, with a real sense of motion and plenty of maneuvering. Nobody stands still and gets shot; they take hits because they didn't evade, but at the same time they're not just sitting still and getting blasted either. They're moving around and firing and engaging targets, and one of this movie's crowning triumphs is the fact that most of the people who take hits and die do so for an immediately obvious reason; they were staring into the sunglare and didn't see it coming, they were chasing another target and got bushwhacked by someone outside that fight, or they were just way too outclassed on every level.

So is this a good movie? Not really. It's got a lot of little flaws that collectively weight it down. I've only mentioned a few, but there are others: the main character comes off as a bit of an impulsive asshole, though more likable than most. The villain is decidedly one-note and spouts cliches at odd moments; the big bad is just bland and has issues I already noted. The lighting team decided they needed to add some effects to certain scenes they never should have. The movie is arguably too fast-paced, edited down, and could have benefited greatly from another thirty minutes both to get to know the characters and to more fully integrate the mobile suits. The mobile suit concept is badly integrated into the movie and has relatively little screentime.

Is it a good Gundam movie? My answer to that, to my surprise, is yes, this is a good Gundam movie. The mecha design is good, the main characters are likable enough and manage to avoid all the usual Gundam protagonist tropes that tend to infuriate people, the details it adds to the universe are coherent to what exists and seem positive additions. Despite the paucity of mecha combat, what we do get is of a relatively high caliber. I understand why people would wish to exile it from the canon; plotwise and tonally it has only Zeta for company, and a lot of the expected Gundam tropes are either not present or played very differently. But change is not necessarily a bad thing, and in the end, I don't think this movie entirely deserves the exile from canon it's been subjected to. I'm not sure where it would fit, but it's far from the abomination in the eyes of man and Tomino it's often made out to be.

edited 29th Aug '15 4:43:21 AM by Night

Nous restons ici.

Pretty much lines up with my recollection of the movie (which is admittedly a good ten years old at this point). Most stuff (from the acting to the CG) comes off as "not great but alright, and better than I'd expect from a low-budget sci-fi movie", while the actual combat, while not getting as much screentime as I'd have liked (almost certainly because they're the most expensive part of the movie), are actually pretty well choreographed, for all the reasons Night mentioned.

I don't think it fits in the UC timeline as it purports to (mecha technology doesn't line up with where it should be, politics are different enough that it seems implausible to be an outgrowth of Victory, the main conflict revolves around food production, which was never really a problem in UC, etc), but as a UC-flavored AU it does just fine.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Well, Tomino just dropped a bombshell:

G-Reco takes place 500 years after Turn A Gundam.

...oh, fuck you Tomino.

Wonder what Sunrise will officially say on the matter.

Tomino says as much random bullshit as Fukuda these days. I put him in the same category as George Lucas: he was the start of a great franchise, but the best parts of it are the parts that he had little involvement with.

Other gems from that interview:

• "Gundam shows made by other people are crap, including Origin"
• "I'm the one who gave the go sign to Imagawa to make G Gundam. It was supposed to be a breakthrough but it ended up being whatever"
• In reference to Gundam Seed: "There’s no way a beautiful woman with a big chest would be a battleship captain"

Tomino is an asshole.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Well, that explains so much about why he's dicked up women so often. He apparently comes from the same era as sixties Star Trek producers!

Nous restons ici.