Post by Konaa on Mar 20, 2009 22:38:24 GMT -5
Konaa Rantview: Gundam 00
Disclaimer: I tend to exaggerate about some details, and most of the jackass in this review is for comedic purposes. Most of it.
Ah, Gundam. One of the few franchises American nerds aren't begging to kill itself because its become a shameless mockery of what it once was. Some history for the uninformed: Mobile Suit Gundam was a 1970s Japanese cartoon (or anime if you've been paying attention to the internet at all for the past ever) about a giant humanoid robot piloted by an angsty teenager who went around shooting up way more interesting characters than himself. As you can expect, it was a major hit and millions of spinoffs and sequels have been spawned in the 30 years since. A popular trend is to just create an entirely new universe with no connection to previous continuity. Such as the latest version, Gundam 00.
Now, contrary to what my friends may tell you, I'm not terribly easy to please when it comes to giant robots. I tend to like well developed characters and interesting plots, and of course well scripted giant robot battles never hurt. Gundam 00 gives us the third one from the beginning to the end, but it's kind of hard to keep track of the plot from square 1. Let me give you the basic rundown: We're in the future AGAIN and of course humanity just can't fucking get along. This time they've built three giant elevators into space (ummm...kay) and covered them with solar panels, somehow giving them infinite energy supplies. Of course, there are only three, and the world splits into three factions: The Union, consisting of America, Canada, and South America(wait, Canada is part of something?), the AEU, which is basically just all of Europe, and the HRL, or Human Reform League(very unsuspicious), consisting of basically all Asia. Of course, those crazy Muslims are blowing shit up as usual, this time because they can't sell oil to anyone and thus their economy is ruined. Besides the obvious problem that this is exactly the opposite of what would actually happen if we acquired infinite sources of energy, this is a rather poor attempt to portray the violence in the Middle East, stating that they engage in indiscriminate terrorism against the entirety of the world instead of negotiating for some of the energy that we are apparently never going to run out of.
So we're given a scene at the AEU's elevator where they're showing off their new mobile suit. Although there's the obvious issue that no military shows off their secret weapons, I can sort of imagine a European Union being dicks about it, though that may just be due to the current governments in Europe. So yeah, they show off the mobile suit and how shiny it is, but trouble soon shows up as a shinier mobile suit lands right next to the new one, piloted by a shadowy boy. A blond American in the crowd takes some binoculars and reads “Gundam” on the head. Yes, let's just put the name of our super secret model that's years above the world's mobile suits at large in big bold letters stamped on the head. Top secret, here. Needless to say the AEU guy makes a complete ass of himself and gets all his mobile suit's limbs chopped off. The Gundam takes to the air because it can apparently fly for no good reason, when he's surrounded by the scrambled defense fighters. However, they're shot down before they can blink by another Gundam, this one with a giant sniper rifle. Meanwhile in space, two more Gundams interfere in a terrorist attack on an orbital elevator, nothing particularly interesting happens here. Soon after, a tape is released to the media, showing a bald old man naming his organization as Celestial Being, claiming that they're going to eliminate all war by blowing up anyone with so much as a bowie knife. This does not make the Gundams terribly popular, as you may imagine. So that's the basic plot, Celestial Being interferes in military disputes with their fancy shiny super advanced units.
Characters! Oh, yes, sorry, we can't just have the Gundams flying around blowing shit up, there have to be the people behind the metal faces in order to make this vaguely interesting. Let's start out with the main character, shall we? His name is Setsuna F. Seiei. And no, we never find out what the F stands for. He's a kid from a completely fictional Middle East nation that was invaded by ANOTHER completely fictional Middle East nation six years ago. He and a number of other small children tried to Jihad it up, but the enemy had mobile suits and thus crushed them underfoot. Right before he was shot dead, though, a Gundam appeared and blasted every mobile suit to pieces. This imparted Gundam in Setsuna's mind as a sort of heavenly figure. Anyways, our hero is pretty bland and boring, says his lines in a dull monotone and carries them out. His Gundam is Exia, a Gundam covered in swords. Yes, that's right, a unit made SPECIFICALLY FOR MELEE COMBAT. Melee combat has been outdated for what, 400 years at this point? Oh yeah, and while I'm complaining about nerdy aspects, let me tell you what powers the Gundams and makes them so much better. A special engine that causes them to shit sparkly lights that are in fact a bullshit magic particle that wishes away all plotholes, called GN Particles. Apparently with GN Particles you can do anything, fly, shoot lasers, block out radar, and READ MINDS. That's right, READ MINDS. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if 00 wasn't obviously trying to keep some sense of realism throughout the show, but its hard to take that seriously when GN Particles are keeping all the difficulty of actually planning a strategy out of the show.
Oh, right, characters. Next up is Lockon Stratos, expert marksman and Irish, for bonus points. And before you ask, no, Lockon is not his real name. None of the Gundam pilots(or Gundam Meisters, as they're called) know each other's real names or pasts. They all use codenames. Anyways, Lockon is one of the few characters that's realistic from the beginning, he's a skilled pilot, but he's also pretty laid back and cheerful, and tends to view things off-handedly. His Gundam is Dynames, a sniper Gundam armed with all sorts of long range weaponry.
Then we have Allelujah Haptism, a genetically modified supersoldier from the HRL who pilots Kyrios, a Gundam capable of transforming into a bird mode. Allelujah seemingly has nothing especially interesting about him at the beginning, until we learn that he(most originally) has an evil psychotic alternate personality with a different eye color. We get quite a few amusing scenes where he's talking to “himself”. Allelujah's other purpose is to extend the bullshit science by the fact that he has “quantum brainwaves”. Quantum scientists may want to stop reading- it only gets worse deeper in.
Finally, Tieria Erde, pilot of Virtue, a giant armored Gundam with a bigass laser. Tieria is sort of just there to confuse us. First of all, he IS a boy, believe it or not, despite every effort on the show's part to make it as ambiguous as possible. Secondly, he's supposed to be the perfect one out of the Meisters, the only one that never acts in his own interest and executes missions to the letter. He's also incredibly uptight and arrogant, but while it's suppose to make us pissed at him, the fact that he never acts in his own interest just makes him so boring you're liable to forget he's even in the show.
Finally, there's the crew of the Ptolemy, Celestial Being's spaceship. The strategic planner is a drunkard women named Sumeragi, who is somehow a brilliant tactician despite being intoxicated for two thirds of the show. The crew is a varied collection of forgettable minor characters who are still more interesting then the Meisters. Finally, there are the various people who are apparently agents of Celestial Being positioned around the world, such as Alejandro Corner and Wong Liu Mei. I say apparently because they never actually do anything to help their supposed comrades throughout the entire show. This is somewhat explained in Corner's part because he's an observer who's suppose to act to replace any of the Meisters if needed, but in Mei's case she just sits around drinking tea with this infuriatingly smug look on her face THE ENTIRE FUCKING SEASON.
So the Meisters are pretty much on their own, not that it matters since the Gundams are completely invincible and barrel through any opposition in less then five seconds. Really exciting, isn't it? I love a show where the main characters have no chance of losing ever and never struggle. Thankfully 00 gets the idea that it's liable to bore half its audience to death after a couple of episodes and throws in some characters who can actually put a scratch on our heroes. First there's Graham Acre, an American ace pilot for the Union, then there's Sergei Smirnov, an old Russian tactician for the HRL. They both give Setsuna a run for his money in the early episodes in nothing more then your typical steamlined mobile suit, but the odd thing is that even though they clash with the Gundams several times, they mysteriously don't suffer the same fate as their inferior subordinates. The Gundams plow through everything that moves normally, but mysterious plot armor seems to save the named characters every time they lose, which IS every time, as apparently the Gundam pilots have the attention span of a sugar high first-grader and boost away the second they've chopped off the arms of a named enemy's suit. They don't extend this mercy to anyone else, ever.
Of course there's the emotional dilemmas the pilots face, too. Setsuna thinks he's the embodiment of a Gundam, therefore of order and justice, and also has to duel the man who made him a Jihadist in his past, too, a man named Ali Al-Sachez. Ali is also a completely unrealistic psychopath who just wants war to keep happening cause he loves it, but that's a small thing to pick on with all the other problems here. Tieria is liable to break down and sob the second he falls even slightly short of the plan's expectations, and Allelujah has to deal with his evil side egging him on to destroy everything.
After fifteen episodes of this nonsense, the three factions finally unite to get rid of the Gundams and toss about 800 mobile suits at them. Of course this finally gets our heroes in a jam, but there's a problem in that not only should it not take 800 suits to defeat four suits, but even THEN the Gundams hold out for quite some time. We get a long boring battle until finally they're overpowered, but then three new Gundams show up in time to save the day. The main difference is that these guys have RED GN Particles, so you know they're evil. Anyways, we get a lot of obvious hints that they're evil even BEFORE they start bombing civilians. So naturally our heroes lay the smackdown on them. Too late, though. The world thinks the three evil Gundams were also Celestial Being and thus they all form a permanent alliance against the concept of Gundam. At the same time, as part of his evil plan to take over the world, Alejandro Corner sells out the fake GN technology to the world nations, causing them to create units using the same energy as Gundams. Meaning that now NO ONE uses realistic technology. At this time a convenient ability unlocks in all the Gundams who use non-fake GN Particles that lets them go Super Saiyan. The world launches one last attack on the Gundams to wipe them out once and for all in space. Lockon Stratos is killed and everyone angsts for a bit before getting over it mysteriously quickly.
The final battle is ridiculously drawn out, but basically Alejandro comes to help out the UN in his giant golden mobile armor of doom. Here we see that the world MUST have unlimited energy as Alejandro throws enough energy at the Ptolemy to power a fucking continent. Basically, most of the minor characters are killed off in the attack and the Gundams and UN fight each other to a standstill. Setsuna fights Alejandro and manages to defeat him while Alejandro spews crap about how magnificent he is and such. Afterwards, Graham ambushes Setsuna for a final battle in which he says some creepy stuff about how obsessed with the Gundams he is before they both give each other disabling blows. Setsuna floats off into the distance and makes a long speech to no one in particular about how distorted the world is. The three factions unite as the Earth Federation, Celestial Being runs off and hides, Wong Liu Mei is STILL drinking tea and smirking randomly, and...I guess the world is a better place?
The main problem with the show is how many of the plot points are utterly pointless. The world is essentially united by the time of the final battle, so the only real point there was to defeat Alejandro so he couldn't rule it, but the Meisters didn't even know he was a VILLAIN until five minutes before he dies. On that topic, it's supposed to be a big surprise that he wants to rule the world but he was so vaguely defined before then that it doesn't even matter, it just makes you go “Wait, who's that guy again?” Another problem is how it contradicts itself. Stylistically it is trying to be realistic, but its lost all sense of realism by the time everyone is using GN Particles. The plot is decent, I guess, but not overly inventive, the characters become interesting eventually but take way too long to do so, the show randomly jumps from Gundams being invincible to getting their asses kicked on a regular basis, and while they try to make Sumeragi a genius strategist, we never actually learn what ANY of her plans are. We just see the Meisters plowing through military bases and such while the crew makes vague comments about how everything is going according to plan. I suppose it'd make sense if the plan was just to let them blow shit up randomly, but randomness defeats the purpose of a plan!
That's not to say this is a bad show. It's inventive, to say the least, if you ignore the plot, but I think that it tries too hard to be unique. It shows a definite improvement in the last ten episodes, and throughout the entire time it has movie-quality animation, which was pretty damn neat. The mobile suit sequences WERE pretty awesome, especially after the Gundams stopped being invincible. Now, there IS a sequel to 00, or rather, a second season, which I intend to watch and see if its improved any. Though there IS a four year timeskip in between seasons, which I consider a bit too long. At any rate, 00 is worth your time, and it's pretty fun, but highly overrated, especially since most of its praise is mandatory because its the latest Gundam series. The high quality animation is cool, but I enjoyed several series just fine with 80s-90s animation, and I think that people who go on about sucky animation being the reason why the newer shows are better need to take a refreshing walk off the nearest cliff.
Disclaimer: I tend to exaggerate about some details, and most of the jackass in this review is for comedic purposes. Most of it.
Ah, Gundam. One of the few franchises American nerds aren't begging to kill itself because its become a shameless mockery of what it once was. Some history for the uninformed: Mobile Suit Gundam was a 1970s Japanese cartoon (or anime if you've been paying attention to the internet at all for the past ever) about a giant humanoid robot piloted by an angsty teenager who went around shooting up way more interesting characters than himself. As you can expect, it was a major hit and millions of spinoffs and sequels have been spawned in the 30 years since. A popular trend is to just create an entirely new universe with no connection to previous continuity. Such as the latest version, Gundam 00.
Now, contrary to what my friends may tell you, I'm not terribly easy to please when it comes to giant robots. I tend to like well developed characters and interesting plots, and of course well scripted giant robot battles never hurt. Gundam 00 gives us the third one from the beginning to the end, but it's kind of hard to keep track of the plot from square 1. Let me give you the basic rundown: We're in the future AGAIN and of course humanity just can't fucking get along. This time they've built three giant elevators into space (ummm...kay) and covered them with solar panels, somehow giving them infinite energy supplies. Of course, there are only three, and the world splits into three factions: The Union, consisting of America, Canada, and South America(wait, Canada is part of something?), the AEU, which is basically just all of Europe, and the HRL, or Human Reform League(very unsuspicious), consisting of basically all Asia. Of course, those crazy Muslims are blowing shit up as usual, this time because they can't sell oil to anyone and thus their economy is ruined. Besides the obvious problem that this is exactly the opposite of what would actually happen if we acquired infinite sources of energy, this is a rather poor attempt to portray the violence in the Middle East, stating that they engage in indiscriminate terrorism against the entirety of the world instead of negotiating for some of the energy that we are apparently never going to run out of.
So we're given a scene at the AEU's elevator where they're showing off their new mobile suit. Although there's the obvious issue that no military shows off their secret weapons, I can sort of imagine a European Union being dicks about it, though that may just be due to the current governments in Europe. So yeah, they show off the mobile suit and how shiny it is, but trouble soon shows up as a shinier mobile suit lands right next to the new one, piloted by a shadowy boy. A blond American in the crowd takes some binoculars and reads “Gundam” on the head. Yes, let's just put the name of our super secret model that's years above the world's mobile suits at large in big bold letters stamped on the head. Top secret, here. Needless to say the AEU guy makes a complete ass of himself and gets all his mobile suit's limbs chopped off. The Gundam takes to the air because it can apparently fly for no good reason, when he's surrounded by the scrambled defense fighters. However, they're shot down before they can blink by another Gundam, this one with a giant sniper rifle. Meanwhile in space, two more Gundams interfere in a terrorist attack on an orbital elevator, nothing particularly interesting happens here. Soon after, a tape is released to the media, showing a bald old man naming his organization as Celestial Being, claiming that they're going to eliminate all war by blowing up anyone with so much as a bowie knife. This does not make the Gundams terribly popular, as you may imagine. So that's the basic plot, Celestial Being interferes in military disputes with their fancy shiny super advanced units.
Characters! Oh, yes, sorry, we can't just have the Gundams flying around blowing shit up, there have to be the people behind the metal faces in order to make this vaguely interesting. Let's start out with the main character, shall we? His name is Setsuna F. Seiei. And no, we never find out what the F stands for. He's a kid from a completely fictional Middle East nation that was invaded by ANOTHER completely fictional Middle East nation six years ago. He and a number of other small children tried to Jihad it up, but the enemy had mobile suits and thus crushed them underfoot. Right before he was shot dead, though, a Gundam appeared and blasted every mobile suit to pieces. This imparted Gundam in Setsuna's mind as a sort of heavenly figure. Anyways, our hero is pretty bland and boring, says his lines in a dull monotone and carries them out. His Gundam is Exia, a Gundam covered in swords. Yes, that's right, a unit made SPECIFICALLY FOR MELEE COMBAT. Melee combat has been outdated for what, 400 years at this point? Oh yeah, and while I'm complaining about nerdy aspects, let me tell you what powers the Gundams and makes them so much better. A special engine that causes them to shit sparkly lights that are in fact a bullshit magic particle that wishes away all plotholes, called GN Particles. Apparently with GN Particles you can do anything, fly, shoot lasers, block out radar, and READ MINDS. That's right, READ MINDS. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if 00 wasn't obviously trying to keep some sense of realism throughout the show, but its hard to take that seriously when GN Particles are keeping all the difficulty of actually planning a strategy out of the show.
Oh, right, characters. Next up is Lockon Stratos, expert marksman and Irish, for bonus points. And before you ask, no, Lockon is not his real name. None of the Gundam pilots(or Gundam Meisters, as they're called) know each other's real names or pasts. They all use codenames. Anyways, Lockon is one of the few characters that's realistic from the beginning, he's a skilled pilot, but he's also pretty laid back and cheerful, and tends to view things off-handedly. His Gundam is Dynames, a sniper Gundam armed with all sorts of long range weaponry.
Then we have Allelujah Haptism, a genetically modified supersoldier from the HRL who pilots Kyrios, a Gundam capable of transforming into a bird mode. Allelujah seemingly has nothing especially interesting about him at the beginning, until we learn that he(most originally) has an evil psychotic alternate personality with a different eye color. We get quite a few amusing scenes where he's talking to “himself”. Allelujah's other purpose is to extend the bullshit science by the fact that he has “quantum brainwaves”. Quantum scientists may want to stop reading- it only gets worse deeper in.
Finally, Tieria Erde, pilot of Virtue, a giant armored Gundam with a bigass laser. Tieria is sort of just there to confuse us. First of all, he IS a boy, believe it or not, despite every effort on the show's part to make it as ambiguous as possible. Secondly, he's supposed to be the perfect one out of the Meisters, the only one that never acts in his own interest and executes missions to the letter. He's also incredibly uptight and arrogant, but while it's suppose to make us pissed at him, the fact that he never acts in his own interest just makes him so boring you're liable to forget he's even in the show.
Finally, there's the crew of the Ptolemy, Celestial Being's spaceship. The strategic planner is a drunkard women named Sumeragi, who is somehow a brilliant tactician despite being intoxicated for two thirds of the show. The crew is a varied collection of forgettable minor characters who are still more interesting then the Meisters. Finally, there are the various people who are apparently agents of Celestial Being positioned around the world, such as Alejandro Corner and Wong Liu Mei. I say apparently because they never actually do anything to help their supposed comrades throughout the entire show. This is somewhat explained in Corner's part because he's an observer who's suppose to act to replace any of the Meisters if needed, but in Mei's case she just sits around drinking tea with this infuriatingly smug look on her face THE ENTIRE FUCKING SEASON.
So the Meisters are pretty much on their own, not that it matters since the Gundams are completely invincible and barrel through any opposition in less then five seconds. Really exciting, isn't it? I love a show where the main characters have no chance of losing ever and never struggle. Thankfully 00 gets the idea that it's liable to bore half its audience to death after a couple of episodes and throws in some characters who can actually put a scratch on our heroes. First there's Graham Acre, an American ace pilot for the Union, then there's Sergei Smirnov, an old Russian tactician for the HRL. They both give Setsuna a run for his money in the early episodes in nothing more then your typical steamlined mobile suit, but the odd thing is that even though they clash with the Gundams several times, they mysteriously don't suffer the same fate as their inferior subordinates. The Gundams plow through everything that moves normally, but mysterious plot armor seems to save the named characters every time they lose, which IS every time, as apparently the Gundam pilots have the attention span of a sugar high first-grader and boost away the second they've chopped off the arms of a named enemy's suit. They don't extend this mercy to anyone else, ever.
Of course there's the emotional dilemmas the pilots face, too. Setsuna thinks he's the embodiment of a Gundam, therefore of order and justice, and also has to duel the man who made him a Jihadist in his past, too, a man named Ali Al-Sachez. Ali is also a completely unrealistic psychopath who just wants war to keep happening cause he loves it, but that's a small thing to pick on with all the other problems here. Tieria is liable to break down and sob the second he falls even slightly short of the plan's expectations, and Allelujah has to deal with his evil side egging him on to destroy everything.
After fifteen episodes of this nonsense, the three factions finally unite to get rid of the Gundams and toss about 800 mobile suits at them. Of course this finally gets our heroes in a jam, but there's a problem in that not only should it not take 800 suits to defeat four suits, but even THEN the Gundams hold out for quite some time. We get a long boring battle until finally they're overpowered, but then three new Gundams show up in time to save the day. The main difference is that these guys have RED GN Particles, so you know they're evil. Anyways, we get a lot of obvious hints that they're evil even BEFORE they start bombing civilians. So naturally our heroes lay the smackdown on them. Too late, though. The world thinks the three evil Gundams were also Celestial Being and thus they all form a permanent alliance against the concept of Gundam. At the same time, as part of his evil plan to take over the world, Alejandro Corner sells out the fake GN technology to the world nations, causing them to create units using the same energy as Gundams. Meaning that now NO ONE uses realistic technology. At this time a convenient ability unlocks in all the Gundams who use non-fake GN Particles that lets them go Super Saiyan. The world launches one last attack on the Gundams to wipe them out once and for all in space. Lockon Stratos is killed and everyone angsts for a bit before getting over it mysteriously quickly.
The final battle is ridiculously drawn out, but basically Alejandro comes to help out the UN in his giant golden mobile armor of doom. Here we see that the world MUST have unlimited energy as Alejandro throws enough energy at the Ptolemy to power a fucking continent. Basically, most of the minor characters are killed off in the attack and the Gundams and UN fight each other to a standstill. Setsuna fights Alejandro and manages to defeat him while Alejandro spews crap about how magnificent he is and such. Afterwards, Graham ambushes Setsuna for a final battle in which he says some creepy stuff about how obsessed with the Gundams he is before they both give each other disabling blows. Setsuna floats off into the distance and makes a long speech to no one in particular about how distorted the world is. The three factions unite as the Earth Federation, Celestial Being runs off and hides, Wong Liu Mei is STILL drinking tea and smirking randomly, and...I guess the world is a better place?
The main problem with the show is how many of the plot points are utterly pointless. The world is essentially united by the time of the final battle, so the only real point there was to defeat Alejandro so he couldn't rule it, but the Meisters didn't even know he was a VILLAIN until five minutes before he dies. On that topic, it's supposed to be a big surprise that he wants to rule the world but he was so vaguely defined before then that it doesn't even matter, it just makes you go “Wait, who's that guy again?” Another problem is how it contradicts itself. Stylistically it is trying to be realistic, but its lost all sense of realism by the time everyone is using GN Particles. The plot is decent, I guess, but not overly inventive, the characters become interesting eventually but take way too long to do so, the show randomly jumps from Gundams being invincible to getting their asses kicked on a regular basis, and while they try to make Sumeragi a genius strategist, we never actually learn what ANY of her plans are. We just see the Meisters plowing through military bases and such while the crew makes vague comments about how everything is going according to plan. I suppose it'd make sense if the plan was just to let them blow shit up randomly, but randomness defeats the purpose of a plan!
That's not to say this is a bad show. It's inventive, to say the least, if you ignore the plot, but I think that it tries too hard to be unique. It shows a definite improvement in the last ten episodes, and throughout the entire time it has movie-quality animation, which was pretty damn neat. The mobile suit sequences WERE pretty awesome, especially after the Gundams stopped being invincible. Now, there IS a sequel to 00, or rather, a second season, which I intend to watch and see if its improved any. Though there IS a four year timeskip in between seasons, which I consider a bit too long. At any rate, 00 is worth your time, and it's pretty fun, but highly overrated, especially since most of its praise is mandatory because its the latest Gundam series. The high quality animation is cool, but I enjoyed several series just fine with 80s-90s animation, and I think that people who go on about sucky animation being the reason why the newer shows are better need to take a refreshing walk off the nearest cliff.
I did post in shades of grey if anyone even remembers that lmao