https://youtu.be/OdrFbdG7L8E?si=8VuCtZtVfRgVB0vPWhy did AGE fail again? Everything from the game looks pretty damn cool
They tried to speedrun 0079/Zeta/ZZ/CCA in a single 50 episode series. It wasn't nearly enough time to introduce, develop, and convince people to give a fuck about any of it's characters. It also ended on Kio, possibly the single worst offender for the power of UNDERSTANDING in the entire franchise.
>>22637102It was enjoyable up until the final arc.That final 10 episodes is very haphazard, because you have some compelling elements such as the conclusion to the Zehart/Asemu rivalry, and there's a lot of characters who get killed off which gives it a real sense of urgency and stakes, but Kio's pacifism is really poorly thought out, and the EXA-DB plotline and Vegan Gear Sid stuff with Ezelcant's clone is all done at the last minute.It's a real shame because AGE had the pieces setup for a really climatic finale, but it drops the ball so hard.Instead of the Vegan gear Flit should've gotten ahold of the EXA-DB and then constructed a massive Gundam MA in the vein of the GP03 Dendrobium or Freedom Meteor.Then he sets out to massacre the Vegans, but Kio confronts him. Flit fights Kio and Asemu without regard for the Vegan colony, damaging it severely causing it to start falling into earth's orbit. Flit then realizes he's twisted the image of Gundam from a savior to a devil and his drive for revenge have doomed both earth and Vegan. Then for a final universal century homage Kio, the remaining Vegan, and EF forces push back the falling Vegan colony CCA style. Flit sacrifices himself while saving the Vegan colony from falling unto earth by using the AGE system one last time to build equipment for his gundam to lift the colony back into orbit. Kio does reentry in the AGE FX's core fighter.
>>22637102Vagan did nothing wrong.
Tldr on AGE?
>>22638086Wasted potential like most AUs
The story is bad because it was originally meant for a video game but then Level-5 decided nah, let's do an anime first.
>>22637126It is plenty of time to develop those characters, bad anime just don't efficiently use their time. Good movies make you care about characters within the runtime of about 4-5 episodes. Plenty of 6-12 episode OVAs/series also do so. Gundam AGE's story is what happens when you take a story designed for a video game and just directly adapt it to screen.But another issue is just the basic mismatch in concept. With AGE they were trying for one of those "kiddy multimedia project" things and it was just ill-conceived. They got Level-5 and their experience with colorful kiddy shit and tried to combine it with the grimderp war drama shit of Gundam. Those two things do not go together at all. Level-5 execs circlejerking how much they love gundam with incessant UC references doesn't help much- though that is just something that plagues Gundam in general (though we might have AGE to thank for that being reduced a bit in more recent AUs).This is to say nothing of L5's spotty writing in general. Like I said they're best when they stick to kiddy stuff, but any time they had more adult themes or complex ideas coming into their work it was usually bad. Like a lot of the Layton plots only work because of the whimsical tone, in other contexts they would be harangued for being stupid as fuck. They are also really terrible at writing female characters in general. Again, this doesn't count as much against you when writing kiddy stuff meant for little boys, but AGE felt like it wanted to please both kids and Gundam fans.Build Fighters came shortly after AGE, succeeding at exactly what AGE failed at- be the kiddy part of the franchise, while pleasing long-time fans with something simple and fun. It turns out if you want to do that, you don't include the stupid grimderp "war is hell" subtext into your obvious toy commercial.As an aside, the AGE game itself is mediocre and forgettable. Like many L5 games it's repetitive grindy shit. Not terrible, but I wouldn't replay it.
>>22638086Gundam gets Level-5 of White Knight Chronicles/Layton/Ni no Kuni/Yokai Watch fame to do a Gundam show. They want to capture the kiddy audience. Level-5 exec is a huge Gundam nerd so they reproduce large parts of the 0079/Zeta/ZZ/CCA story, packaged as a "three generational story". Bit more spoiler details below:Gen 1: Kid hero Flit loses mother to the mysterious Unknown Enemy, they appear to be some kind of alien force out to kill humanity. They're actually Martians who got dicked over by the Federation. Flit takes mommy's AGE system to build his totally-not-RX-78 and fights the bad guys while awakening to his own strange Newtype-expy abilities (X-Rounder).Gen 2: Flit is now a higher-ranking commander. Seethes at the Vagan more and more over the generation as his friends die on the front lines. His son, Asem, is typical high school student kid and friends with Vagan super secret agent Zeheart. Cue Zeheart's obvious betrayal and Asem going after him in the totally-not-Zeta to try to restore his idyllic teenage BFF school days. Asem finds out he has literally 0 X-Pounder aptitude so he has to become a Super Pilot™ to keep up with all the ubermensch. Asem later marries the girl caught between him and Zeheart even though it's obvious to any viewer Asem and Zeheart have way more chemistry with each other than any female.Gen 3: Asem decides he's gonna be a deadbeat dad and disappears right after his son Kio is born, actually becomes a pirate and gives his Zeta pirate claws and skulls because we need a Crossbone reference in here. Kio grows up to have insane X-Pounder abilities so I guess it's one those things that skips a generation. Uses his infinite psychic power of understanding to annoy the audience more than any Gundam protagonist ever and magically gets Flit to let go like 50+ years of hatred to become the savior he always was meant to be. Happy ending for all, even for a lot of people who don't deserve it.
>>22638167A few of those points don’t sound very kiddy
>>22638174That is probably part of why it didn't really succeed. On paper the plot points don't seem that much different from your standard AU. The kiddy-ness is mostly in the art and the general simplicity with which it handles its ideas.
>>22638183I’m watching the OP vid and it doesn’t look very kidsy
>>22638189Dunno what to tell you. The colors are very bright and saturated for one thing, and look at the character designs for example. Just take Flit and compare him to Setsuna, Heero or even Kira- he looks way more like the kind of kid hero you'd see in a more kid-oriented anime like Beyblade or Inazuma Eleven or something. Also look at silly character designs like pic related. The only other non-Build Fighters AU that I would say has a style even close to it is actually IBO, and it's one of the things that was a bit offputting about that show at first. Of course IBO made it clear it wasn't a kiddy show with both the color palette and a lot of the clothing and setting choices, as well as having more violence in its action scenes. IBO's first OP wasn't really unclear about the tone either.
>>22638195Just watched a little girl die pretty terribly
>>22638174>>22638189>>22638211Thanks for the play-by-play, monkey
>>22637102The anime was too lame. Too little episodes devoted to each main protagonist.>>22637547>>22637102AGE Could have worked as a 2 generation anime. But three generations is too much.
>>22637777Sex with Fram! Also checked.
>>22638273Nah, three generations is fine. Seeing Flit's development was one of the good things in AGE.
>>22638167>they appear to be some kind of alien force out to kill humanityI remember when AGE was initially airing. The UE seemed like such an interesting concept, especially with their weird animalistic designs. The whole thing being a redo of Nadesico's plot was probably the most boring possible answer (at least in the greater context of Gundam) and of course it ended up being the right one.Even then, they should've at least done something silly with the bad guys like say they spliced their DNA with animals or some shit to explain the weird Vagan designs. If you're gonna do kiddy shit at least do the fun things too.
>>22638367The thing is the three generations works for Flit, but only for Flit. This is both because Flit is the only important character who appears in all three generations, and because the way he gets old and hard-faced, is a visual metaphor for his decaying morality. Some of the gen 1 characters make it into gen 2, nobody from gen 2 makes it into gen 3, and that ends up making pretty much everything about gen 2 a waste of time except for establishing that Asem and Zeheart want to fuck each other. Which is also a waste of time because ultimately Asem just puts Zeheart down like a dog in probably the most humiliatingly one-sided defeat a Char has ever had.This shot is great. The way Flit ends up with nearly the exact same beard as Grodek, the one who's directly responsible for turning Flit into what he became, is great. The way Flit eventually piles so much weaponry and armor onto the AGE-1 that it stops looking anything like a hero and turns into this hulking instrument of murder is great. Everything surrounding that is awful.
>>22638757>nobody from Gen 2 makes it into Gen 3Sad Obright noises
>>22638757The Grodek beard is the most kino part of AGE. Obright ends up getting it too.
>>22637102The director didn't know how to direct an anime. The anime itself wasn't even a proper show, it was just an appendage to the game. And it was mismanaged to shit.What Hino did was to put the cart before the horse. The anime comes first, any games based on the anime come after. It's basically like if you tried to treat Breaker Battlogue or Build Metaverse as their own shows, that shit ain't gonna fly.
>>22638778Build Metaverse is its own show
>>22638778If I remember right, the project started as only a game and when some execs saw the stuff Hino wrote and much he likes Gundam, they figured it could work as a full series too. At the very least I wouldn't lay all the blame on Hino.Had AGE come out as just a game as originally planned I think it would be remembered more fondly as "that one Level 5 game that was a huge fan service circlejerk of Gundam and had some cool original stuff in it too".
>spend 2/3 of screen time convincing me that vegan are animals and deserve holocaust>spend 1/3 of screen time trying to convince me that I'm wrongThis is the most bipolar show I've ever seen.Even IBO is not this level of schizophrenic.
>>22638143>It is plenty of time to develop those charactersIt's not.
>>22638991if you're a shit writer yeah
>>22638987In a smarter show, there's a lot that can be said about how much responsibility a people have when they are mislead by a shitty situation and a deceptive leader.On the other end it feels like the show also never truly had the balls to show Flit in much of a negative light. You have lots of Vagan characters acting like raving lunatics left and right so many of the moments when Flit wanting to commit mass murder just seem like a totally rational response.
>>22639049You can see what they're going for in how Flit raises Kio to basically become another Desil, and that part I think works for being something where Flit really did something awful. They just don't know how to build on or resolve that plotline properly.
Flint Asuno was a cool dudeHe used the same suit for like 30 years and it didn't seem to slow him down at all. Also I'll never forget when Dencil called him out for not wanting a one on one fight and he basically replied >this is war I'll defeat you however I can!
>>22637102>pspAge is that old? What the fuck
>>22637102I like it. Not every series has to be a genre staple, AGE plays safe but it's fun. Good music and good battles, some cool secondary characters. It's flaws lies in the pacing but the story is nice. Kio's trying to be a good boy or Flit changing his mind at the last minute doesn't affect me as much as Asemu's reason for abandoning his family. Although we never got the MG AGE-3 and FX that were show as prototypes, 1 and 2 are often revisited in model kits and premium releases. The current VS arcade game also has more mobile suits and charactes from it than some legacy series or later successes.
AGE's failure scared Bandai away from releasing MGs and 50 episode shows for Gundam.What a disaster that is.
>>22637102The gameplay was very bland despite the ability to use transformation on applicable customisable MS The anime? idk, something about bad pacing or strong competition, the anime wasn't bad, I'm sure it contributed to toy sales well enough
These two were great.
>>22641327He was married
I love AGE, it was my first Gundam show, and first real mecha show too. I was young back then.I understand it's flaws but it's impossible for me to dislike it.Really good mecha design too, and probably one of the last Gundam show who understood the "don't make the mechas too complicated" rule the franchise had a few time.
>>22641354And? They were great characters.
>>22637102Weak romances.
>>22640525MGs slowing to a trickle has nothing to do with AGE and everything to do with smaller scales outselling it by a huge margin. The only thing keeping RG from being hands down the better line is the lack of non-MC mobile suits.
>>22638987>Literally make them baby killers who intentionally kill civilians purely to kill civilians>Probably have the highest kill count of an enemy factionin Gundam since they continue to destroy whole cities and colonies and are active for an absurd about of timeOh but space hitler's son died so now you're supposed to feel bad that he had to deliberately give his loyal followers space cancer to make them hate earth. They didn't even properly do a pivot to suddenly making them sympathetic, they simultaneously tried to make Ezelcant the focal point of sympathy for the vegans, but simultaneously doubled down on him being an irredeemable monster who probably has more blood on his hands than any other Gundam antagonist.
I actually thought the first third of the show was perfectly fine.Really started to fall apart with the daddy issues/love triangle shit in the second part though.
>>22638167>They want to capture the kiddy audience.AGE sucks, but being too kiddy honestly has nothing to do with it's issues. It's pretty consistently tonally somber and takes itself as seriously as it needs to. Honestly, probably more so than Witch from Mercury.
>>22641749Not to mention, it turns out they could have moved the colony anytime they wanted but didn't because of this stupid plan.
>>22641774Ezelcant was a hell spawn who wanted to insure his people would suffer if it meant their hate would make it's way back to earth.
>>22638195That seems pretty incidental given the actual content of the story. Yurin's death is honestly one of the more fucked up heroine deaths in Gundam, a franchise that already made killing young girls into a ritual by that point. And it felt like they were trying to have the Vegans outpace Blue Cosmos from SEED as the most unapologetic bloodthirsty monsters in the series.
>>22638780And it's bad.
>>22641763Strictly speaking, Gundam has always been meant for kids on some level, so maybe it's not even the issue of that AGE is written "for kids", per se, but more than it seems like it was trying to combine cliche elements of modern kid's anime with the Gundam war drama stuff, which is going to clash really badly unless you handle it really carefully.Like the whole "Ezelcant is just a guy sad about his son" last minute reveal might be sympathetic if Ezelcant was a stereotypical super robot style campy villain who dressed in all black and lived in an evil castle, but the context changes a lot when we're talking a guy who is a human leader who caused an actual war between two human factions and you handle the drama in the same way a more traditional Gundam show would.
>>22642379Ezlecant's sloppy half-assed backstory quite frankly wasn't typical to anything, it was very unique in how it seemed to simultaneously cause Kio to sympathize with him while revealing to the audience that he was worse than we thought, explaining that he only thinks people who prove themselves deserve to live, and showing that he was using space radiation to manipulate his own people. Also the whole time Kio is falling for his shit the audience is fully aware Ezlecant is using the life of an innocent little girl as a bartering chip. Yet the narrative treat's Kio's perspective as the correct one. Gundam has tons of villains that are sympathetic or at least give a convincing case of believing the ends justify the means.There are also a fair share of villains who are unrepentant monsters. Ezlecant is this really retarded mix of both and I don't think it's a kind of sloppiness you're going to see in old super robot shows much ether. Juvenile or not, they tend to pick a lane.
I liked Zeheart. He was in too deep shit to stop and just went along with a war he couldn't win.
>>22641754Funny thing is, the Asemu part seems to be the favorite from the general public.
>>22644114I'd suspect it's because you have an oldtype pilot styling on the newtypes, which is rare in Gundam works.
>>22641754The stuff in the first third inside that colony (mafia/yakuza flavored? genuinely don't remember) may be the most tedious thing I've ever watched.
>>22641754People like the second part entirely because Asem is an Oldtype protagonist who beats Newtype antagonists and the audience for that will always mark out for it. They mark out for it even though the way Asem beats the X-Rounders is by just suddenly being immune to their powers and the Double Bullet having some admittedly cool new weapons. But there's so little of that content that anything with it ends up beloved.>>22644490The Fardain arc is the only time AGE ever has actual setup and payoff, since it explains where the Diva gets an army big and experienced enough to handle the final fight. The arc itself isn't amazing, but it does capture the show's theme of generational war in miniature, and it's meant as dramatic irony that Flit fails to make the connection with his own situation and heed the warning he's unintentionally being given about what's going to happen to him if he continues on the path he's on. If the rest of AGE were good I would agree that Fardain sucks, but the rest of AGE is so bad that Fardain is the most narratively and thematically coherent part of the whole thing.
I haven’t watched AGE, but goddamn, the kits are really good. The fact that the AGE-1 and AGE-2 have moving back skirts even in HG is such a nice feature I wish Bandai would give us more often. Also, the geometric features of the Feddie suits make them quite photogenic.
>>22644566It's not a terrible concept at all, but narrative coherence isn't enough to balance out its incredible dullness. You could've cut the thing in half and the show would've been far better for it.>>22644596The mechanical designs of AGE are, with a handful of exceptions, decent to pretty neat. Good to know they didn't fuck up the kits.
>>22644114I'd get it if it weren't for the unappologetic deadbeat dad thing.Kind of hard to sympathize with the daddy issues thing when his dad ends up raising his kid anyways.
>>22638174That anon left out Flit meeting and losing his Lalah expy in Gen 1, which plays a huge part in his Vagan hatred.
>>22641754>>22644566>>22644114Asemu's arc did the Kira/Athrun dynamic a lot better which is another reason it gets praised.Gundam SEED doens't do a good job of showing you Kira and Athrun being friends in the past, or even when they reunite on the same side.AGE taking a few episodes to show Zehart and Asemu casually hanging out and doing school stuff before the war kicks off makes their version of the dynamic much stronger.
I am here once again to tell you that age is just animated crossbone, which is why its amazing
What’s the point of Emily?
>>22647267Asemu needed a mom. The whole three generations concept would never come to pass if Flit didn't have a cumdump to hatefuck after his vegan waifu died.
>>22647598That’s not Emily
>>22647598Fuck I meant Wendy. My bad
