The Age of Gundam

With the 00 movie already on DVD and probably in bargain bins in Japan (...do they have those?), Bandai has gotten ready the next series that will be hitting airwaves in Japan this October: Gundam AGE.



What's strange with their new series however, is that Bandai has decided rather than allow Sunrise to make yet another series that sets the anime world on fire for a season only to fail spectacularly in the second season, that they'll be allowing game developer Level-5 to handle the reins for both the anime series and the video game (which I'm presuming is set in the same universe, if not an adaptation of the plotline itself). So far, it's produced...shall we say, interesting results.

With only a few exceptions, Gundam has always been about man truly reaching the final frontier, colonizing space, and then the conflict that comes from the interaction between those on Earth and the new "spacenoids". AGE however, has taken a different direction, sounding almost "Super Robot" in it's concept:

The story will span a century and three generations of Gundam pilots. In the year A.G. (Advanced Generation) 101 — several hundred years after humans migrated to space colonies — an Unknown Enemy (UE) suddenly attacks the space colony Angel and destroys it. The calamity and the huge loss of life became known afterward as "The Day the Angel Fell From the Skies."

Seven years later, the war with the UE comes to the once peaceful colony where seven-year-old Furitto Asuno lives. When Furitto loses his mother to the war, he is entrusted with the "AGE Device," a memory unit which has been handed down from generation to generation in his family. On the device are the designs for "Gundam," an ancient mobile suit known as a savior. Furitto resolves to build the Gundam.

In the year A.G. 115, 14-year-old Furitto is at the Earth Federation base Arinsuton on the space colony Nora. For seven years, Furitto has continued developing with the base's engineers, and at last the "Gundam" is complete. The Gundam is equipped with the AGE System, which allows the unit automatically evolve. However, the UE has arrived at Nora, and Furitto must fight in the very Gundam he built himself.

Aliens. The concept bugged me last night, but thinking on how often Gundam tends to rely on the same tropes, I welcome the potential this new element brings. And the basic plot? Gundam has always been about how rapidly war changes people (particularly the youth), and thus generally takes place across very short periods of time. The One Year War. The Gryps Conflict, which lasted all of a year. The Second Neo-Zeon War, yet again only a year long. To create a series that specifically flies in the face of that by being set over a hundred year period? [Writer] Akihiro Hino definitely has some balls on him, I'll say that.

The design of the eponymous mecha is interesting as well. The last few Gundam had grown more and more intricate/complex--it eventually got to the point where a pilot in 00 had a giant Gundam head on the back of his suit and no one really said anything. AGE is more simple; it's a stripped down design with two variants that help it excel in either strength of speed, and that's it. It's possible, and likely, that the series will have more Gundams released as Bandai decides it wants to sell more toys, but for now...



And that's all of them, right now.

Of course, it remains to be seen how good this series will be. The internet hates it, but I'm convinced half the internet is made up of complete tools that hate everything. (The other half is made of porn.)

Promotional video:



The biggest complaint about this series is that the characters look too young. Trouble is, Tomino himself said Gundam essentially is about how kids are the future and adults are evil. (I'm paraphrasing. Sort of. I distinctly recall him saying "adults are evil", so all I think I'm not accurate with is the "kids are the future" bit.) So it's fan revisionist history at work. Amuro was a kid. Kamille was slightly older at 17, but Uso was back to form and even *younger*. His "Gundam opus", Turn A? The main character was seventeen. So basically no Gundam character from a series he wrote was ever older than eightteen. If this one is 12-15, it will be nothing new.

Anime's kind of boring for me lately, with the summer releases offering all of one series I *really* want to see and THAT'S a sequel (Baka to Test), another I'm slightly interested in (Sacred Seven) and one I'll watch because of it's attachement to Marvel's Anime Project (Blade). I'm hoping something awesome comes from this, and the RPG Level-5 is working on. The excitement I feel from this is welcome.

Source Articles:
Akihiro Hino and Susumu Yamaguchi work on a new Gundam Project (ANN)

Sidenote: A different Gundam Project is being announced in about a week. No clue what it is, or if people will care about it beyond it's initial announcement (ie, a new manga or game). I'm hoping they'll be doing another UC OVA, but we'll see.