The Official Gundam AGE Anime Thread AGE-8

[zerogradius]

So Age has finally come to an end. There were some good points in this ep, such as the battle against Zera/Sid and the scene where Flit was confronted by the ghosts of his past to give up his hatred against the Vagan was done a lot better than I expected (I'm guessing he actually could see them since Kio used his X Rounder powers on him and has no idea who Yurin and Grodeck are). Seeing the Vagan and EF working together was also a nice touch.

However, there are also a whole bunch of things I simply could not explain and was disappointed by, such as:

1. Zera being the ultimate enemy. Who at Level 5 could have possibly thought that killing off Zeheart in the previous ep and making a complete unknown the final battle to overcome was a good idea. I know Level 5 is a video game company, but someone over there really should have thought this through.

2. Sid coming out of nowhere. Then it suddenly fuses with the Vagan Gear with the only explanation being that Zera must be trying to fuse with it, even though it is clearly the opposite that's happening. Again, more video game characteristics thrown into an anime.

3. Why did the fusion of the Vagan Gear and Sid affect Zera mentally? He started attacking Vagan MSs, all the while babbling on about defeating the Gundams and the EF, so why did he turn on his own people?

4. Flit's desire to plasma dive Second Moon seemed forced and was just an excuse to bring about the confrontation with Kio. If he was going to do it, why not the previous ep when the Vagan seemed a much bigger threat. Instead, he allowed the Diva to be destroyed as well as the Age builder. His actions made absolutely no sense considering that he admitted that Second Moon was going to be destroyed anyway by La Gramis' self destruction (not sure how he knew that), so why bother plasma diving it then? Just to land the final blow himself?

5. Ezelcant stated before his death that he never wanted to fight a war. This seems like total crap considering he was the one who started it after the Earth Sphere had undergone a hundred years of peace before he arrived and ruined it.

6. The Age device and the EXA-DB were used to create the solution to the Mars Rays, which begs the question why Ezelcant, back when Kio was on Second Moon, did not try to do the same thing.

7. No mention was made of what happened to the characters after the war outside of the Asunos, and even then there wasn't much info provided (we could not even see their faces). This is not surprising, considering that Dique and Millais were completely written off the show like they never existed without any explanation as to what happened to them.

8. Where did the bazooka that Rody sent come from? The Diva was alreay destroyed, and I don't remember weapons being uploaded onto the priate ship.

9. Flit was too easily able to convince the Vagans to listen to him. Why didn't they ignore him like they've ignored every other Eartling to that point. If anything, it should have been Mr Kabuki who should have ordered them to seperate La Gramis, but he did nothing until Zera started attacking his own people. And why didn't he order the Vagans to seperate La Gramis when he knew it was going to take Second Moon with it?

10. What ever happened to Kio and Wendy? Wasn't she supposed to be his love interest? If not, then what was her purpose in the show? To be Unoa's shadow?

This ep and the last were rushed and it seemed to me like they should have been combined into 3 eps instead. It also isn't good that the previous ep outshined the finale.

All in all, I think Age was a pretty average series. It had its good points, but was also muddled by a lot of bad, especially in the final arc where the plot and its characters started to fall apart. If only the story could have kept its intensity after the first arc, which by far outshined the other two. Time will only tell what lessons, if any, Sunrise learned from this before the next Gundam series is released.

[angelwingzero]

I could go on about how bad that finale was in so many aspects, but everything I'd want to say would turn this into a lot of rambling. I'll just state my opinion:

I think it's a consensus of the people who frequent this board that Gundam is the high mark of mecha franchises. Even the worst Gundam show is better than a lot of, if not the vast majority of, the anime out there. I can't say that for AGE. It is probably the first Gundam series I'd tell someone to skip unless they absolutely love the franchise, and I really hope that's not a sign of similar things to come.

[latenlazy]

The finale was terrible. Not going to retread covered ground. This series clearly had ambitious thematic and plot points, but the risk of ambition is that it hinges on execution. If AGE were better planned and more tightly written, I think they could have easily fit 3 generations of conflict into 50 episodes. Instead it was sloppy and poorly thought out. Some plot points took far longer to execute than necessary. Others didn't get nearly enough development. Inconsistent and disjointed pacing basically turned the finale into a mess that preached its message far more than it compelled it. I can't believe I'm saying this but I think this series is worse than GSD, and with 00 S2 you could at least tell they wrote themselves in a corner before relying on pixie dust to resolve every plot conflict.

[domino]

3. Why did the fusion of the Vagan Gear and Sid affect Zera mentally? He started attacking Vagan MSs, all the while babbling on about defeating the Gundams and the EF, so why did he turn on his own people?

I hate to try to explain any of the crap that happened in AGE but I think Zera was mentally affected by Sid fusing with him. Since he has no human soul, it's possible that Sid was able to affect him. Let's assume that the Vagan Gear is like most super-robot-ish mobile suits (nowadays) piloted by newtype-ish pilots so it might be controlled at least partially by newtype-ish brainwaves. So......maybe Sid fusing with the Vagan Gear caused a feedback so that Sid was controlling Zera as well as the Vagan Gear.

What was confusing is how afraid Zera seemed of Kio (and how poor a tactic it was to hide behind a fusion(?) reactor) when he isn't even supposed to have human emotions.

8. Where did the bazooka that Rody sent come from? The Diva was alreay destroyed, and I don't remember weapons being uploaded onto the priate ship.

I didn't bother to bring this up but it was definitely a *facepalm* moment. Considering how useless the bazooka was (did it even hit anything before it was destroyed?), I think the writers just wanted to remind us that the AGE device was still doing SOMETHING even after AGE-FX was created. Still doesn't explain how the bazooka got loaded onto the Bisdain ship.

Sigh......I'll be waiting on one of the Mechatalk fanfic writers to make sense/fun of this series

[Strike Zero]

Finally got to see the final episode subbed. Holy Christ, that was awful.

Zera Gins -- this guy might as well have not even been a human being for all the character he exibited. Then he gets taken over by SID and starts to go crazy for no apparent reason. What was even up with that? Hell, what was the deal with SID in the first place? Why did it suddenly decide to show up and start eating mobile suits and attacking everybody? Eh, maybe it wanted to take revenge for one of its bodies getting destroyed. I suppose that makes sense. If I was just chillin' when suddenly some Martian jackass decided to fly in out of nowhere and blow me the hell up, I'd be pretty pissed off about it too.

So then Flit comes in lugging this huge-ass colony destroying missile and is about to nuke the entire Vagan population out of existence by himself. I was laughing my ass off the entire time this was going on due to the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. Too bad Kio had to spoil the fun with his babbling. And too bad Flit didn't just do what had to be done and fire the missile anyway; the series ending with Kio being impaled on the end of a speeding missile and blowing up along with the entire Second Moon would have most probably redeemed this entire arc.

And of course, Flit decides to abandon his 50-year-long genocidal ambition thanks to X-Rounder ghost vision. Now, to be fair, if the ghost of my dead girlfriend were to suddenly appear, sit on my lap and tell me in that sweet, lovely voice to stop doing what I was doing, I would probably be quite inclined to listen to them too.

I didn't buy the sudden alliance between the Vagan and Federation armies, not for a second. If I were a Federation soldier at the time, while destroying the blocks I would also be taking random potshots at every Vagan mobile suit that happened to be in the general area. What? These bastards blew up my colony and killed my family, I'm not about to be all hunky dory with them just because now their home colony is in danger!

And then the remaining 37 or however many years of this 100 year conflict is resolved through narration over still images in just under 60 seconds. And there's a flash forward of Kio and Asemu looking at a statue of Flit. Wow. It's like they were desperately striving to deliver the most horribly underwhelming ending to the series as humanly possible. 49 episodes building up and leading to a massive war that lasted for three generations, and the best they can come up with to wrap it all up is "and then the fighting eventually ended and everything was fine." That's just... I don't even know what to call it.


And so, in retrospect: Gundam AGE.

The first arc was undoubtedly the best. It had its problems, but overall I really enjoyed it. The second arc wasn't as great, thought it did have its moments. The third arc started off really well, only to enter into a slow decline after the battle at not-Jaburo and ultimately end up degrading into what we see here. I do want to give the show at least a little credit for turning out some likeable/adorable characters over the course of its run, but pretty much all of them ended up either dying, derailing or not amounting to much of anything, so... yeah, way to mess that aspect up too, AGE.

But hey, you know what, when all is said and done, at least the show managed to show off a bunch of neat-looking giant robots. Because, in the end, that's what Gundam is all about and what Gundam does best; giant robots beating the crap out of each other and blowing stuff up. So, if it managed to give us at least that, do I really have the right to all of this bitching and moaning over a story that had a lot of potential but was very, very, very poorly executed?

...


...


...Why, yes. Yes, I think I do.

Gundam AGE isn't the worst TV series I've ever seen, but it's definitely on the low end of all the Gundam shows I've ever seen, and people wouldn't be missing out on a whole lot by skipping over it.

[YazanGable]

It also would've been helpful if they showed more of the epilogue to explain how the process of integrating the Vagans into the Earth societies went. Did the Vagan soldiers get a reprieve for following Flit's suggestions or were they tried for their crimes? What about Zera - given that he's no better than a human fighting machine? Did the Vagans willingly leave Second Moon or was Second Moon placed in orbit and retrofitted for long-term civilization? Did the Vagans lead the charge to populate Mars?

On this note, one part of the epilogue that I did a doubletake at:
After they mention colonizing Mars there's the line about there finally being enough places for all of humanity to live.
At which point I went "...there was a population crisis? First had ever seen this indicated."

I mean, outside of MAYBE the slums of Fardain, there didn't seem to be any sort of overpopulation issue. Even with Vagan it wasn't 'There are too many of us' as it was 'This environment is dangerous'

It just felt like another indication of how poorly handled the world view and setting on this show were overall.

[HellCat]

9. Flit was too easily able to convince the Vagans to listen to him. Why didn't they ignore him like they've ignored every other Eartling to that point. If anything, it should have been Mr Kabuki who should have ordered them to seperate La Gramis, but he did nothing until Zera started attacking his own people. And why didn't he order the Vagans to seperate La Gramis when he knew it was going to take Second Moon with .

He did. The whole sequence before he goes hat in hand to the Federation has him order them to disengage it, only to be told in classic sci fi tradition doing so is no longer possible.

[Compass]

It could also have to do with the fact that he purposely aimed and fired his giant missile into the sky to get everyone's attention.

"Hey, we have a superweapon and we choose not to use it. Now stop using your silly weapons and help."

[E08]

6. The Age device and the EXA-DB were used to create the solution to the Mars Rays, which begs the question why Ezelcant, back when Kio was on Second Moon, did not try to do the same thing.

Its AGE system not just the device. Besides, Ezelcant does not have EXA-DB just part of its data.

[Chris]

Wow, I just read Chris's review. Bru-tal. I wonder if he watched the 2005 version of Venom, got inspired by Ray's murdering methods, and applied same methods to this episode.

Seriously though, no mention of Ezelcant going from strategic tyrant to a simple dying elderly man? No mentioning of Medal? Not even how Godom went from ace pilot to revenge driven nut? Come on Chris, I expected more than three examples. You could have at least mentioned how that Zalam-Euba alliance went nowhere after episode 15.

On that note, can anyone else find Age's review average? Because I do not see it on there.

My commentary was already long enough, so I'm not going to list every single example of a problem when just a few are representative enough of everything. Also, you couldn't find the average because I forgot to upload the updated page.

[DeganUAB]

One thing I liked about the ending was the amount of desperation the vagan forces felt. I don't recall the main antagonist being killed before the finale in any other gundam series. I was disappointed by vagan gear but it was interesting to see zeras confusion as to why his own allies would attack him. So all in all a disappointing ending but there were interesting points in the mess.

[Amion]

(Looks at Soma's thread) I feel a bit bad drawing you back in, Soma. Well, my body and spirit would be crushed too, If it weren't that I love the Vagan designs, so I will never say AGE was a complete waste.

And so, AGE is over. I suppose we will all now begin bashing the very idea of a UC production. And for the record, Duel, I am now hoping that your crazy theory is true (what series are you comparing Gundam with?). A serious Gundam series would be welcome, yes.

domino wrote:Sigh......I'll be waiting on one of the Mechatalk fanfic writers to make sense/fun of this series

*Sheepish glance around*. Well, once I finish writing my own original work I might start tackling that. Still don't know where to begin with a rewrite though, considering the multiple flaws the sloppy writing presents. Or maybe we'll get lucky and Thundermuffin will take interest.

Again, Kei beats me to the punch. Thank you for saying all that about AGE, I guess I'll be signing off like Soma now...*munches a chocolate bar tearfully for emphasis*-and this I refuse to give up using

[DuelGundam2099]

what series are you comparing Gundam with?

Ultraman. The drawback is though, if what I think is true, than we western fans will praise the new series for being so different and new, but Japanese fans will find it unappealing/too different and will more than likely have a much shorter episode count (much like with Ultraman Nexus). If THAT is done, the series after that will be like Ultraman Max: Pure parody material while sticking true to the oldest shows. Then the big anniversary Mebius equivalent will come, everyone will love it for balancing and whatnot, and the franchise will be on hiatus while they make spin offs (probably similar to Gunpla Builders........ Gunpla Galaxy Model Battle?).


Remember, this is pure theory, although if you count Tomino's new project set in the distant UC timeline as the next series, it might not end up being farfetched.

[Amion]

what series are you comparing Gundam with?

Ultraman. The drawback is though, if what I think is true, than we western fans will praise the new series for being so different and new, but Japanese fans will find it unappealing/too different and will more than likely have a much shorter episode count (much like with Ultraman Nexus). If THAT is done, the series after that will be like Ultraman Max: Pure parody material while sticking true to the oldest shows. Then the big anniversary Mebius equivalent will come, everyone will love it for balancing and whatnot, and the franchise will be on hiatus while they make spin offs (probably similar to Gunpla Builders........ Gunpla Galaxy Model Battle?).


Remember, this is pure theory, although if you count Tomino's new project set in the distant UC timeline as the next series, it might not end up being farfetched.

I'm just hoping we don't get another disappointing series like AGE. And I hope we don't get something that ends with everyone screaming bloody murder about a new UC production. What's so bad about the Origin anyway? I was under the impression it is simply a novalized MSG, so isn't it's plot the same?

Oh yes, can you give me a link to this new project? I like the idea of a new Tomino production.
Back to AGE, I can't help but say I was very happy with Chris review, and I think it was a good ending note for AGE.

[Momaru]

Am I the only one that doesn't hate the final episode with the fire of a thousand suns? Honestly I actually liked it and I felt that it neatly tied up the loose ends left in the series. I will agree that the final episode was a bit rushed and that I would of liked to of seen more time spent on how the Vegans and EFF were getting along after the war ended.

Spoiler

Honestly I don't see the problem with Zera Gins or his MS when they hinted at the guy being a souless supersoldier several times and even hinted at the vegan gear. It would of been better of course to see the guy really be a big bad though and have some personality.

I actually liked the scene with Flit being convinced to not use the plasma diver missle and he becomes a savior for everyone, even the Vegans in the end. You KNEW this was going to happen somehow it wasn't like AGE was gonna be like LOL nope, Flit really is a heartless bastard afterall. I only thought it was strange that he was somehow able to convince the Vegan and EFF to work together to break La Gramis.

The ony other problem I have with this episode is honestly a nitpick. Its where the hell did the bazooka attachment for the AGE FX come from?

Finally, did anyone else feel like Ezelcant spoofed Siam Vist from Unicorn in this episode? Oh, and props to Ezelcant's actor for doing an amazing job in this episode. I could almost simpathise with the genocideal maniac. He had good ideals, but an utterly crazy way of going about them.

[DuelGundam2099]

For Amion:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20 ... production

[Amion]

Well, it ain't a Gundam show, but sounds pretty interesting. Thanks Duel.

And I don't hate AGE's ending, Momaru. And from what I've seen, not too many have been bashing it nearly as much as I thought they would. Chris review, which I expected to be stern toward the failed ending, comes off as a bit lenient and unbiased. Right now, at least on Mecha Talk, everyone is in consensus I think that AGE was a disappointment, but had many good core ideas if given better writing.

[DuelGundam2099]

^You're welcome.

Anyway, unlike most people I thought the hundred year war idea could have worked with the episodes they had, they just fleshed it out poorly. I also should have mentioned this sooner, but having some back story to the Age Device might have helped give some depth or at least give us reason HOW it and the EXA-DB created everse rays.

[Compass]

The ending wasn't bad. It just... didn't feel that great either.

There's so many loose ends. Characters who don't get resolutions and such. How was the peace process cemented? Sure, we had a cease fire due to a random robot going out of control, but it would have been nice to flesh out how peace was made. Did Flit play a role? Did Kio play a role? Was Ezelcant's plan revealed?

[Chris]

Chris review, which I expected to be stern toward the failed ending, comes off as a bit lenient and unbiased. Right now, at least on Mecha Talk, everyone is in consensus I think that AGE was a disappointment, but had many good core ideas if given better writing.

I appreciate the unbiased, but I don't think that "lenient" is quite the word given the two stars and the amount of time I spent discussing the episode's failures before commenting on the series as a whole.