While this has been a difficult month for me (and for the world at large thanks to the Orange Hulk), there have been a few bright spots. One of those has been the premier of the bizarrely named Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX.
I've been looking forward to this series mainly to see if it'll live up to the same level as the revolutionary series that was G-Witch. While I'm still getting used to the character and mobile suit designs, I dig the vibe the series is going for. The only real issue I've had with the series so far is how they used the second episode to show the flashback of how this alternate version of the Universal Century timeline kicked off with Char stealing the Gundam before poor Amuro could blunder his way into the cockpit. I'm sure the really hardcore Gundam fans ate this up, but it probably left newcomers and a lot of non-hardcore fans scratching their heads. At the time I had seen the first ten or twelve episodes of the original Gundam anime years before, so I had least had a frame of reference for a little of what was going on.
Now I'm not saying they shouldn't have done the flashback. In fact they really didn't have a choice but to show it because this alternate timeline is the foundation upon which this series is built upon. I'm just saying they should've used a few more episodes to finish establishing the new characters and the setting before plunging everyone into the episode that was Hideaki Anno's "Red Gundam" fanfic. Despite this initial misstep though, I'm still eager to see where GQuuuuuuX goes from here. I just wish the series hadn't given all us non-hardcore fans homework to study before the later episodes come out.
So on that note, I wound up spending a good chunk of this past week streaming the original Gundam anime on Crunchyroll in order to be ready for any more of the Universal Century crap that GQuuuuuuX is likely going to keep throwing at us. I've mentioned in the past that the series didn't do much for me the first time I tried watching it, and now that I've seen the whole thing...my opinion hasn't really changed. Now the final twelve or fifteen episodes of the series were okay, but as a whole I cannot comprehend how so many people think of this series as such a freaking classic!
The whole Newtype concept was certainly interesting, but they didn't introduce it until the eleventh hour of the show. They also failed to explain exactly what Newtypes were within the show itself, nor did they do any buildup to it. It was this concept that was just suddenly there to add to the sci-fi elements of the series. The series also took too long to do anything to make me are at all about the outcome of the One-Year War. For most of the series it was simply, "The Zeon dudes are the bad guys and need to be blown up."
Also, the only character in the whole series who did anything for me at all was Char, and that was because he had an interesting backstory. And that backstory was handled terribly within the show. Plus some of Char's motivations towards the end of the series were a little hard for me to comprehend. The overall problem I had with the original Gundam though was that it was just one episodic giant robot fight after another. Had I first watched the original Gundam when I was twelve, that probably would've really appealed to me, but seeing the series as a twenty-something or thirty-something adult, I need just a little more substance.
Sorry for that little rant just. Anyway, another new anime I've been enjoying this month is the adaptation of the manga, Kowloon Generic Romance. For those who haven't even heard of that manga, it's a very surrealistic mystery that I highly recommend. The art style itself makes it seem like it might've been a series released in the nineties. The only serious flaw the manga has is the fact that each volume of it has been released at a glacially slow pace. The anime adaptation has been pretty good, though the pace seems to have been greatly accelerated in order to fit as much of the original story as possible into a thirteen-episode season.
I think that about does it for this month's post. I didn't mean to go on for so long, but clearly I had a lot to talk about. Anyway, I'll be back in another month to report on the current ups and downs of my life. Until then, I'll probably poke my head into the site every few days to see if there's anything going on.
