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Rabbi Tupac posted:Are you guys just not counting Thunderbolt? Or are we only talking full series? Thunderbolt is very good, it's also a real weird product in that we got shorts then we got movies, and none of it is finished so yeah Thunderbolt would be the 2nd best Gundam thing in the past decade to me. IBO does get credit from me for being a complete story, but if you thought Thunderbolt was better I don't think that's a crazy opinion. Thunderbolt also inhabits that weird UC but its AU space I'm never really sure what to do with. The Notorious ZSB fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 22:22
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I saw thunderbolt as the shorts so I always forget that it became an actual movie.
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Feb 17, 2021 22:26
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Gaius Marius posted:I saw thunderbolt as the shorts so I always forget that it became an actual movie. Watch the movie, it works better than the shorts. Plus there is some new stuff in there. And yeah fair point about IBO being a completed work. December Sky works well enough as a stand alone that I tend to gloss over that it's an ongoing story.
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Feb 18, 2021 00:02
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G-Reco is very good. IBO has a great opening but I checked out early.
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Feb 18, 2021 01:34
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Gaius Marius posted:G Reco is the only unconditional recommend I could give from the franchise in the last decade. I can see why someone would recommend G-Reco. I can even, with some effort, buy it as someone's favorite Gundam from the last decade. But unconditional? You're insane. G-Reco is a very acquired taste. It's everything people take issue with in Tomino Gundam shows ramped up to eleven, with most positive reviews talking about how the show feels like it needs more room to breathe. The show isn't just naturally show-not-tell, but spitefully so, cutting away from a natural explanation of part of the setting in the middle of a conversation to ensure we don't pick up important details about the world. And when it did have exposition, it clunked. In Turn A Gundam, I felt like I could always figure out how characters were thinking, and their actions were a natural product of recognizable motivations. Even 'genius' plans like riding a barrel to Earth came from comprehensible chains of reasoning. Meanwhile, G-Reco had characters just... forget about their friends getting killed. Despite some of them having been at war for decades, off and on, they don't have the first idea how any of it works, responding to death with less comprehension than a small child told about how his dog lives on a nice farm now. (Heard the movies are much better about it, which is nice, but I haven't seen them and they're not done, so... recommendation still conditional.) It's a severely flawed show, despite its visual charm, and sending someone in without warning is liable to make them pretty bitter about it. Worse, it's replaying a lot of the same notes as Turn A, but, you know. Not as good. I'm going to agree with the IBO vote for the 2010s. Starts strong, ends strong, good fight choreography, enough room for subplots to breathe, distinct cast, and really good mech designs that share a common design language.
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Feb 18, 2021 01:37
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chiasaur11 posted:G-Reco [is] a severely flawed show, despite its visual charm, and sending someone in without warning is liable to make them pretty bitter about it. Worse, it's replaying a lot of the same notes as Turn A, but, you know. Not as good. Tomino's UC Gundam works all hit a lot of the same notes too, to be fair, and there's a lot of thematic and narrative similarity between 0079, Zeta, ZZ, Char's Counterattack, F91 and Victory, with the villains of all of them using Contolism as a jumping off point for their own ambitions but ending up letting their personal agendas twist the conflict beyond the point where there's any real moral ambiguity left to them or their faction for instance. Those works are not identical by any stretch, but they certainly hit some of the same notes and some of the notes have even carried beyond UC in to both Turn A and G-Reco. Tomino used a past apocalypse that upended society so that he could basically keep the setting as a near future version of Earth that didn't change too much politically between any of them twice, and so that the basic premise between all of them continued to focus on the conflict between Earth and her colonies, who would be in control of it, what was the best course for everyone (Earth or space) etc. He can use that basic framework to tell stories or explore issues he's passionate about, and it seems like he keeps trying to do it in a way that he feels satisfied by or that reaches the people he wants to inspire and each time he ends up dissatisfied with the result and wanting to try again, with some variation on the last one but using the same basic framework. tsob fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Feb 18, 2021 |
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Feb 18, 2021 01:53
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 ok y'all. what do i watch next, i've watched: 0079 zeta double zeta cca unicorn f91 ibo 0080 08th ms team wing turn a g gundam what do i watch next?
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Feb 18, 2021 05:24
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Watch x and finish off all the ninties series.
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Feb 18, 2021 05:30
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Thunderbolt. Think of it as the sadistic companion piece to 0080 about war destroying people's lives for no good reason. It's not a malicious show or a nihilistic one but it's tragedy is more based on how the war turns people into monsters rather than about good people losing their innocence ala 0080.
Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Feb 18, 2021 |
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Feb 18, 2021 05:30
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I vote Seed, original dub. This choice is for my own entertainment as I have expressed previously. If we're still in the recommend good Gundam/don't make Ramadu play drinking games space, then I second Thunderbolt: December Sky.
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Feb 18, 2021 05:37
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Victory and X to really finish off the 90s.
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Feb 18, 2021 05:38
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chiasaur11 posted:I can see why someone would recommend G-Reco. I can even, with some effort, buy it as someone's favorite Gundam from the last decade. chiasaur11 posted:I'm going to agree with the IBO vote for the 2010s. Starts strong, ends strong, good fight choreography, enough room for subplots to breathe, distinct cast, and really good mech designs that share a common design language. Rabbi Tupac posted:Watch the movie, it works better than the shorts. Plus there is some new stuff in there. Yeah I've got it on my list just waiting for my buddy to get back from leave so we can watch it, it's something he's gonna like.
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Feb 18, 2021 05:47
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Ramadu posted:
Go Back To The Beginning
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Feb 18, 2021 06:59
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Gaius Marius posted:I consider this nothing but a plus, I loathe modern media where you're just forcefed every plot and emotion everyone is feeling. If media doesn't force me to engage with it on an intellectual level I disengage hard. I'm also a person who includes Gene Wolfe in his favorite authors so the idea of cutting even important ideas is not only acceptable to me, but encouraged. There's a quote that always comes to mind for me in these situations. "Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness" (Here is where I pause to note that Tomino's not guilty of this from anything I've seen. His response to G-Reco failing to connect is "Oh, should have made that clearer. I'll try to do that more in the movies", which is an attitude I respect.) G-Reco has a lot of straightforward things made more confusing just because the audience isn't informed of things that would be common knowledge to the characters, and then cutting away when the show would give enough information for an answer. Which I could respect more if it didn't also have really clunky exposition. (Mask's explanation for what a Kuntala is to his all Kuntala squad still stands out in my memory.) I don't have the Gene Wolfe experience to state much with authority, but in what I've seen of his work, there's an in-story reason for the gaps in information, from the world or the narrator, where the gaps themselves provide more information than you'd get with more straightforward presentation, once you know what you're looking at. Meanwhile, the gaps in G-Reco are extra-textual, imposed from above. When Severian sees a picture of the Apollo mission and doesn't recognize anything of it but traces of lost glory, that tells us both what the world was and what it is in a way that carries more weight than if it was just imposed from an omniscient narrator. Meanwhile, G-Reco highlights the artificiality of the information it provides or doesn't provide by putting us in the middle of situations where the characters are being told things, then denying the viewer the information... sometimes. The viewer has too much information to share the ignorance of the characters, but too little to feel equipped to evaluate them as an outsider. (And, of course, the characters behave in ways that don't seem natural to our world or theirs. )
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Feb 18, 2021 09:42
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Adding to that, G-Reco suffers badly from having to have a fight per episode no matter what. People have said that G-Reco needed time to breathe, that it needed more episodes, I disagree. It just needed to cut all the completely unnecessary fight scenes. It absolutely had enough time and wasted it on selling toys (which, to be fair, I do understand - this is a Gundam series, after all. Gunpla is what matters most, I know). Add to that everything chiasaur11 has said (which I agree wholeheartedly with) and you end up with a mess of a show that has enough good going for it that I can't say I disliked it, but enough mistakes that I can't say I loved it, either. If the movies tried to fix all of this, great! I definitely have to give them a chance, because G-Reco definitely felt like something that could be a lot better with just a bit more polish, just a bit less weirdness and toy marketing.
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Feb 18, 2021 13:46
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Blaze Dragon posted:Adding to that, G-Reco suffers badly from having to have a fight per episode no matter what. People have said that G-Reco needed time to breathe, that it needed more episodes, I disagree. It just needed to cut all the completely unnecessary fight scenes. It absolutely had enough time and wasted it on selling toys (which, to be fair, I do understand - this is a Gundam series, after all. Gunpla is what matters most, I know). Add to that everything chiasaur11 has said (which I agree wholeheartedly with) and you end up with a mess of a show that has enough good going for it that I can't say I disliked it, but enough mistakes that I can't say I loved it, either. I don't even recall what I read that gave me this impression exactly, but I've certainly gotten the impression from various interviews with Tomino and snippets of information released about both Turn A and G-Reco that he thought one of the problems with Turn A was that it wasn't attractive to kids, which is the group he's trying to reach with his message. And that he course corrected during G-Reco by personally mandating that the show have a more attractive color palette and general aesthetic, that there were lots of unique and toyetic designs, constant fights and a fast pace to keep things moving and interesting. I don't know how true that all is, and I don't even know how I'd start to verify it if it was honestly but it's the impression I get at least; that it wasn't a case of Tomino being told he had to have a fight every episode and fit this much story in this many episodes, but that he was the one deciding it because he thought it the best way to keep the show engaging for his audience.
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Feb 18, 2021 14:30
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Blaze Dragon posted:Adding to that, G-Reco suffers badly from having to have a fight per episode no matter what. People have said that G-Reco needed time to breathe, that it needed more episodes, I disagree. It just needed to cut all the completely unnecessary fight scenes. It absolutely had enough time and wasted it on selling toys (which, to be fair, I do understand - this is a Gundam series, after all. Gunpla is what matters most, I know). Add to that everything chiasaur11 has said (which I agree wholeheartedly with) and you end up with a mess of a show that has enough good going for it that I can't say I disliked it, but enough mistakes that I can't say I loved it, either. The stinger to this is that Re:Rise did a good job not having a fight per episode. Significant episodes included maybe still shots of the Gunpla, but all the meat and potatoes was interactions between Hiroto, Kazami, Par, May, Freddie, and the other Eldorans/Hinata/Masaki's Sister. And Re:Rise is explicitly part of the explicit toy commercial continuity of the franchise. Mind you Re:Rise was almost a decade later, but still... it's an interesting comparison given how well regarded Re:Rise seems to be even outside of SA.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:25
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Is Re:Rise not well regarded here? I remember people being pretty positive about it over all.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:46
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Ethiser posted:Is Re:Rise not well regarded here? I remember people being pretty positive about it over all. It is, but they were just noting that it's not just us goons who seem to like it.
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Feb 18, 2021 18:48
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Warmachine posted:The stinger to this is that Re:Rise did a good job not having a fight per episode. Significant episodes included maybe still shots of the Gunpla, but all the meat and potatoes was interactions between Hiroto, Kazami, Par, May, Freddie, and the other Eldorans/Hinata/Masaki's Sister. IBO didn't have a fight every episode and it aired the same time as G reco (This is pretty much the only reason why Reco and IBO stans keeps slapfighting every mention of it)
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Feb 18, 2021 22:02
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r-reco should have spent more time on the story than on fights, sure. that's probably true for most gundam shows. however, the many grunt and one-off mechs in g-reco were excellent so it wasn't all bad.
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Feb 18, 2021 22:08
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turn-a gundam would have been better if century color had been the first op and not the second
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Feb 18, 2021 23:59
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Tae posted:IBO didn't have a fight every episode and it aired the same time as G reco It did? I thought IBO aired a few years after reco? ...ok, guess it was only a few months after Reco. The more you know.
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Feb 19, 2021 00:18
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I have definitely got my EDs and OPs mixed up for Seed and their order. Anna ni Isshou Datta no Ni would have been a better op than ending theme.
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Feb 19, 2021 00:22
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:r-reco should have spent more time on the story than on fights, sure. that's probably true for most gundam shows. however, the many grunt and one-off mechs in g-reco were excellent so it wasn't all bad. gently caress yeah Grimoires.
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Feb 19, 2021 03:41
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Warmachine posted:It did? I thought IBO aired a few years after reco? It was also in production before AGE came out, all the way back in 2011. (Although it was still pretty vague at that point. Basically, they had Tatsuyuki Nagai as director and some high concept stuff. Even Mari Okada didn't get involved until later on.) And I figure if I'm going to argue for flaws in G-Reco, I should try to argue the virtues of IBO as well. More specifically, I figure the Brewers arc has enough good to be worth talking about. I'm not going to deny its flaws, of course. The whole "What a coincidence! I have a brother I've never talked about before. Sure would suck if he turned up trying to kill me!" was some pretty blatant plot contrivance, and the Brewers themselves had very monster-of-the-week designs. (If I wanted to defend IBO on that one, I'd point out that pirates and warlords in history often tried to look monstrous in order to intimidate their targets... but that doesn't make the Brewers look any less like villains in a super robot show from the 70s.) But there's also a lot of good in the arc. The interactions between Tekkadan and the kids, and the scenes of the kids on their own, are really good. We see what kind of life could be awful enough that Orga considered things at the start of the series acceptable in comparison, in a mirror to the "good" future the Turbines showed, building on the show's focus on 'family' as something you're stuck with, for good and ill. Shino's raid on the ship and Masahiro staring over the battlefield after Mikazuki's gone to town on the Rodis are especially strong moments. Shino shows mercy because he's just up against a bunch of traumatized kids... and then the kids and people under his command died because he didn't realize he was in the same position as Crank. Meanwhile, Mikazuki continued to be Mikazuki, treating every enemy the same (and further traumatizing Masahiro, since Akihiro's new family just murdered the closest thing Masahiro had in all the years since he was enslaved.) Orga's recruitment speech and the lead-in to the funeral also worked quite well, both in showing how little the protagonists had (emphasizing that, although it wasn't as bad for them as it was for the Brewers, life still sucked a lot) and showing the bonds that kept them going anyway. Orga's actually got a little Zeon Zum Deikun to him here, taking some of the same things that labeled people 'human debris' and turning it into a mark of pride. ("Born in space, and not afraid to die there either. The chosen few, and proud of it.") There's good character moments, the fights are exciting (the Guision's hammer strikes and Mika's killing blow are Good Fight Scene stuff, even divorced of narrative context), and the Brewers kids subplots pay off with Akihiro's arc through season 2. I'm not going to say it's anywhere near IBO at its best, and if you had to cut a season 1 arc for some reason, it's the obvious choice, but it's still good Gundam. (I'll even go as far as to say I'd pick it over 08th MS team, controversial as that might be.)
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Feb 19, 2021 03:56
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I mean 08th MS Team kind of gets oversold a lot by Gundam fans so I'm okay with that assessment.
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Feb 19, 2021 04:00
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Yeah 08th was the golden boy in ADTRW for a long time and ZZ and Wing were whipping boys for a while. Both have had a pretty significant rehabilitation. ZZ especially since I feel like a lot of the hate was based on second hand and historical impressions rather than first hand. The first stretch of ZZ is rough but it's as much gundam as any of the OVAs that come after it.
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Feb 19, 2021 05:48
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Its bad that they went back to the regular gundam face for the zz gundam
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Feb 19, 2021 06:10
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The brewers arc I generally felt was more a failure in direction than in story content. Akihiro's brother was a little silly but I dont care about that a ton tbh, I just found those to be some of the weakest episodes for not really selling me on the emotional beats they hit. The last episode of the brewers arc was on loving fire though, the difference between that and the other episodes was incredibly night and day. Jumping from what I felt were some of the least engaging episodes right to the funeral, which is honestly my favorite emotional beat in the show, was some serious whiplash Come to think of it I never actually watched the last couple episodes, I walked away right as mcgillis' backstory was revealed and I was pretty excited to finish it, but I just never picked it back up for the ending. I should go give that a watch
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Feb 19, 2021 06:21
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ZZ, like most Gundam series, is way too drat long and it suffers from having a generally weaker cast overall. It has standouts for sure but it absolutely feels bloated and considering most Gundam series are already bloated that is saying something. I do think ZZ would have done better movie-wise than Zeta did because there is a looooot of cruft between the moments people remember and having a 2-3 movie set would allow it to focus on just that. Wing I'm not sure has gotten so much a reevaluation as people just care less about Wing's oddities. Like the series is absolutely batshit insane and borderline incoherent and by most objective measures isn't like... good, but it's bad in a way that is enjoyable and fun to watch and when you're not caring about it being plausible it's easier to enjoy it. I will however go to bat and say that the Brewers arc is absolutely one of the worst in Gundam (that isn't AGE-level terrible and thus not worth considering.). It has good moments but I would absolutely watch Moon Moon over it any day of the week. I think it hurts IBO pretty badly because it doesn't really play to any of IBO's strengths except Mika's shocking ability to kill people. The characters feel paper thin, the plot contrivances are ridiculous, and in general it just doesn't belong in the show. The most damning thing I can say about it is that it feels more like an AGE arc than an IBO arc, right down to its pacing and incongruous designs. It doesn't help that it is bookended by stronger stuff and no matter how much I despise Naze Turbine the Brewers are probably worse at stopping the show dead. The Gusion Rebake and the characters who come out of it are cool but eh. IBO is a good show when it is focused and active and a terrible show when it's lazy and halfassing its way to plot points. (See: "Oh hey here is a character getting a focus epis- DEAD" which they do a whole loving lot) The Brewers arc unfortunately embodies all the worst parts of IBO's writing outside of a few strong moments.
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Feb 19, 2021 06:24
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If the brewers arc were in the last third of the show and not the first third of the show it would be a lot more unforgiveable. Given it's relatively early in the shows run overall, I ultimately gave it a lot of leeway in my eval of the show because its largely left in the dust shortly thereafter, and nothing after it is really anywhere close to as misfired.
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Feb 19, 2021 06:44
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Wing suffers from a huge chunk of the internet having a phase where it decided it was too grown up to like something campy with tons of CinemaSins esque "mistakes" even though it's more interesting and fun than 9 of every 10 Gundam shows. Also it was super popular with young girls at the time and since when have they liked anything good?????? That this happened while a surface level "realistic" show like 8th MS Team was the darling of the western gundam fanbase frankly says more about said fanbase than about the quality of both shows.
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Feb 19, 2021 09:53
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It's just people thinking it's more mature if it swears, or it's more serious if lots of people die, etc.
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Feb 19, 2021 10:05
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GimmickMan posted:Wing suffers from a huge chunk of the internet having a phase where it decided it was too grown up to like something campy with tons of CinemaSins esque "mistakes" even though it's more interesting and fun than 9 of every 10 Gundam shows. Also it was super popular with young girls at the time and since when have they liked anything good?????? However, UC Gundam has a shitload of cool robots, and ultimately the allure of plastic crap is too great for any human to resist. But I think this meant that series or sections that did not touch on things like Newtypes (08th, 0083) got bonus nerd points, while the mainline shows did not. These effects are fading a lot, recently.
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Feb 19, 2021 10:08
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Argas posted:It's just people thinking it's more mature if it swears, or it's more serious if lots of people die, etc. Ah, 90's anime dubs! 
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Feb 19, 2021 10:28
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I still like 8th MS Team but I'm also fairly certain I'd probably skip some of its later episodes and get right to the finale cause Shiro tearfully refusing to take out an enemy, to the astonishment of literally everyone involved in the fiasco, just doesn't sound like good viewing to me. I can endure the Romeo/Juliet stuff, but Shiro's pacifist turn is loud and obnoxious material.
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Feb 19, 2021 11:00
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Stairmaster posted:Its bad that they went back to the regular gundam face for the zz gundam Well, at the time there was no regular Gundam face because there were only two Gundam shows, and three Gundams that pre-existed the ZZ. Maybe 4, if you count the Hyaku Shiki; which the ZZ animation and novels appear to as much as Bandai don't anymore, given that the Hyaku Shiki is part of the Gundam Team in the ZZ animation and specifically noted as one of the 4 Gundams that comprise the Gundam Team in the ZZ novelizations. Any face the ZZ used would be regular by the standards of the time.
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Feb 19, 2021 12:21
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Nessus posted:It is somewhat difficult to accurately articulate, but I think there was a strong current in the mech-show fandom which was pretty orthogonal to a lot of recurring themes like understanding, the futility of war, and so on, which were very prominent in UC Gundam and not easily separated out. There is the additional common western fandom-discourse current of, "Is there a magic power in the thing we're discussing? Wouldn't it be great if the magic power was actually... bad? Or if there was someone who was SO cool, that despite NOT having the magic power, they could beat the guys with the magic power?" which, of course, strikes against the recurring conceptual permutations of Newtypes. I don't think some of the things you're discussing are exclusive to western fandom. "Someone without powers who beats guys with powers" shows up in Gundam proper as early as Zeta, where that's one of Yazan's big gimmicks, and in a modern Gundam manga, it's a plot point in Johnny Ridden. Going broader, it's a simple way to make an ace pilot distinct from the others. This is the hero, this is the mentor, this is the "normal" guy who manages to keep up anyway. In a broader sense, it combines some classic archetypes, getting you the blind kung fu master style from having someone fight and win in spite of a handicap, and the viewer surrogate by having someone Like You (in not being superhuman, at least) get to be cool. I agree that being less about "understanding" definitely was a factor in the early US preference for the OVAs, but they were also short and available, with great visuals. The original Gundam had a major entry barrier, while 08th was 13 episodes right there on Toonami. (Also, you know, they were right next to Wing in the Japanese poll, so it's not like Americans are the only fans.) As for Wing, well, if we're talking cycles, Wing's the series that goes around the most, to the point where it's hard to tell at a given moment if it's popular, ironically popular, unpopular, or just kind of part of the background. Unlike X or ZZ, it's never been the Gundam nobody's seen, so the first person to comment gets to write the narrative. Instead, it's a show a lot of people watched when they were young, getting it the bonuses of nostalgia and the curse of people going back to get bitter over how badly what they remembered matched with the reality.
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Feb 19, 2021 12:59
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tsob posted:Well, at the time there was no regular Gundam face because there were only two Gundam shows, and three Gundams that pre-existed the ZZ. Maybe 4, if you count the Hyaku Shiki; which the ZZ animation and novels appear to as much as Bandai don't anymore, given that the Hyaku Shiki is part of the Gundam Team in the ZZ animation and specifically noted as one of the 4 Gundams that comprise the Gundam Team in the ZZ novelizations. Any face the ZZ used would be regular by the standards of the time. You're forgetting the Psyco Gundams
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Feb 19, 2021 13:00
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