For now, I’m happy enough with this series. My biggest fear was that it would go down the same path of Code Geass, though at this point I’ve yet to find any hints that that would be the case. There isn’t one party that’s just pure evil, hundreds of innocent citizens aren’t killed in an attempt to evoke sympathy, the fights are short and sweet and there are no hints that two childhood friends will end up against each other. The director of Full Metal Alchemist and Ooedo Rocket hasn’t disappointed so far.
Right now, this series is just building up. The Celestial Beings first need to build up some kind of success before the real meat of the series can come. I’m also dying to know some of the background behind the different characters. How did they end up where they ended up? How come the Celestial Beings waited 200 years before acting? What I like so far is how all the four Gundam Pilots have different opinions about the war. Not bad, for only three episodes.
Ireland may have gotten a bit more development before the declaration of peace, though. It’s a bit of a pity that the creators only used wars that have been going on for more than hundreds of years, and it would have been more interesting to see the leaders of the terrorists, to make their actions a bit more believable.
This episode also explains why the two students we’ve been seeing occasionally will be important: the guy is Setsuna’s next-door neighbour and the girl is this guy’s girlfriend. The guy furthermore lives with his sister, who is investigating the Celestial Beings. The guy especially will without a doubt be responsible for a large amount of character-development on Setsuna’s side. It’s a bit predictable, but if the creators carry this a bit further, things could become quite interesting.
Then there’s also the old Gundam Models which were left behind. The Celestial Beings must be very confident to just leave clues like that behind, which could give the enemy more advantages in battles.]]>
Category: Mobile Suit Gundam 00
Gundam 00 – 02
Two months ago, I ran this little poll, asking which show my readers would want me to blog. In the end, Gundam won the poll, hence the reason I’m going to blog this series. Personally, I acknowledge that it’s got potential, but I’m not willing to call it a success yet. I think we need to wait a few more episodes for that.
The thing I like about this series is how the characters acknowledge how the plans of the Celestial Beings are flawed. The reasoning of the Celestial Beings is that by diverting the anger, harboured by both parties in a war towards the Gundams, the problems will be solved. Now the next thing that the creators need to do is actually use this. My prediction is that the first dozen or so episodes will focus on the building-up, where our heroes try to stop various wars. It won’t be very exciting, but after that, things could become very interesting when the Celestial Beings will run into trouble.
In this episode, we already saw that people are investigating the source of the power for the Gundams, and I’ll be darned if they don’t end up finding it at one point. Once the different nations of the world are able to build units of the same strength, the advantage of the Celestial Beings will be gone. Do they have a plan to counter that?
There are a few issues with the setting, though, and I wonder whether we’ll get explanation for that. This episode explained nicely how the fossil fuels have ran out, so people switched to solar-power, but that’s not the only thing that’s about to run out. What about the parts of the Oil that’s used for plastics? What about iron? Why haven’t all the metals ran out? Gundam Wing found a nice answer for this: asteroids. Though in this timeline, it doesn’t look like the humans have ventured that far into space.]]>
Some quick first impressions: ef – a tale of memories, Mobile Suit Gundam 00 and Kimikiss Pure Rouge
ef – a tale of memories
The characters are a major flaw in this series: they all belong in random harems and every one of them has a personality that’s been done to death by now: Wimpy male, cold male, optimistic male, fragile female, clumsy and impulsive female, annoying sister female and of course the tsundere-female. Thankfully, the story and especially storytelling make up for this. The director clearly borrows influences from Shinbo (Soultaker, Pani Poni Dash, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei), there are actually multiple couples, and this series has got an excellent narrative structure, probably because Makoto Shinkai had some influence in this series. The different people may have fallen in love a bit too easily, though if you ignore this, the dialogue was pretty nice and works pretty nicely with the Shinbo-influences. While the characters are most definitely clichéd, the storyline isn’t. I’m just a bit disappointed that the excellent music you can hear on the main website didn’t come back in this episode.
Mobile Suit Gundam 00
This series probably got the most hate-reactions prior to its release, due to it being part of Sunrise’s plot of milking out franchises. While I admit that milking out the Mai Hime-franchise was a really bad idea, I don’t have the same opinion of Gundam yet, but that may be because the only Gundam-series I’ve seen so far is Gundam Wing. In any case, the first episode was pretty decent. I like the background music, and the story is full of potential. Still, this series made one classic mistake: placing teenagers in the centre of adult struggles. While it’s not as extreme as in other series, it can form a potential hazard for this series. It’s generally lacking in realism in more areas than this: the weightlessness was a nice idea, but if humans stay in weightless space for too long, their bones and bodies will suffer from the lack of pressure. I wish some explanation went to that area. Also, I expected the animation-department to have gotten a rather big budget, but yet all the important characters in their series can be recognized because their hairstyles stand apart when compared to the random generics. Ah well, what this series needs to focus on is not to fall down the same path of Code Geass, which was way too much aimed at fanboys and fangirls in my opinion.
Kimikiss Pure Rouge
I expected nothing of this series with such a title and premise. And fair enough, the very first scene starts with the umpth transfer-student of the season. Imagine my surprise when I actually ended up chuckling as the episode went on, even though it was for the wrong reasons. The plot-twists are so obvious that they become laughable: subtlety is so not this series’s strongest point, but at least it’s not the bore-fest I expected it to be. I wonder how long it will remain funny though, and I’ll probably end up dropping this when I need to lose a few series, simply because the amount of high-school series this season is huge enough already, and I’ve seen so many better series in this season. The character-designs also have a few issues here and there: they look well enough for a hentai-game adaptation, though the eyes of the characters are a bit too far apart. It makes the characters of this series look rather dumb (just take a look at the screenshot).]]>