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It's pretty cool how Astray basically functions as a second SEED meta-series. Classic two-for-one.
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Jan 23, 2019 02:15
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Any mention of a US release on consoles or do I need to stock up on Singapore psn cards?
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Jan 23, 2019 03:49
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So, finally watching some of the original Gundam and Gundam SEED so I can have more confidence in my positions. And... yep. I was right. The original Gundam is much better. I tried to just watch a quick clip to confirm some memories of the Origin, and I was pretty much hooked for the episode. Meanwhile, I was watching SEED as the main focus, and I interrupted that repeatedly. But so I can say something with at least a tiny bit of substance, you can see why the 1979 show is better from the first shot after the credits. The original Mobile Suit Gundam starts by showing you the Zakus approaching Side 7 before introducing us to Amuro (who's in his boxers and ignoring an evacuation warning because he's busy fixing a circuit. Amuro's great.) We know from the start why we should care about this situation. (It's because giant robots are about to attack.), and we get a great little moment of a Zaku hitting its head on a manipulator claw, and the claw just... floating into space. It sets up Mobile Suits as concrete objects with weight and mass, making them feel real to the viewer. We believe they exist before we have to believe they're ultimate weapons of war. Meanwhile, Gundam SEED opens with... Kira watching TV and the grade school level irony of people talking about how the war will NEVER come here, not to the peaceful space colony where a Gundam show is about to start. Kira isn't Mika, Loran, Kamille, or Amuro, where Why This Person Stands Out is set from the first scenes. He's just supposed to be generically relatable. (Also a dumbass since he chases after someone into danger for no good reason and can't tell someone is a girl if she's wearing a hat, but I kind of doubt that we're supposed to think of him that way.) Further, where the first episode of Gundam has everyone be just regular people, with everyone just kinda... dying when things get bad, Zeon and Federation alike, SEED has the Le Crescent team be invincible action heroes, charging at machinegun fire in the open and not getting hit because they're main characters. (Except Rusty, presumably because of an incident involving a turkey baster.) Where Denim and Slender bantered, hosed up, and generally acted like people, SEED acts like a picture on the dash of some rando pilots and a flashback would be enough to have the whole thing feel human even when the enemy pilots are just being murderous assholes giving villain speeches. And of course, the first Gundam ends when it ends, showing off the Gundam and getting Amuro first blood (which incidentally gets his father spaced), while SEED spent so long faffing about that Kira's not even in the cockpit when the ED starts. I know different shows, different pacing, all that, but it really does feel like the time in the episode was more wasted than spent. By the end of the second episode, SEED hasn't even reached where the original was at the end of the first. (Also, Amuro loving up and getting better is much more compelling as a setup than Kira being great after having to take over from someone else loving up.) So, yes. I have rediscovered common knowledge, fulfilling the Pauline dictate to test all things. I'm sure you're very impressed. chiasaur11 fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 11:34
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Very impressed. You could have just written Seed/Kira sucks and we would have all agreed unconditionally but nope, you really went for it!  Kira really is a horribly one dimensional character though. Despite all his experiences he's almost exactly the same person at the end of the series as he was at the start. Athrun is by and large a much better character with a more interesting arc.
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Jan 23, 2019 17:43
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RillAkBea posted:Very impressed. You could have just written Seed/Kira sucks and we would have all agreed unconditionally but nope, you really went for it! Athrun being a mentor to Shinn could have been such a great idea for the character, but it sadly gets obliterated by the time Kira shows up and starts mucking this up.
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Jan 23, 2019 17:48
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RillAkBea posted:Very impressed. You could have just written Seed/Kira sucks and we would have all agreed unconditionally but nope, you really went for it! Yeah, it feels like making Kira distinct and memorable was less important than having him be... generically likable, I suppose? Some other things: Comparing the Gundamjack to Cyclops Team's attempt in War in the Pocket, Cyclops team had a much better plan (enemy uniforms, use the MS as a distraction, just stroll up and get in) that was foiled by much worse luck and the Feddies showing basic competence. It's also notable that there, the Zeon team only chains kills when Garcia is shooting guys in the back out of nowhere. Once he's been spotted, he starts getting shot himself, and only manages to make any distance past that due to being an action movie tough guy who keeps fighting despite massive bullet wounds. (War in the Pocket: Still great.) The original Gundam show the power of the Zakus by having them trash armored cars, AA trucks, and the like, vehicles the viewer is familiar with. It puts the Zaku II in an understandable context. Meanwhile, the GINN goes against weird looking space vehicles, making it much more difficult for the viewer to contextualize them. The GINN might be powerful... or the Alliance gear might just be really crap. (It seems pretty crap.) The original, as I mentioned, also had things come across as a chain of... the mistakes of one's youth. Char stumbled across the White Base, Denim couldn't keep Gene in line, which escalated the whole thing into an open confrontation, the evac was a shambles, Amuro blew a hole in the colony... Nobody knew what they were doing, and the ones who made slightly fewer mistakes won the day. Meanwhile, despite going on a blind hunch, Rau has a complicated multi-part plan that lets his one ship completely demolish a larger Alliance military presence. And while the Feddie forces got demolished in the original, they were operating with clear plans and trying to keep things together, unlike the Alliance, who managed to lose despite theoretically operating at every advantage. And as a last thing for the moment, Amuro left the safety of the shelter for a good reason (he doubted how well it could work, and he wanted to find his dad to secure transportation off the Side in the White Base.) while Kira left his friends for an idiot reason. (Someone he didn't know was running off towards probable death even when asked to stop.) I know, I know. Still stating the obvious, but it's really interesting seeing the original Gundam and Seed side by side like this, because it highlights how much better the basic craft was in the original.
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Jan 24, 2019 01:25
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Gundam Seed partially feels like you're expected to know certain Gundam tropes going into the series, which results in some poorer presentation because of it.
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Jan 24, 2019 01:47
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Funny story with SeeD; Madman Entertainment anime sampler DVD's in Australia often had the first episode of a few shows. For Gundam SeeD they used the second episode instead, and it's almost certainly because it's not until then that Kira gets in the Strike.
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Jan 24, 2019 01:55
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Arcsquad12 posted:Gundam Seed partially feels like you're expected to know certain Gundam tropes going into the series, which results in some poorer presentation because of it. Gundam has been about itself for a while now.
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Jan 24, 2019 01:57
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Raxivace posted:Seed is a bad example of it but I feel like most Gundam series expect you to know about Gundam already at this point. True, but I feel that SEED does a bad job of contextualizing a lot of stuff because it expects you to know it already. There are other Gundam series that operate well enough on their own while still having numerous callbacks that are bonuses for longtime viewers, but still make sense for a fresh audience. You can be referential without confusing your new viewers.
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Jan 24, 2019 02:16
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SEED as a whole has the problem of taking for granted the audience's assumptions. It doesn't put in the work on things like making Flay sympathetic, but then tries to do something like her death scene as a big tragedy anyway. It just assumes you'll care, and so does anything but make you care.
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Jan 24, 2019 03:10
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I think when you're discussing Gundam, especially for a Japanese audience, assuming you know at least some of the things is reasonable. It's like how Spider-Man can tell a story about Spider-Man without needing to cover most of the backstory. It's known. It might not be accessible to a completely blind viewer but cultural osmosis means that you've probably picked up enough to have an idea, which is probably partially why SEED was successful with new viewers.
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Jan 24, 2019 03:18
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Arcsquad12 posted:True, but I feel that SEED does a bad job of contextualizing a lot of stuff because it expects you to know it already. There are other Gundam series that operate well enough on their own while still having numerous callbacks that are bonuses for longtime viewers, but still make sense for a fresh audience. You can be referential without confusing your new viewers. I think a problem is SEED is referential without building on its parts. Build Fighters, for example, depends on past Gundam shows for a lot of its context, but with the buy in done, it's a different thing than past Gundams, a fun little ride of its own. SEED, meanwhile, requires the buy-in, but the payout is basically "0079, but worse." Then again, I suppose when the atmosphere does the buy-in for you, there'd be some appeal to having a Gundam with all the edges (read: Interesting bits) filed off. Like, Kira's pacifism-unless-it's-the-real-baddy is easier to sympathize with than Amuro's not worrying about how nice someone is once he's on the battlefield, or the heroes making their own faction instead of having to deal with the fact every option kind of sucks.
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Jan 24, 2019 04:28
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I know hating on SEED is the cool thing here but at least try to hate on something real. SEED doesn't expect you to have watched a previous series more than any other AU Gundam. I can say that for sure because it was my first and I had no issues whatsoever following what was happening. Is it self-referential? Yeah. Gundam is like that. You won't go a series without a bunch of clichés reappearing and half the fun is seeing how they're used rather than whether they will be used or not. But it doesn't really make it impenetrable, at all. Otherwise we could say the same about so many series.
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Jan 24, 2019 12:18
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SEED doesn't require any buy in. Sure you miss some self referential stuff, but it's not like it's a detriment to the show. It's still gonna be soap opera as gently caress and if that ain't your bag, that's fine. But I loved it and it was my second gundam series. SEED Destiny though... yeah that needs some buy in to get "Zeta gundam but we hosed it up".
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Jan 24, 2019 12:37
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Okay, I can move onto hating on AGE for a minute, then. Watched the first episode of that to round out the first Gundam premier riffs, and I figure it's worth saying something about it. First off, it's much more focused than SEED or the original. Where first Gundam and SEED hopped around a bit to give you a little on both sides of the war's policies, the secret projects that kicked off this round of conflict, and the ordinary lives of the heroes, AGE zooms in on Flit, giving him flashbacks, dream sequences, flashbacks for other characters about him, whole deal. And, credit where due, it at least manages to give him some personality from the whole bit, even if I'm not sure they wanted "Flit is a paranoid whackjob who happens to be right" to be the main theme this early. The cost is that it makes the world feel much smaller. Where Amuro was just one soldier in a larger war and even Kira Yamata was still just some kid for the first couple episodes, Flit is the all important savior of the world from the end of episode 1. Nobody else has ever come up with his brilliant "stab the fucker" strategy, and it may be just the kind of outside-the-box thinking the Federation needs. I don't know what they were thinking when saying the war had been on for fourteen years without a single MS takedown, but it does less to make Flit look good than it does to make everyone else look spectacularly incompetent. (Similarly, having the enemy decide to just crash the colony only after taking losses raises the question why they risked going in for a head-on fight to begin with.) And talking about the meta-series as mythos, AGE leans in hard for its opening episode, talking about how important Gundams are like it's planning to murder Gaelio Bauduin . Instead of being a war changing prototype, here the Gundam is just the latest suit trying to emulate a legendary original. Which would be a more interesting theme to play with if they didn't declare it a real Gundam and a worthy heir in episode 1. Likewise, I appreciate trying to change up the fell-into-the-cockpit standard, but it makes the "What weapons do I have?" scene feel ridiculous when Flit was bragging about knowing the suit inside and out just a minute ago. I think I liked it a tiny bit better than SEED's opener, but that's damning with the faintest praise. It had a character with possibly interesting motives, it got to the action, and the art was a humorously awful fit for the subject matter, rather than just the boring kind of bad. Not planning to follow up with either, but they do really highlight how good the first Gundam was.
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Jan 24, 2019 13:17
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I've been watching seed because I never did and I have an MG Buster gunpla sitting on my desk at home (for two years now). But holy poo poo I don't know if I can continue. Flay is the biggest poo poo head character I have ever seen in a gundam, I'm on episode 9 and she makes me want to throw myself out an airlock-- does this improve in any way (not limited to her death)?
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Jan 24, 2019 16:36
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chiasaur11 posted:The cost is that it makes the world feel much smaller. Where Amuro was just one soldier in a larger war and even Kira Yamata was still just some kid for the first couple episodes, Flit is the all important savior of the world from the end of episode 1. Nobody else has ever come up with his brilliant "stab the fucker" strategy, and it may be just the kind of outside-the-box thinking the Federation needs. I don't know what they were thinking when saying the war had been on for fourteen years without a single MS takedown, but it does less to make Flit look good than it does to make everyone else look spectacularly incompetent. So the kid builds an entire superweapon in his garage from blueprints possibly hundreds of years old and it's somehow not a piece of garbage that's hundreds of years out of date? Like the Mark I tank was a legendary weapon but if the aliens land I'm not gonna trust one to save the earth much less one built by a child. But ok whatever, turns out it is great somehow and kid goes to fight the enemy but oh no, he doesn't have any weapons good enough, lets activate the machine he also somehow built that develops new weapons from scratch. Again, a kid in his garage. Why are they even letting him fight, they should be handing him a blank check and putting him at the forefront of arms development. If that's what he can do in a garage, imagine what he could make with an entire industry at his command. And that's where my brain walked out. I watched a few more episodes but I remember nothing of them.Razzled posted:I've been watching seed because I never did and I have an MG Buster gunpla sitting on my desk at home (for two years now). But holy poo poo I don't know if I can continue. The first 30ish episodes are a terrible slog. There is a really awesome stretch of episodes after that though with some prime Buster time but after that it just meanders along again until it ends.
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Jan 24, 2019 16:46
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SEED is alright. Mediocre in a really boring way and is just 0079 but worse until it starts to do some of its own stuff in the final third and becomes middling on its own efforts. Destiny is actually awful though and I think a lot of SEED hate is Destiny making people hate it retroactively. The HD Remaster of SEED is people's memories of it being trash made real, everyone is even uglier and Kira is even more perfect.
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Jan 24, 2019 17:41
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Yeah SEED was the first Gundam I watched and I absolutely adored it at the time, but moving on to Destiny immediately afterward I could tell things had gone terribly wrong.
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Jan 24, 2019 17:42
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Flay is terrible though. Just the absolute worst. Even her redemptive death is trite and unearned. "Kira I'm sorry I literally used you but it turns out the big bad is actually like evil and somehow this knowledge has turned me into a good person. Whoops I'm dead." They wanted their Lalah Sune moment but didn't actually want to kill off their version of Lalah.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:06
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Older tech= better just means Gundam is set during the dark age of technology.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:16
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Original broadcast SEED was a better product than the HD remaster. I mean it's still a very blah piece of Gundam, but I think that's mostly due to the retread nature of it which y'all have thoroughly discussed. At least the original actually provided some grey area for Kira's actions where the HD remaster worked hard to make him as Jesusy and pure as they made him into during Destiny with the tweaks they did make. No matter the version his og VA crying is one of the worst noises ever put into a show.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:30
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I haven't watched the Remaster but I remember younger me thinking Seed was fine, not great, but fine. The main complaint younger me had was how the later 1/4th of the series had every single fight follow the formula of "Launch the Strike-->Meteor-->Kill all the mooks with 30 seconds of reused footage-->Fight the Ace of the episode."
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Jan 24, 2019 20:46
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The Notorious ZSB posted:No matter the version his og VA crying is one of the worst noises ever put into a show. Can't find the original but this one isn't any better and it's a sin to point this out and not show it for whoever in this thread has not watched SEED (or does not remember the sound of a whale slowly dying) so here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo5075Ok-Tw Kurieg posted:I haven't watched the Remaster but I remember younger me thinking Seed was fine, not great, but fine. The main complaint younger me had was how the later 1/4th of the series had every single fight follow the formula of "Launch the Strike-->Meteor-->Kill all the mooks with 30 seconds of reused footage-->Fight the Ace of the episode." I'll defend SEED in a lot of things but animation quality and fight choreography is not one of them. Fights were boring and constantly reused the same shots, it's insane. I can only imagine the budget was really limited.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:51
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Kurieg posted:Flay is terrible though. I never laughed harder than when she's bizarrely cry laughing after she bones Kira. That whole sequence is uninentionally hilarious to me.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:54
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Blaze Dragon posted:Can't find the original but this one isn't any better and it's a sin to point this out and not show it for whoever in this thread has not watched SEED (or does not remember the sound of a whale slowly dying) so here it is! It was more that a bunch of labour-saving technology debuted around the time of SEED's production, and Fukuda decided to use as much of it as possible to make his animators' arms slightly less likely to fall off. Which was decent of him, but not exactly conducive to an attractive show.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:06
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Blaze Dragon posted:Can't find the original but this one isn't any better and it's a sin to point this out and not show it for whoever in this thread has not watched SEED (or does not remember the sound of a whale slowly dying) so here it is! Tulalip Tulips posted:I never laughed harder than when she's bizarrely cry laughing after she bones Kira. That whole sequence is uninentionally hilarious to me.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:08
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Darth Walrus posted:It was more that a bunch of labour-saving technology debuted around the time of SEED's production, and Fukuda decided to use as much of it as possible to make his animators' arms slightly less likely to fall off. Which was decent of him, but not exactly conducive to an attractive show. Early digital cell painting was a dark time for animation. A lot of shows from the early 2000s have not aged gracefully.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:14
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Kurieg posted:I haven't watched the Remaster but I remember younger me thinking Seed was fine, not great, but fine. The main complaint younger me had was how the later 1/4th of the series had every single fight follow the formula of "Launch the Strike-->Meteor-->Kill all the mooks with 30 seconds of reused footage-->Fight the Ace of the episode." I re-watched Wing recently and got legit bored how every fight used the same stock footage and almost always involved one side eating 100% casualties while inflicting none, unless one of the Gundam Bois was driving a Leo or something and suddenly it was explosion-proof. Like I get it, I don't like it but I get it, when it's a main character shredding mooks. When there weren't any named Gundam drivers on either side it just stuck out and seemed really weird. It made that last battle of high-end Mobile Dolls against Space Leos (!) really lame, since I couldn't accept that Treize's forces were going to do anything but explode en masse while he zipped around blowing up hundreds of Virgos himself. When his assistant came on the codec and told him how many people had died for him that day, I just rolled my eyes that the answer wasn't "all of them, you dipshit, because these Leos are trash". The Gundam-on-Gundam fights were cool as poo poo at least, so there's that, it's a fun show even when the fights were tiring.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:40
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Kurieg posted:Flay is terrible though. Not to defend Seed too much but Flay doesn't really talk about Rau or whatever, she apologizes to him and explains that she did that out of a misguided sense of fear and anger. I also did like how you can tell that It's not like a newtype connection thing as Kira never really responds to what Kira is saying.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:41
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Blaze Dragon posted:I'll defend SEED in a lot of things but animation quality and fight choreography is not one of them. Fights were boring and constantly reused the same shots, it's insane. I can only imagine the budget was really limited. The only thing I'll defend Seed for are the mecha designs, and the anti-ship swords which are something I'd love to see redone in a better series (i.e. not Build Divers). ANAmal.net posted:...Leos are trash Burn the heretic! ...you're absolutely right in your Wing analysis, though. Even though I still consider myself a fan of that series, it had a LOT of glaring flaws. Paper Kaiju fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 22:45
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Paper Kaiju posted:The only thing I'll defend Seed for are the mecha designs, and the anti-ship swords which are something I'd love to see redone in a better series (i.e. not Build Divers). Didn't the Barbatos eventually get a giant anti
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Jan 24, 2019 22:48
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You don't watch Wing for the battles, you watch Wing for the batshit insane dub and Heero falling down a cliff for thirty seconds. [narrator voice] HOWEVER... some of the fights can be entertaining.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:53
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Kurieg posted:Didn't the Barbatos eventually get a giant anti I haven't rewatched it, but I recall his weapon for taking down ships and mobile weapons was a gigantic mace. I think the 'swords' he occasionally had were just sword-shaped bludgeoning weapons. The anti-ship swords from Seed are the ones that had a physical blade with a beam edge; the only time in IBO you ever see a beam weapon (I think) is on the Hashmal.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:56
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Paper Kaiju posted:I haven't rewatched it, but I recall his weapon for taking down ships and mobile weapons was a gigantic mace. I think the 'swords' he occasionally had were just sword-shaped bludgeoning weapons. The anti-ship swords from Seed are the ones that had a physical blade with a beam edge; the only time in IBO you ever see a beam weapon (I think) is on the Hashmal. Wasn't the conceit of IBO that since it's so easy to just coat ships and mechs in anti-beam coating that beam weapons were phased out during the technology gulf. The only thing that beam weapons are still good at are killing humans. Which Hashmal demonstrated amply. But I also loved the Seed "Physical Sword With beam edge" weapons.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:00
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Wing battles are mostly boring, one-sided whatevers, but the still shots of the Gundams are some of the best in the business.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:02
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RillAkBea posted:This was pretty much what turned me off of AGE, the first episode was a consistent attack on suspension of disbelief and it won. Not to defend AGE too much, because it is really stupid, but I got the impression that the blueprints were his mom's design, and he'd been optimizing it as much as he could. Not "This is the original Gundam!" but "I'm going to make this machine as badass as the original Gundam." And they said the military was giving him special dispensation at the start of the show due to being a MS design prodigy. Him going out to fight was less because they wanted him to and more because nobody was able to stop him. (He also tried to get a professional pilot to use the Gundam instead, but that was shot down for vague, flimsy reasons.)
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Jan 24, 2019 23:02
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Paper Kaiju posted:I think the 'swords' he occasionally had were just sword-shaped bludgeoning weapons. No, those were actually swords, but Mika is a colossal idiot and doesn't know how to do anything with them other than to use them as bludgeoning weapons.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:19
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Lemon-Lime posted:No, those were actually swords, but Mika is a colossal idiot and doesn't know how to do anything with them other than to use them as bludgeoning weapons. what's the point of finesse when you can turn your opponents into paste
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Jan 24, 2019 23:56
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