It's a Gundam thread!

Of the stuff I've encountered, your best bet is either using the Mecha & Manga supplement of Mutants & Masterminds, or else use Battle Century G. I'll copy/paste a post I made on the subject a few pages ago.

Speaking of RP Gs, when me and my co worker were talking about what model kit to buy next. For some reason it led to us discussing on how being a princess in a gundam show gives you the highest chances of survival as well as good luck in your love life.....

I guess gundam has a thing for princesses

edited 2nd Feb '16 7:01:57 AM by TheMainCharacter

Yep.

Speaking about model kits, Gundam Build Fighters TRY was a bad sequel to the original.

Gundam does have more than one Fallen Princess, though. Dorothy from Wing, Lucille from X, Flay from Seed...

And yeah, Try wasn't so much bad in and of itself as it was So Okay, It's Average compared to GBF being fantastic.

edited 2nd Feb '16 9:25:47 AM by NativeJovian

So, Gen Urobuchi has an... interesting perspective on G-Reco. Not sure I fully agree with him, but it's a viewpoint I hadn't seen before.

I guess but I think the G Gundam antics were so mishandled that it ruined the show for me.

Oh man G Gundam is great. Try, not so much. It felt like it was trying to do G Gundam but missed one of things that made G Gundam good.

Incidentally that's the main characters developing.

Domon goes from a rash hot head who is only nominally the hero because we have no other protagonists to someone who truly is a good person despite his faults and is more than willing to admit that.

Hell he also struggled quite a bit! Sekai was insta-win button.

That Urobuchi read (assuming it's his) does seem to indicate that he missed a few bits. In particular, we do actually see a fair bit of anti-Kuntala discrimination, particularly in the early episodes - in particular, Episode 1 has a couple of Capital Army goons roughing up Manny and Noredo for being Kuntala shortly after a snatch of dialogue indicates that they're not usually allowed up the Tower. It's cultural discrimination, not legal (Luin gets to be one of the Guard's top cadets, and Noredo is a friend of His Holiness), but it exists, and leads to things like an expendable all-Kuntala unit being used to test out potentially dangerous, unreliable equipment on the front lines. Luin/Mask's sin isn't striving for Kuntala liberation, but his Motive Decay - as the series progresses, 'Kuntala rights' become less of an actual thing for him and more an excuse to be Cumpa's rabid attack dog, forever hounding after Bellri and the G-Self. It's telling that the faction he joins, the Capital Army, are the ones responsible for the worst on-screen bigotry against Kuntala in the show (another Japanese-rearmament metaphor - the Japanese right wing have been known to exacerbate racial tensions in order to drive minority groups into their own arms in much the same way Cumpa apparently does here), and his final victory is in being unable to kill Bellri (he has the G-Self Perfect Pack dead to rights several times in his final battle, but never goes for the killshot), abandoning his insane, self-destructive grudge, and starting a new life with Manny.

So I rewatched Unicorn and I think I found IMO is my biggest issue.

It feels like a letdown. I won't say I hate it, in fact I applaud it for some interesting ideas, suit designs, and even if the Unicorn is OPPLZNERF tier it's still a interesting suit design and could have actually brought about some interesting moments in writing the entire story.

But that's just it, things happen, and nothing really goes anywhere, all battles with the Unicorn are unsatisfying with the Unicorn GODHAXING it's way out via Psychoframe and NTD especially against what are characters that would be Bosses in video games.

The characters feel a bit flat and I'll admit I only felt anything for the Garencier crew and the Nail Argama crew because even those were minor characters they felt more fleshed out and reasonable.

Probably helping that is the Garencier crew defects from Neo Zeon and end up joining the Federation.

I do like the fact that as much retcon shit they give the Federation; Zeon is still said to be wrong, dropping colonies, forcing people into poverty and eventually the idea of becoming so independent Earth because Angry and vengeful are all wrong.

But in the end, it's biggest points, the fights with the Unicorn and the Box feel lackluster. The Box itself actually contributes little to the story and feels more forced in than anything and I already said enough on the Unicorn fights.

Do I hate it? No. Do I like it. Not really. Am I disappointed? Yes. It really showed some strong potential at the start but eventually brought nothing with it.

Will I try to eventually pick up some Unicorn Gunpla? Maybe.

SEED @ episode 30:

• Given that the production staff would now know ahead of time that Waltfeld's coming back, I kinda expected them to alter the line in Creuset's video message saying that he was killed to something more ambiguous. Guess they were too cheap to pull Toshihiko Seki into the recording booth for just that one line.
• I wish Hisashi Hirai would stop putting facial hair on characters. He draws them like shit.
• They're being a lot more blatant about Kira and Cagalli being siblings than I remember.
• It feels like redrawn footage is getting more and more common, or maybe I'm just getting better at spotting it.
  • Sometimes it's a little jarring though. Like during their encounter at the Orb facility Kira and Athrun are completely redrawn - they're more detailed, shinier, more vibrantly colored throughout the whole scene, then the camera cuts back to Nicol, Yzak, and Dearka and they're clearly stuck back in 2003.
• And now the remaster's notorious change to Nicol's death. I knew it was coming going in, and I have to question why? Just why? It completely undermines the point of the scene (not to mention the point of Tolle's subsequent death), and it looks utterly asinine visually as it makes it look like Kira's drunk in the Strike's cockpit and has no idea what the hell he's doing.
• Yzak's reaction to Nicol's death is rather overdone, IMO, since he was never really shown to be all that close to him before this.
• And so Kira dies for our sins the first time. Since they didn't bother to soften Waltfeld's "death", I doubt they're going to make Kira's "resurrection" any more plausible...

The reason they changed it is the same as pretty much any instance of The Dog Shot First: to remove any sort of ambiguity as to Kira's heroicness. What makes it silly is the fact that 1) it was about as clear-cut an example of self-defense as you can come up with, so (unlike the infamous "Han shot first" scene) it wasn't particularly ambiguous in the first place, and 2) Kira had already deliberately killed people, including named characters (most notably with the battle against Andrew Waltfeld, and even if Andy shows up again later, Aisha doesn't), so I'm not sure what the point of making Nichol's death accidental is.

That's dumb. This is a war story, and yeah, Kira is The Hero but Nicol's death was meant to be tragic and is supposed to make Athrun think that Kira is lost cause.

edited 7th Feb '16 8:16:41 PM by heliosKAISER

So, after taking a break of a year and a bit, I'm catching up on G-Reco. Up through episode 20

Things really sped up once they hit Towasanga, and it wasn't exactly slow before. This isn't terribly coherent

Is Chickara a guy or a girl?

Chickara's a woman.

So G-Reco can be pretty fun as long as you don't try to follow the plot. That's a fool's errand

It's the worst written Gundam, but also the prettiest. Unicorn might be better animated, but G-Reco makes up for it in style

The fights are great, and what SEED was aiming for. Though the G-Self's tendency to pull new powers out of it's undercarriage was annoying

So the first half focuses on world-building, setting things up, and terrible, terrible writing. The next third or so covers a lot of plot at absurd speed, making it impossible to actually engage with what's going on (which is good. Lets you focus on the fights instead of the idiocy). Then you have one long battle until the last episode, which is fun if you don't mind never being quite sure what's going on. After that there's the ending, which is just kind of disappointing

It feels like some of the problem is that Tomino wanted it to have a continuous narrative but is used to a more episodic approach

• So in this show the main character and the local princess are actually siblings, seperately adopted and oblivious to this. The main character eventually comes to the realization that the enemy is war itself, and decides to disable enemy suits without killing the pilots. Most of the focus is on a huge number of unique mobile suits, all with their own gimmick. Newtypes exist, but this is never acknowledged. This all seems familiar, somehow
• Despite having an absurd number of suits, they're generally quite well designed (and so were the other mechanical designs)
  • The Mack Knife appears to be the predecessor to the WaDom, which raises all kinds of questions
  • Nothing about the Yggdrasil makes sense, but it sure was pretty
• There was this weird duality with the G-Self where it's a mysterious suit that everyone is after with an odd religious undertone, but also an ordinary suit with a perfectly well-known history
• Towasanga was narratively superfluous. Basically everything that was looking to involve them had to do with Venus Globe instead, and their fleet accomplished nothing. They should have been cut to make room for important things
• The utterly blase attitude these people take to betrayal is baffling

So, this wasn't good, but I think it's enjoyable enough if approached in the right frame of mind. And, like all things set after Unicorn, it's claims of being part of the UC timeline should be aggressively ignored

Don't you mean made after Unicorn?

It's a better UC work than a good half the UC OV As.

And I still stand by my opinion that even without Crossbone, F91 was a decent movie.

Nope. Don't like late UC and would prefer Turn A and G-Reco to be in their own timeline

What is better than the OVAs?

0080 WITP is pretty dang good and 8th MS Team isn't great but it isn't bad.

G-Reco had a lot of designs were distinctive (the G-Self was visually unique while still being undeniably Gundam-y, while the Reckten was an interesting take on the boxy GM-analogue) but a lot more that were completely forgettable and blurred together (basically everything from Towasanga and Venus Globe). I feel like they went for quantity over quality in terms of mecha design — I would have rather seen one or two actually good mecha designs from each faction rather than a half-dozen decent designs spread out across a sea of meh.

I found the fights to be dull and uninteresting for the most part. About the only combat scene that sticks in my mind was the G-Self with the High Torque pack, because it actually played the G-Self's overpoweredness for drama (ie, Bellri couldn't control it properly). Other than that, the G-Self was a Boring Invincible Hero and the fights had no tension to them whatsoever. This is largely due to the fact that it would deploy new features completely automatically on the rare occasion that Bellri was actually in trouble, which happened throughout the series. A single autofire defensive system that bailed Bell out a few times before his enemies learned how to counter it would've been okay, but as it is, the G-Self had New Powers as the Plot Demands and was made entirely invincible as a result.

I could go on, but I've made my feelings about G-Reco well known on this thread fairly recently. I could go on about Unicorn, too, but ditto.

edited 8th Feb '16 4:37:21 PM by NativeJovian

Salvaging G-Reco:

• Should be about twice as long
• Needs to be written be someone with actual talent
• Should either have connections to the UC played up or shoved into it's own timeline. Or CE
• Tension between the Capital Guard and the Capital Army should be emphasized a lot more. It should look like a civil war, not people turning traitor for no reason
• Bell and Noredo should be established as having a plan when they go with Aida near the start
• G-Self should be less broken
• Have Aida's newfound maturity take the form of being politically active by the end (I think this is what it was trying to do, but it never quite panned out)
• Just get rid of Towasanga entirely
• More deaths of named characters. G-Reco was very bad at making war look unappealing
• Have Manny get through to Luin
  • I think I'd have Cumpa (try to) run away with clear intention of starting up another war/continuing this one, but get killed by Luin. This is very similar to Kycilia's fate, but it's better than what we got
• The ending should be that the hawks got themselves killed and now the moderates are trying to stop the war and establish friendly relations with the other factions. I think this is basically what the original ending was going for, but it wasn't very clear
• Have Bell and Noredo get together

edited 9th Feb '16 11:53:45 PM by Hylarn

Agreed with most of the above. Having Bell and Noredo end up together isn't required... but at least I wouldn't have him abandon her and everyone else and randomly go travel the world. That really made him out to be an unthinking jerk. In fact, were we even supposed to agree with that?

Tomino has a habit of making his characters do things like that. It's part of his tendency to get rid of characters in order to prevent them from being used in sequels. He did basically the same thing in ZZ and Turn A, for example.

Or he'll just kill them outright like Amuro in his many novel adaptions.

With Tomino's obssesion with character death's its a wonder he created stuff like Xabungle and King Gainer.