Friday, December 7, 2018

FIF#69-Mobile Suit Gundam AGE

The years is AG (Advanced Generation) 115.  Fourteen years have passed since a mysterious force, dubbed the Unknown Enemy (UE) ravaged the space colonies, leaving hundreds dead.  Among the victims of that attack was the mother of a young prodigee named Flit Asuno.  Since then, Flit has dedicated his life to developing a weapon capable of battling the UE and protecting the colonies, a mobile suit he calls “Gundam”.  When the UE suddenly return to attack his home colony, Flit flies into action.  But his battle will only be the first of many and Flit will not be the only Asuno to see battle against the UE in a Gundam.  A war spanning nearly a century, with the name Asuno echoing throughout, begins.

Welcome back to GundamCember 2.  This was supposed to be the episode that kicked everything off but with the surprise preview of Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative, it was too big a surprise to pass up taking a look at that first.  So I felt bad and opted to do a first for FIF, two in the same day.  If you haven’t taken a look at my first thoughts on Gundam Narrative, feel free to take a look here: http://gundamanimeblog.blogspot.com/2018/12/fif68-mobile-suit-gundam-narrative.html  Meanwhile, let’s move onto the beginning of one of Gundam’s more ambitious projects, Mobile Suit Gundam AGE.

I say AGE is ambitious because the whole projects goal is to tell a story across three generations of pilots, all from the same family.  That’s an intriguing notion but also a risky one.  If you think about it, Gundam started off with a tale spanning three generations in the Universal Century with Mobile Suit Gundam, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ before wrapping up in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack.  That’s around 150 episodes and 1 film worth of story.  Can AGE really accomplish the same in a third of that time (49 episodes)?

Im talking about the series as a whole, how does it start?  It starts well enough.  I seriously doubt the mysterious UE’s are actually aliens.  Given the mixed reception bringing extraterrestrials into Gundam received in Gundam 00: The Movie, I think Sunrise might be better off sticking to the human vs human conflict that made Gundam such a game changer in the Giant Robot Genre.  Still, the rest of the episode plays with all the usual Gundam introductory tropes from an ambitious youth to a colony attack to the titular Gundam taking out an enemy swiftly in its first sortie.  We’ve seen that done almost to death at this point, from Mobile Suit Gundam to Gundam Seed (and repeated immediately again in Seed Destiny).  Does anything help AGE stand out?  Well I like that Flit was the one behind the creation of this universes Gundam, basing its design on a family legend.  The painting of a Gundam in his house reminded me of the Turn A, sans the mustache.  The kid definitely has Amuro Rey beat in the Gundam development department since Amuro didn’t really build his own until 14 years after his first battle in the Mobile Suit.  One thing that Im not as sold on is the character design and artwork.  Everyone looks like they came from a video game rather than your typical Gundamverse.  And for the life of me, I couldn’t think of any video game title other than Mega Man while muling this over.  Upon further research I discovered that Level 5 Studios (the creators of the Professor Layton series) had a hand in this one.  Does a design approach like this really work with Gundam though?  Maybe it gets better or might grow on me, who know.

For a series set to tell a hundred years story in a standard Gundam series amount of time (average length of a Gundam show is about 50 episodes), Mobile Suit Gundam Age definitely has its work cut out for it.  That said, I don’t know if it had time to follow the usual Gundam premiere blueprint to get things going.  I wonder how much time we’re going to spend with Flit before moving to whatever Asuno comes next (I assume his son)?  I haven’t heard a lot of positive fan reaction to AGE all around but considering what its trying to do, it might be worth a full watch, or at the very least I should check out the first arc to see if I get a full story in 13-16 episodes, give or take.  Seeing as how it might be my lifes goal to watch all of Gundam, ill probably end up watching it anyway.  It couldn’t be worse than Seed Destiny or Build Fighters Try…could it?


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