Okay…I have some explaining to do. Years ago, I told myself I was never going to watch Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in any capacity, mainly because I’m not into mecha series, as I often find them too hard to follow a lot of the time. I have a really hard time keeping up with hard sci-fi and technobabble, as it all just flies over my head and does not compute in my dumb autistic brain, and Gundam Wing really leans HARD into all of that, which is why I gravitated towards stuff like fantasy and slice-of-life in anything I watch, read, or play. Though funny enough, one of the first anime songs I discovered, by accident at that, was Two-Mix’s Just Communication, aka Gundam Wing’s first opening theme, by way of a random Neopets webpage I found in the early 2000s that had it as background music in the form of a midi file. Remember those? I still have that midi file on my flash drive! The only other thing I knew about Wing was the fact that one of the characters self-detonated their Gundam, and that’s because one of my college friends spoiled the events of that episode to explain something to me. But one day, I was bored. I wasn’t in the mood for the other shows I was watching, Anne Shirley got delayed by several weeks, I couldn’t watch the rest of one of my Full Moon discs because episode 19 had a glitch that made it unwatchable, and I found out GW was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I decided to break the oath I swore to myself and I watched the first episode…and now here I am, having completed the entire series. Seriously, what is wrong with me? I’m a masochist, apparently. So as of now, I’ve seen seven Gundam series in their entirety: Both seasons of 00, Witch From Mercury, After War Gundam X, the War In The Pocket OVA, and now Gundam Wing. So what’s my verdict? Eh, it’s…nothing special. I know it’s the series that exposed Americans to Gundam and popularized the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, but honestly, I don’t feel the series is as good as people make it out to be.
Centuries in the future, in the year After Colony 195, Earth is surrounded by orbiting space colonies. The colonists are cruelly oppressed by the Earth Sphere Alliance, which uses huge humanoid fighting machines called “mobile suits” to control the populace. Behind this tyranny is the secret society called Oz, which has infiltrated the Alliance military and steered it towards its repressive course. Now, the space colonies are ready to strike back. Five young teenage pilots, equipped with advanced mobile suits called Gundams, are sent to Earth to wage guerilla war against Oz and its Alliance puppets. Relena Darlian, the teenage daughter of an important colonial diplomat, accidentally discovers the identity of a Gundam pilot who was shot down during his entry to Earth: a teenage boy named Heero Yuy. From there, Heero and the other four Gundam pilots find themselves having to blast their way through the various groups in power behind the UESA (and eventually their own force). The Gundams have near indestructible armor and enough firepower to overwhelm entire armies, but the pilots find themselves limited in making positive progress through brute force. In turn, Relena discovers her true family heritage and fights in her own way to bring about peace between the Earth and the colonies amidst various political power shifts caused by the Gundam rebellion.
Honestly, just the plot summary alone doesn’t really do that great a job explaining just how off-the-rails the series is when it comes to its plot. For a series with 49 episodes, with every single one being mandatory viewing and moving the plot forward, this is not a series you want to use as baby’s first Gundam series IMHO. Normally, serialized narratives are a good thing, but in the case of Wing, this format actually works against it in that in its attempts to constantly have stuff happen in every episode, it feels like the series is constantly trying to one-up itself at every turn, constantly introducing plot points and subplots at a breakneck pace, with little to no reprieve from any of it. Oftentimes, it’ll drop just as many subplots as soon as they’re introduced. For example, you know that whole thing where Heero accidentally kills a guy named Noventa, and the guy’s wife asks Relena to deliver a letter to Heero forgiving him for what he did? For all the importance that was given, we never see Relena give Heero that letter, nor do we ever see his reaction to it. Characters constantly go from place to place or change sides with little to no explanation, or behave when the plot demands it. As a result, GW lacks cohesion and feels completely disjointed, preferring spectacle and bombast over actually allowing itself to breathe or let the audience everything in.
Not to mention there are plenty of subplots that feel completely superfluous and unnecessary, to the point that you could cut them out from the show and it’d be to GW’s benefit. The biggest example of this is episode 13. You’d think an episode titled Catherine’s Tears would be entirely about fleshing out Trowa, his time at the circus, his relationship with his friend Catherine, and making him feel like more than just the strong silent lone wolf, right? Nope! 90% of the episode is taken up by this pair of awful, generic villains of the week who only exist to be cliche villains and make Zechs look like a complete idiot, whereas everything involving Trowa and Catherine is only in the last five minutes! False advertising, much? I did read that a lot of the show’s narrative choices were due to director Masashi Ikeda being very loosey-goosey in his approach. In my opinion, that loosey-goosiness is GW’s biggest problem. Its constant desire for spectacle and lack of narrative consistency drags it down to an insurmountable degree, resulting in it becoming a convoluted, overblown mess that feels really bloated.
This unfortunately extends to the characters as well. For a series with 49 episodes, it has a huge cast of characters, but doesn’t use its time to actually develop them, save for a select few, and even the development they do get feels slap-dash and cobbled together. Most of the characters feel either one note, or their characterization is wildly inconsistent, often changing with literally no explanation whatsoever, sometimes acting completely out of character. The biggest victim of this is Wufei, who honestly feels less like a character and more like a plot device. He starts off as an angry little misogynist or a prototype Sasuke, then he’s suddenly helping the others for seemingly no reason other than the plot demands it, then he’s back to working alone and being a dick, and so on. I always felt like the writers never seemed to know what to do with him, and considering the series was originally meant to just have four pilots in its early planning stages, maybe they should have stuck with that instead of shoehorning Wufei in here. The only characters I feel who got anything even resembling character arcs are Relena, Quatre, and Noin, who are quite honestly the most interesting characters in the series. But by this show’s standards, that’s still not saying much, and even they have their issues caused by the director’s loosey-goosey approach. The characters have so much potential to grow into a memorable cast, but because GW is more interested in spectacle and bombast rather than proper characterization and storytelling, they’re not given the chance to evolve beyond their base archetype, and they’re not fleshed out and developed enough as a result, which makes it really hard to care about them and their struggles in any meaningful way.
This is made even more egregious by way of the existence of Episode Zero, a manga that actually explores the pilot’s backstories and explains crucial parts of the plot, which were meant to be episodes in the series, but were scrapped due to production issues and members of staff either getting fired or quitting. As a result, we’re treated to a whole two fucking recap episodes back-to-back!! Seriously, of all the episode ideas to scrap, why would you do this to episodes that would actually help to make the series better and convince the audience to give a damn about the characters?! I will admit, I do enjoy Duo as a character quite a lot, even if he also suffered from a complete lack of anything resembling a character arc because of the way the series is structured. He and Quatre are my precious little murder muffins. Speaking of Quatre, what’s the deal with his whole Space Heart thing? It’s implied he has some kind of psychic/Newtype power, but it’s only brought up twice, never explained at all, and never brought up again. Why even throw that in there if you’re not even going to commit to it?!
I’m also going to piggyback off another review that I found on AniList, where that reviewer pointed out that Wing doesn’t allow its characters to just breathe, take a break, or be anything other than soldiers in a war, merely cogs in a machine to serve the plot rather than steer it. You know what? They’re absolutely right. Wing could have easily benefited from having episodes that didn’t focus on the plot and actually showed the characters doing other things than just being soldiers, politicians, and fighting, and I mean for an entire episode, not just for a one minute scene and that’s it. Seriously, how is it that Gundam X and War In The Pocket, two series that are much shorter than Wing and have far fewer episodes, understand this better than Wing does?! Well, at least there’s plenty of fan fiction that does just that. I know a lot of people like to complain about filler/anime original episodes and such, but having seen a lot of them over the years, I feel that the best ones can do a lot to both further a character’s development and show what they’re like outside of the main plot. It’s okay to have episodes where the characters aren’t worrying about the world being at stake for a while! I wish Gundam Wing understood this.
Wing’s problems are so entrenched in everything about it, they’re extremely hard to ignore. To springboard off this, I want to talk about the setting for a bit here. Wing’s setting is a huge, sprawling world with a lot of space colonies getting caught in the war, but for all that it touts itself on Earth oppressing the colonies, we hardly know anything about the actual colonies themselves, the people living in them, and their history other than the narrator spouting it at us whenever he feels like it. They hardly receive any attention outside of their involvement in the war, and because of this, it’s hard to care about them at all. An example of a series that actually did this right is the Gundam: War In The Pocket OVA. That series actually took the time to flesh out its setting, a singular space colony, show what life is like on there, flesh out the characters living on it, and actually tied it into the plot in a way that gets you to actually give a damn about it, so the setting isn’t just window dressing or a chessboard where the characters can move from point A to point B because it’s convenient. They say less is more for a reason! Wing’s problem is that even though it has 49 episodes to tell its story, it still feels too big because it wants so badly to be bigger, more epic, and more bombastic, but every single attempt it makes ignores practically every basic rule in storytelling to get there. A lot of the time it really loves to pull stuff out of its ass to make things more convenient for itself, like having most of its characters survive events that absolutely should have killed them and refusing to answer basic questions.
Now, I don’t want to be a complete negative Nancy, and Wing does have some good stuff in it. One of its biggest highlights is the soundtrack, which is absolutely bitchin’. It’s almost better than I feel the show deserves. It’s sweeping, epic, rich, varied, and bombastic, almost on the level of Star Wars, with plenty of horns, oboes, percussion, and orchestras that truly make it feel big. I still find it hard to believe this was done by Kou Otani, the same guy who did the music for Haibane Renmei, Shadow of the Colossus, Outlaw Star, Popolocrois 1998, Digimon Ghost Game, and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. You could claim that they got the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra to do the soundtrack for this and I’d believe you, that’s how good it is. Do I even need to mention Two-Mix’s openings? Seriously, the fact that I can recite the entire first half of Just Communication from memory, and have been able to do so since I was probably eight or nine, tells you how memorable it is. I will forever be grateful to that Neopets webpage for introducing me to Just Communication and by extension Two-Mix as a whole. Minami Takayama, you a queen. I have less to say about the ending theme, but it’s nice, even if it doesn’t fit the tone of the show at all.
Also, as someone who doesn’t watch a lot of mecha anime, I did like the mech designs here, especially Wing and Deathscythe, though I have to question why they made every Gundam except Heavyarms share similar color schemes in the first half. The animation, for its time, is fairly serviceable, though there are times when it goes really off model and some characters are drawn with hilariously bad facial expressions that make them look constipated. I also liked the stuff it had to say about the dangers of using robots as tools of war, especially considering war drones and unmanned combat vehicles are a hot topic IRL. I honestly wish Wing had zeroed in on that rather than the constant serial escalation it tried to do for its ridiculously melodramatic, off-the-rails plot. Sadly, none of those good qualities are enough to save Gundam Wing from being a campy, ridiculous, overblown, convoluted mess of Victorian proportions. Seriously, how in the world did Cartoon Network expect children to be able to understand Wing’s plot? I’m a 32-year-old woman and I don’t know what the hell is going on half the time! Wing could have been a better series had it restrained its scope, focused more on its characters rather than constant action and bombast, and bothered to flesh out its concepts and setting. Thanks for reminding me why I don’t bother with mecha anime, Gundam Wing.
That said, I’m not gonna deny its impact on Gundam as a franchise. Wing was the first Gundam series to be exported to North America and was, for a short while, the highest rated show of all time on Cartoon Network upon its premiere. Granted, its English dub is very rough, even if it did allow now famous Canadian VAs like Scott McNeil, Brad Swaile, Saffron Henderson, David Kaye, the late Kirby Morrow, and Brian Drummond to get their feet through the door. Wing helped pave the way for Gundam to gain exposure outside of Japan in general, so for that reason, Gundam fans owe the series that much. I still find myself liking Gundam X, War In The Pocket, and Witch From Mercury better, their own issues notwithstanding. But man, characters like Duo, Quatre, Trowa, and Noin were wasted on this series! They deserve better! While Mobile Suit Gundam Wing’s impact on the Gundam franchise as a whole is substantial, its overall quality as a series leaves a lot to be desired, and nostalgia can’t really do much to hide its massive flaws. I absolutely wouldn’t recommend this as baby’s first Gundam series, even if it was that for a whole generation of children who watched it on Toonami/Cartoon Network in its early days, and honestly, there are better Gundam series out there you can watch.
