Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 368: Gundam Universal Century

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Austin Walker, and Kat Bailey hop aboard the White Base to travel across the span of the profoundly influential Gundam franchise (or at least the U.C. timeline) with a look at the anime and its hot scramble of a video game legacy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, this is not a podcast. This is not a podcast. It's real life. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronaut's episode, I believe 368. I am Jeremy Parrish. And with me this week, I have some special guests, a regular guest, and one who has never been on the show before. And we're going to talk about a topic that I don't think we've ever really discussed directly on the show. Despite it's, massive outsized influence and the hundreds, literally hundreds of video games based on this franchise. That's right. We are talking about Gundam. And that's a very big topic. So I've said, you know,

let's just corral it in. Let's go to Sweetwater and rope some doggies. We are just going to talk about universal century, mostly about the cartoons and, you know, some of the ancillary media. But then also, I think we've highlighted a few video games that are kind of representative of just the universal century era of Gundam. And we'll be talking about those to some degree, although generally in my experience, Gundam games are not very good. So we're not going to belabor that particular point. But anyway, that's enough about me and enough about the podcast. What about the people who are here on the line with me? Let's start with the person that has been on Retronauts many times and everyone listening to the show knows. Hey, it's Kat Bailey. And I count this

podcast as my final victory, Jeremy, because I was the one who was the one who was blaboring the point that we should be doing a Gundam thing for years and years. And you and many of your colleagues were just kind of rolling your eyes and being like, ah, cat's on the giant robots again. And here we are. Did you say Gundam or did you say Super Robot Wars? I said both, gosh darn it. I remember being like, you know, it's really good Jeremy Gundam? And you're like, yeah, sure. Okay, Kat, whatever. And now here we are. All right. Kat Bailey, where did you first discover Gundam? How did you get into Gundam? I think we should do the the roundtable thing before we introduce our

next guest. Sure. I discovered it through Super Robot Wars. I knew literally nothing about Gundam when I started playing Super Robot Wars W. And then I was like, wow, these little units are kind of cool. And I was thinking of Gundam Wing, actually. And that got me to start watching Gundam Seed

because I mixed up the two. And then I discovered that Gundam Seed was actually kind of rad. And then I discovered that Universal Century was even better. And then I was on the Gundam train. All right. So then coming in, maybe from a different angle, more from the gun plastic side of things, I think, potentially. We have a newcomer to Retronauts. Please introduce yourself and tell us about yourself and, of course, how you got

into Gundam. Yeah, I'm Austin Walker. I have been a Retronauts fan for a long, long time. I think a decade ago, I was just thinking a decade ago, I was doing my first year of grad school, probably in a subway, eating a sandwich, listening to whatever episode of Retronauts came out most recently. So if I could have told that version of Austin that one day, not only would I be on retronauts, but I'd be on retronauts talking about Gundam. I would have made my week for sure. In any case, I'm Austin Walker. I am the host of Waypoint Radio, a twice a week game podcast for Vice Media. I'm also the host of Friends at the Table, where I've done three seasons now influenced by Mecca anime. Friends of the Table is an actual play podcast, which if you follow actual play podcasts, or if you don't, I guess it's similar to something like The Adventure Zone or Critical Role, Me and My Friends, play tabletop role-playing games, and do that for an audience. And our most recent season, which literally we're going to do the post-mortem Q&A session

for after this recording today, is about a game called Beam Sabre that we played, which is extremely what if Zeta Gundam was a tabletop role-playing game, fantastic. So my love of Gundam, I think, is probably similar to many of the folks in my generation who got into it via Tsunami. Gundam Wing came to the states via Cartoon Network when I was in high school. And I loved it instantly. I'd encountered, you know, Mecca previous to that. My dad had, like, showed me old episodes of Gigantor when I was a kid, which is the, the, the, Americanized version of Tettingin 28 Go and I'd obviously seen I think by then I'd probably seen Robotech

the terribly massacred version of Macross The massacred version? Bad boo. Missile massacre. It had absolutely was. And it had some insight into the fact that I liked giant robots

but Gundam Wing brought me in in, and then when UC-W79, first Gundam, as the fandom calls it, first Gundam, started airing on Cartoon Network, I then kind of became a UC head. And then that was kind of really drilled in when OathMS team aired similarly in that same slot. And from that point forward, I was like, you know, buying VHS tapes and DVDs and downloading whatever I could get my hands on. And like Kat, looking for strategy games. games that were involved with Gundam, which at the time were like, frankly, you know, old SD Gundam ROMs that were interesting, but like I didn't know half of the suit. And I didn't know that I liked the SD style, but it was what was available to me. And then, yeah, you know, throughout the rest of that era, it was kind of a golden era if what you wanted was to buy kind of mediocre PS1, PS2, Gundam games. I'm sure we'll get there eventually. And who didn't, really? Yeah.

Okay. Well, so it sounds like both of you have a lot more expertise with this particular topic than I do, which is, of course, why I've summoned you here. My own interest, I don't know, like, so growing up in the 80s, I would occasionally get glances at Japanese cartoons with robots and stuff. Robotech, like I saw one or two episodes on TV, and it was so tantalizing, but we didn't have it in my local market. So I was always just kind of fascinated, but it was always a little elusive. And so then, you know, in college, stuff like, Macross Plus. Evangelian, those were new and came out, and I was really into those. And of course, all this time, you know, as I was reading more about this stuff, I was like, people always talk about Gundam and how it's so good and how it's so realistic and so serious and thoughtful and complex and nuanced. And it really, really intrigued me. And so the very first time that I was able to buy Gundam media in English, I jumped at it. And unfortunately, that was Gundam Wing. And it was not what I wanted at all. And I decided for a long time that Gundam is bad, actually. And it wasn't until a few years ago when I adopted a Bright Noah Avatar on a forum I hosted, just because I saw this image of a guy in a military uniform giving someone the side eye while eating a hamburger, I was like, that's me. I like this guy. I don't know who this is, but this represents me. And then everyone in the forum was like, yeah, that's actually you. You're like the forum dad. You're like, you know, you're exactly our bright

Noah. So everyone else is the double Zeta crew yelling. I slap so many people. I tell you what. God. You've already hit something, though, really amazing about what Gundam is, which is that it is so vast a property that you could engage with one part of it and hate it and then engage with another part and be like, oh, this is a different thing, even though it's connected with giant robots. I'm currently on a podcast called The Great Gundam Project. Shoutouts to them. It's Emin Jackson, who also do have normal mapping, a great, another great retro-focused video game podcast. And we're watching Gundam X, which is a Gundam I've never seen before and is at once so different than everything else I've seen. It's a post-apocalyptic show. It's a, what

if Shar's counterattack went different? What if Axis hit Earth is kind of the premise? It's It's not a UC show. It's not actually Sharr, but it is a, what if the earth was devastated by, in this case, it's like 40 or 50 colony drops. It's a bunch. It's a bunch. And then at the same time, it's deeply in conversation with things like new types and the relationship between new types and governments. And it's been great to do that show and kind of encounter a whole new Gundam for the first time. And that's how vast Gundam as a series or as a franchise is.

So you can be following it for 20 years and still, you know, come across things where you're like, wow, I haven't seen this one before. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So I finally decided, you know, I'm going to jump on this and check out the Blu-Rays in English a few years ago. And so I started watching original Gundam. And then I jumped over to, you know, I was kind of jumping around between different shows within the Universal Century. And I got halfway through Zeta. And Zeta got me really sick. Like I developed shingles while I was watching Zeta. And I'm pretty sure that it was Zeta. because then I decided to redo it again a few months ago, and I got to the same point in Zeta, and I didn't get shingles, but the first time I had shingles, it got into one of my eyes and, you know, could have blinded me if someone hadn't recognized it what it was. Wow.

And then, as I was watching Zeta again, uh, my other eye got this weird infection or something. So I was like, if I keep watching Zeta, I'm going to go blind. This is terrible. This is the sign of Zeta. I got a healed and I powered through. And now I'm on like halfway through Unicorn and I'm watching everything chronologically. So pretty much after this, there's just like Victory Gundam that's available in English right now. Oh, Jeremy, if you didn't like Zeta Gundam, you're not going to like Victory Gundam.

Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. But anyway, like, it's all over the place. It's ups and downs. But the core story is very interesting, the core premise. Sometimes there is a real sense that they've kind of run out of things they can do with the core premise. And so it's like, hey, we're just going to shuttle back and forth between Earth and the Moon. we're going to drop some more colonies. We're going to commit some more gaseous genocide.

Hey, hey. Yeah, you mentioned, Austin was mentioning Gundam X, and that was about the time that Gundam was very firmly out of interesting ideas, because if you just, that was around the same time as Evangelion came out, and a lot of people will tell you that Evangelian kind of refreshed anime or refreshed the Mecca genre. And so if you put Evangelian and Gundam X side by side, no disrespect to Gundam X, I mean, it's an occasion.

show. It has very nice designs, but I think the difference is palpable. Yeah. I mean, Evangelion was a huge deal for me personally and for a lot of anime fans. And, you know, that show would not have existed without Gundam. But at the same time, it is also in many respects a repudiation of Gundam. But at the same time, it's also, it also embraces a lot of the ideas. So it has a very complicated relationship with Gundam. And I think complicated describes Gundam and Evangelian both. So it's fitting. Yes. I definitely will say as someone who grew up loving Gundam and loving Ava, one of the most frustrating things in the world was hearing people say that what makes Evangelion different than other Mecca shows is that it's about trauma.

It's about structures of power forcing children to commit acts they don't want to do. That it's... Yoshiyuki Tomino has never done anything like that. No. It's literally the Gundam-0-079. Yes, exactly, right? Yeah. If you want to get more overt, there's also Space Runaway Edion, which is just like, kids going to die for power. The first episode of the original Gundam has Fraubo crying over her dead parents as the colony is getting massacred and everything. I mean. Yeah.

And late and late into 0079, it's revealed that the Federation is absolutely putting these kids deeper and deeper into traumatic situations. in order to potentially spark them as new types. You know, Gendo could never. Right. He could, actually. Gendo in a Earth Federation uniform would be a thing to behold. It would make sense. Like, he would absolutely be part of the Earth Federation.

So, yeah, we'll get into, I think, Gundam's influences later in the show, assuming that there is time to actually tackle that. I have a feeling that this is going to be, we're going to be all over the place, and we're going to run out of time to say everything we wanted to say. But I do just want to kind of go over the history of the Gundam franchise. So Gundam, of course, really refers to a certain type of not robot, but mech suit, like a battle combat suit, humanoid. powered by people, you know, blah, blah, blah. But it also refers to just a massive franchise of entertainment, not just cartoons, but comics, books, novels, toys, oh, so many toys, video games, there's probably, like, candies and stuff, I don't know. Just anything you can think of, can you put Gundam on it? Yes, you can.

So it's a massive money-making franchise. It's the reason why Namco no longer exists. It was just absorbed by Bandai, who basically owns the licensing and video game and toy aspect of Gundam and became incredibly wealthy. I mean, I don't know if you ever went to Namco's headquarters in Tokyo, their old headquarters, but it actually looked like you could launch a Gundam from inside that building. It was this massive pyramid like building inside Tokyo, and it was just totally empty inside. And like you could fit a mech inside of there. So it was destiny. But the series goes back to 1979 when it was first aired, just a standard television series designed to sell toys.

And I don't know how well it did that, but it certainly did not go over that well to begin with. Apparently, it was canceled or like way before its run was completed. And then it just kind of peters out and it ends with sort of a stalemate. So you can definitely tell it's unfinished. One of the big stories that you hear now about that time is some of the kind of biggest supporters, the folks who were petitioning, you know, the networks to let the show continue, were young women fans who loved the show for their characters and the character relationships. You know, one of the big things that the crew who made the show, Tomino, but also the rest of the staff, were trying to do were to blend sort of the character focus that you saw in. emerging anime films with the already established super robot genre, which is why you end up with slightly less powerful, but still, you still get that touch of super robot here in 0079, the Gundam hammer and the beam javelin and all of the kind of the G parts. The G parts and the kind of like mobile armors of the week that Zeon wheels out, the big crab one, and then Big Zam, and then, you know, all of that stuff is firmly rooted in the kind of episode of the week.

format of super robot shows. But it's so interesting to me that before any of the gunploss stuff, the plastic models that became kind of synonymous with Gundam and eventually gave it a second life, before that blew up, it was like, you know, women as fans, women fan, you know, that style of fanzines, fan fiction, all of that stuff that we associate with, you know, Spock and Kirk and early, you know, original series Star Trek fandom was here. two in Japan. And that's so fascinating to me. I mean, who are the main characters of Gundam 0079? Selah and Char, I would argue. And both of those characters have immense appeal to women. Totally. I mean, there's a whole, honestly, probably a whole episode we could tackle about

just how important women have been to keeping science fiction alive and fueling it and how it's been, you know, taken over by a bunch of man babies who use it as fuel for misogyny. But yeah, Star Trek came back because women loved the relationship between the characters because they really, you know, they found a lot of substance in the stories and in the character development, and they just found that really compelling and were huge fans of the show and very vocal, much more so than a lot of men at the time. And I didn't realize Gundam has that same kind of story behind it, but I can absolutely see it because there is, you know, the people are as important as the robots. I mean, the word Gundam is like a shibboleth in this series. especially as you get further and further into the franchise, and Gundams are just like this almost mythic thing. And people are like, oh, it's the Gundam. And they just keep going on about that. But explodes. Yeah.

But as much as, you know, it's about selling these plastic models and giving people something new to buy and more stuff to put on their shelves, I think, you know, at heart it is stories about not only characters, but also about, you know, bigger stories about the nature of society and politics. and warfare and so on. And, you know, I don't think it's insignificant that Yoshi Yuki Tomino, the kind of lead visionary for the series, the franchise, was born in 1941, just in the thick of World War II, and would have grown up in post-war Japan, you know, kind of toward that era of reconstruction where Japan was basically impoverished. You know, we've had Matt Alt on the Retronauts podcast a few times recently, and he's written a great book called

A Pure Invention, that's it. And it has, you know, entire chapters about the relationship between, you know, kind of re-emerging Japan in the late 20th century, you know, post-war Japan, and pop culture. And you look at the themes of warfare of, you know, genocide, of apocalypse, you know, just weapons of mass destruction. and the impact, the real impact that it has on human lives, especially something like war in the pocket. And you really see, like, this is, you know, written with a very specific point of view that I don't know that Americans or Europeans could have come up with a story. I think you needed to be someone who lived through, you know, post-nuclear Japan and experienced what that was all about to really understand the impact of war.

You know, once the history books are done writing about it, people have to, you know, live through. the results and deal with that. And Gundam is a lot about that. What's interesting, though, is that you could argue that Zeon is very much from the Japanese perspective, at least in the 1970s, just because it is a show that is effectively a World War two like war drama in a lot of respects, except that Xion is a smaller kind of technologically advanced society that's rebelling against the, what's a much larger country in Earth, as it and they're able to kind of bring the fight to them initially, but keep getting pushed back and push back and push back. So the flip and perspective is kind of interesting to me.

Totally. I think the two things that undergird that for me. The first is that Tomi Noah has said that what he was really interested in doing, and again, who knows? When you have a series this story and this long, it's hard to know if the creators speaking 30 years later are being accurate to what they were motivated by. at the time, but they certainly have a better, a closer relationship to that truth than we do as outsiders. And so, Tomino has said he wanted to create a war story in which both sides of the war were told with some degree of clarity, that normally in, especially in children's, you know, media, you're telling stories about war where there was a good

guy and a bad guy. And there are certainly bad guys in 0079, Gieran. very directly. His fascist father compares him to Hitler. And he's like, well, that's not so bad. Hitler had some pretty good ideas. But at the same time, through a character like Shar and through the backstory in which you learn that what the Zabi family, which has become ascendant and taking control of the kind of space colonies through the, through Zion, what they've done is kind of co-opted a bottom-up movement that was about breaking. free from Earth's depression, getting sovereignty and political representation, freeing themselves from economic exploitation, and all of that is caught up in a beautiful rapper of the old

royal family having been deposed, Shar living under an alias, looking for revenge against the Nazis who overthrew his own family. You end up with soap opera history happening, and it's a blast to watch that side of the war when on the other side you have these children kind of tossed into the waves of conflict Amaro needing to learn how to pilot this thing

and then and then needing to kind of struggle with the idea that he's very, the thing he's very good at is killing people, but the thing he, the thing that the world won't let him be good at, despite his literal, you know, super power is connecting to people.

And so like, yeah, it's such a distinct thing, especially in the context of other children's media at the time. And it's no wonder to me that it ends up getting the fandom that it gets eventually, even if it took a little while, you know? Yeah, one of the reasons that the original Gundam drew me in originally was that, first of all, it has a real scope to it in what you were talking about with the storytelling with both showing the Zion side and then also what's happening with Earth and then what's happening with White Base. Like, you get a sense that there is a huge conflict happening that you're only seeing a tiny part of, and that's one of the reasons that kind of

Gundam took off ultimately was because people really got into the supplementary material with Operation British and everything and the Mobile Suit variations, and they've, you know, shown different parts of the story over the years. But another thing that grabbed me was, you know, I, like so many Americans, I was raised on Star Trek, and Star Trek, as much as I love it, has this kind of heightened version of the future that doesn't always feel entirely realistic. especially that was the case when we got to Star Trek the next generation in D-Space 9, you had warp drive and techno-babel, and they could techno-babel their way out of every single problem. And then you would go over to Mobile Suit Gundam, and it has almost a Robert Heinle kind of feel,

you know, Starship troopers and all that, combined with space psychics and espers and all that. So you get a feeling of it like, oh, this could be a somewhat realistic version of the future. They're at pains to explain why they're actually driving giant robots. It's because of Minoski particles, and they've introduced advanced control systems that make the mobile suits actually work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that hooks its way into my nerd brain who desperately wants to feel like the show that they're watching has some kind of meaning or some kind of realism and goes from there. Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting that when you kind of look at the Zeon versus the Earth Federation, Zion is very much an organization that it's very kind of built around personas, you know, around a devotion to the idea of the figureheads, whereas the Earth Federation is very much about systems. It's about ranks and hierarchies. And there is no real clear leader. I don't think you ever see like the Earth Federation president, do you? If you do, they're totally forgettable. It's more about like high command people, but that's about it. Yeah. Revel, general revel, for instance.

In Gundam Sea Destiny, the Earth Federation president is basically George W. Bush. There you go. So anyway, but it's basically like, you know, where you fall kind of on the spectrum has to do, you know, where you were born, like were you on one of the Earth colonies or on Earth or were you in one of the free colonies. But it also speaks to like people's devotion to the idea of a person, of leaders, or of a system. But at the same time, I don't feel like there's that much ultimate difference because, you know, the, the whole Zeon thing, you know, the Zobby family, and especially as you get into the later shows where Maneva is basically the Anastasia Romanov of space, like this figure whose existence is a rallying point,

basically. And you don't really get that with the Federation until you start seeing the Gundam pilots who, you know, all of them except Judau in double Zeta. basically have a blood connection to the Gundams themselves. Like their parents worked on the Gundams usually, and even though they didn't realize it, they were basically destined to be like, you know, the superhero in a super robot saving the day. So in the end, they're both kind of, you know, guilty of the same sort of personality cults, almost, I think you could say.

You mentioned that you're watching Gundam Unicorn. I just want to observe, and this is a thing that has kind of evolved over time. with Zeon is that they'll show two perspectives of Zeon. They'll show the working class people who are just living on, say, an asteroid or something or a space station and then trying to make their living and their families being starved by the Earth Federation. And so they join Zeon to fight for freedom. And then you have your aristocrats. Like, oh, I don't forget. I forget what full frontals like lieutenant is. McCuvey with the Vaz in 0079 or yeah, any of. Angelou. Yeah, Angelou, that's the guy.

Yeah, full frontals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Full frontal. Also full frontal. So these aristocrats have basically co-opted the struggle and kind of made it their own. And the contrast is really jarring. And you get the sense of you really want to side with the people who are just trying to

freaking survive on the planet, on the colonies and everything, who are ultimately being victimized by people like the zombies. Yeah. Yeah, that certainly resonates with modern day politics, I would say, and movements happening around the world, especially here in the U.S. Uh-huh. But, you know, at the same time, if you look back to Universal Century 079, you know, original Gundam, what you have is, I don't know that they were necessarily working to make that kind of point and to draw those direct political parallels to, you know,

what we're seeing in the world right now. I think they were working with a lot of disparate influences. Obviously, they were working from things like Giant Robo and Mazinger Z, you know, the super robot idea where the robots had personalities or how it had, you know, self-actualization, but also with hard science fiction. But also, you know, Kat, you mentioned Esper's, like the new types, like the trends of 1960s, 1970s science fiction. Like that was, that was so big, the idea of, you know, there's been the sea change in science fiction over the decades. And I think, think it really kind of happened in the 80s, I would say, where, you know, before there was, you know, the idea of, you know, going to the moon, going to Mars, whatever, like technology, science,

rockets, whatever, but also the idea that human beings would better themselves through their own innate powers, through their own innate abilities and unlock special gifts and basically evolved to a next form, whether that was through psychic powers or through superintelligence. You see, like, the Benegeseret and the navigators in Dune, you see the force in Star Wars. or even like the very first episode of Star Trek, you have Gary Mitchell and, you know, going beyond the galactic barrier and awakening his innate ESP. That was just baked into science fiction. And the new types are very, very much an evolution of that. Like, they are drawn directly from that idea. But then you get into the 80s and you really start to see a move away from Esper's and ESP and

science fiction and more toward humanity evolving through technological means. And you see that in Gundam as the, you know, you start seeing, you know, first the psychamu or whatever, the, the, the, the, the brain-controlled, uh, gundoms. But then you have cyber gondoms. And then you, by the time you get to Gundam Unicorn, you have, you have, uh, or cyber new types, you mean, uh, or cyber new types. What did I say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cybergundoms. Oh, yeah. Well, sure. There's probably a series about that, too. Cyber new types, yeah. And then you have the, uh, NTD system in Gundam Unicorn, which is literally artificial new types trying to destroy. destroy natural new types and just get rid of the idea of human evolution on its own terms in favor of, you know, artificial evolution through machines and through technology. And I guess you had that also in Thunderbolt with the, the amputees who became better attuned to their systems through their cybernet or their, what do you call it, cybernetic, not cybernetic, bionic, yes, bionic implants. There you go. Cyborg implants.

Yeah. And for me, one of the most interesting things about Gundam, especially as you trace it through the years and across different creative teams, is what do you mean by new type? And I really think that it gets messier the further you get from Tomino specifically. And he makes it messy along the way, too, to be clear. But I think his messiness- He never clearly defines it. Well, I think victory gets the closest. And I think unicorn specifically sets out to define new type and push-back. against the notion that it's an ace pilot, right? Totally. I think throughout you, you kind of see them attempting to sort of reset the idea of what it means to be a new type. Unicorn definitely does take a very explicit approach. Totally.

Well, and for me, the thing, and this is from like what Tomino has said since, you know, in interviews and stuff like that also, but the new type is the thing we could be if the world didn't push on us the way it did. It's one of the reasons why I think it's interesting that artificial new type. First of all, in Japan, like, the word is not cyber new type. That divide does not, it's not as clear as that. I forget the exact term in the Japanese, but it is not as clear as like cyborg. Do you know what I mean? It is a little less, a little muddier than that. Because it isn't just about like implants. It's also about training and putting people through terrible processes which unlock this new type potential. Yeah, I think double Zeta kind of gets into that, not directly, but it intimates it when what's his face, marshmallow comes back. And he's gone from being like a ridiculous fop to like this bloodthirsty terror. And they're like, oh, he's been enhanced too much. So, Austin, it's a Kiyokaningen or literally enhanced human. Enhanced human. Right. Yes. Which doesn't even say the word new type, right? New type is not there. It's not a. And then I think Gundam X actually does say artificial.

new type instead, which is an interesting division. But the thing I was getting to is, especially when you look at something like Victory Gundam, what you end up getting at is this classic Tomino thing. And this is another thing from the 60s and 70s sci-fi, right? Which is the youth will save us. Children have not yet had their new typeness, their ability to connect to one another, ripped away from them. And because of that, that skill can be developed under the correct conditions. And what's that look like? What's that mean? On one side, you have like Lala, who is trying to connect to people, you know, deeply emotionally. And on the other, you have Amaro who is being thrown into conflict after conflict in order to sharpen him as a weapon.

And seeing the way that stuff plays out over time does fit so well into that era of science fiction, which you point out in the notes for the show, you know, connects to so many different visions of, like, can humans transcend the things that we've been for all this time? Can we stop just killing each other. Can we connect to each other on this deeper, deeper, more emotional level? And Gundam says yes, but it is not a direct line there, and it certainly isn't given to us by winning a war. And that's unfortunate because that seems to be all we know how to do in the universal century. But in the original 0079, so the thing that I find interesting is in 0079, it's relatively, I don't know, want to say subtle, like a sense of intuition for a new type and

that kind of thing. And there's that whole sequence where Amro and Lala, like, connect psychically and all that. It's amazing. It's the most psychedelic, awesome. I love that sequence so much. But then by Double Zeta, which I believe is another Tomino joint, they basically are just superhumans. They have superpowers. They're flashing lights and everything. You get that sequence where judo becomes a giant version of himself standing over the city. His emotional pressure or Mashima doing his final new type explosion. I mean, listen, in victory, there's a queen who heals people with new type powers. And that is a Tomino joint. Double Zeta is interesting because Tomino had kind of left it to the studio to go work on CCA. And that's part of why I feel

like it's so disjointed. Yeah, disjointed and all over the place. I know, Kat, you're a big Zizi hater. Oh, a huge hater. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's so uneven and it rehashes so much of what happened in the original Zeta. And the first half is unwonted. watchable, in my opinion. And the second half is barely better and it's still pretty bad. There's like an eight episode run there that is some of my favorite Gundam. I think the desert arcs through Lena's Blood Part 2 and like that arc. Everything with the Ireland colony drop is very good. That stuff is great too. Yeah. All that is great. Totally. There's some really good Gundam in there. But unfortunately, it's a full season show and it takes a while to get going.

But then it has moon moon, a two-parter. I think you could, I think you could take all of Zeta and Double Zeta and condense them down to a single series and you would have a really, really phenomenal single season of Gundam. But, yeah, as it is, both of those shows just

they just feel flabby. They don't have the focus that Double 79 has. 0079. I think I still come around on Zeta pretty positively, and I think a lot of that is aesthetic. In my mind, when I think what does anime look like, I see Zeta Gundam. A green-haired boy biting his fingernails forever. A hundred percent.

A blonde rival whose miserable falls off a mountain. Love it. Jared. I need more Jared in my life immediately. And the music, right? The music of Zeta Gundam is so memorable that the sort of like pop aesthetic of what Zeta is determined so much about that style of Scott sci-fi anime in the 80s and kind of through some of the early 90s stuff. And it just resonates with me as a fan so much. And that's despite a lot of problems. I think Zeta is probably where it becomes, increasingly clear that though Gundam has lots of female fans, what it might not have is lots of, lots of well-written women characters. No, I think the women are actually pretty well-written. I think they are just murdered unceremoniously on a regular basis, like, starting with the youngest and just kind of working their way up through the age ranks to fuel the heroic men and make them sadder so that they will fight more. Like, there are a lot of, there are a lot of really great women in the Gundam franchise, and most of them die stupidly. I really like Emma a lot. And I was like, man, I really like Emma and Zeta and I can't wait to see her. And then when I did a Gundam rewatch not too long ago, I suddenly realized that Emma's barely in Zeta Gundam for the most part. And then she dies the end. Her storyline really, really bothers me. Like, it kind of gets to this thing that Gundam does where people go out into space and they fight each other and they kill each other. And then as they're killing another person, they're like, shouting why it's that person's fault that they have to die. They're like, if you had just

stayed home, I wouldn't have had to kill you. And I feel like her arc is the worst of that because she's abducted in battle and someone decides, you know, one of the opponents decides not to kill her and takes her back. And then the next time you see her, like half the season later, she's like, hey, yeah, I just decided to team up the bad guys. It just seemed like the thing to do. And, uh, yeah, so I guess they're going to order me to go commit genocide against an entire colony. I sure hope sure hope my old friends come and stop me before I do this. Oh, they didn't do it. Well, I just killed millions of people and it's all their fault. Like, I don't know. That really, like, you're thinking of Roccoa, not Emma. Was that Ricoa? Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. RICO's story is. Keep in mind I was

half blind for all this. Her story is like one of the blackmarts on Seda, for sure. I mean, she ends up betraying the good guys because she falls in love with Shiroko is what it comes down to. Got it. She's like, oh, I looked into his eyes. And now I'm going to go commit genocide. And specifically cannot get the connection she wants with Sharr, right? With, with Quatro. And, yeah, that's the part of where I say that I think the women characters are written poorly, is like, the motivations are often women be shopping, you know? And that is not always fantastic.

I mean, just look at Gundum, 20083. God, I can't remember her name, but. Who? Which, what role does she play? The gal who was lifted directly from Top Gun, basically, and dropped into the show, who has basically no motivations except to be interested in the two male protagonists. Nina. Nina. Nina, Puppleton. Yes, that's her. Oh, God. She's, I don't like that character either. She is so uneven.

W83, a show that definitely could have been half as long and twice as good. I mean, that show is beautiful, and yet. It doesn't need to exist. Like, the only purpose it has to say, is to say, well, here at the very end is where the Titans came from. But it doesn't even have the guts to show the main characters becoming Titans in the end. Like, it doesn't even have the guts to say, this is how fascism seeps into an organization. Because if it did, then you would get co-at-the-end in a Titans uniform saluting, because even though he's a good guy, he's caught up in the systems around him. And we don't even get that from that show. Of course, it's the assholes who become the Titans. And like, yeah, great.

Well, now we've associated political upheaval with personal morality instead of with larger. systemic change. And it's like, I don't know, some of those fights are good. The music is cool. I didn't need 13 episodes of it. It's a beautiful, beautiful OVA. Like, it exists solely to be like, wow, that is some gorgeous mecca action from circa the early to mid-90s. Like, holy moly, I am a huge fan of the GP2 in particular. But it's such a huge missed opportunity because, like, Shima, who is a major character, you barely know anything about her background. It turns out her background fills in a huge gap from the original 0079 with the poisoning of a particular colony. And her entire motivation is informed by that, but they never talk about it. It's all in the

background material. Yep. Yep. Which ends up being a big story and does connect to games in some ways here, because like many franchises, you get to a point where Gundam is big enough that what you have are committees looking at what they have in front of them and saying, where can we fill in the gaps. Where can we give some juicy story background? So, like, that specific one, right, is that, is that Chima feels kind of very guilty about having participated in the gassing of a space colony, which even then connects to a 8th MS team because it turns out that according to Gehrin's greed, one of the strategy games, it was Shiro's space colony that Shima gassed, connecting those two across space and time. You actually see him in eighth MS team at one point

a flashback, seeing the colony getting gas. But I believe that it's, I believe that it's Gehrin's greed that explicitly says this is the one that Shima did. And so you end up getting a lot of stories in the games meant to, if not, I guess maybe you could split them into two different categories. One is, here's us replaying the events of the series. And that's something like Journey to Jabro or a lot of other games that do similar things. Or you look at something like 0079 side story on.

Dreamcast, Zeotic Front on PS2, and those are things that are saying, well, where are some spaces we can kind of have an interjection? We can kind of fill in some of the map that hasn't been filled in yet. And I think that that's that when I was a teenager and even into my 20s, I really loved that stuff because I want to just consume Universal Century. I wanted to know encyclopedically everything that happened. And so any attempt to fill in the gaps felt good now as like in my, you know, mid to late 30s, I'm like, eh, I kind of wish that there was more clarity around this stuff and almost would have rather more content in their own little universes or something like that because sometimes those attempts to fill in the gaps end up creating additional layers of complexity or storytelling that like changes what the original story was in something. way. You look at things like Blue Destiny, which introduce a Zion new type school slash institute that's much more like the Earth Federation's Flanagan Institute. I believe the Flanagan Institute is the Earth one. But I thought Flanagan Institute was Zions, yeah. You're right. But it restructures

the Flanagan Institute to look more like the future cyber new type stuff that comes out of the Titans and then in double Zeta where like, well, that wasn't the way that new types were treated in 0079. Like, Shalia Boole existed out in Jupiter somewhere. Lala was coming out of the Flanagan Institute, but you didn't see that institute as being a particularly nefarious institute when it came to what they were doing with new types. But games like Blue Destiny wanted to kind of backport the vision of what an evil new type lab looked like into that timeline.

And so sometimes with games like that, I end up going like, oh, can't we just like leave the material alone a little bit? Well, that's one of the big problems with a massive media franchise. At a certain point, it's a compelling setting. Don't get me wrong. But at a certain point, you become so obsessed with the lore that you start kind of emphasizing that over good storytelling. And I know I was just saying that Shima was a kind of a missed opportunity.

But that's because she was a paper-thing character in 20083, and you don't really understand what her motivations actually are. But, yeah, so, I mean, just look at Gundam Unicorn, a show that is basically all fan service, all about the lore. It's like, remember this, remember that? here's the throwback to this and it's kind of bringing all the individual threads together and ultimately I do like it but that is what Gundam is. It's just appealing to the hardcore fans and actually Bandai Namcoe with Gundam Unicorn found a formula that worked and they're continuing to lean on it

which is oh the people who are going to watch this are the 30 to 40 something year old fans who grew up and had fond memories of the original show and will shell out big bucks to go see in the theaters, to buy all the Blu-rays, to follow each individual episode, and we're going to keep them happy. And you're starting to see that with Star Wars as well, I might add, where they're just like, just keep the fans happy. Whatever, don't care. I will say I said all of that, and then I thought to myself, what is one of my favorite Gundam things ever? And it's 0080 War in the pocket, a completely quote-unquote unnecessary side story. But it's an original story. It's so good. It's so essential to the essence of what

Gundam is. It is not about the war. It is about, you know, what I was saying earlier, the effects of the war, how the war hits and hurts the people just who happen to be there. You know, the war is happening. And they don't really have a choice. They're dragged into it. Their colony, you know, is going to be annihilated. You know, it's going to be nuked if, you know, if not for a chain of events that the characters in the show have no bearing on, have no control over. And it's going to be nuked because there's a secret Gundam base on it that no one who lived there voted for or agreed to. They were a neutral colony. It's like from the jump, it's about people who can't control their, who are put into precarious

places because they've been left out of the political process, right? It is a movie where it, that ends with a child crying. Yes. And it feels earned. Like, you're with that kid, you know, at the very end. Don't worry, Jeremy. There'll be another war one day. That's right.

War in the pocket is great because it's one of the very few pieces of Gundam media that doesn't feel like it's trying to sell you on toys. It manages to capture the kind of interesting aspects of watching these amazingly cool mechanical designs fighting and everything. But there's a real weight and there's a real drama and there's a real, trauma to the action so that when you're in the end, you're not like, I want to go buy these toys. You're like, damn, war sucks. It's funny you say that, though, because the cover art, at least for the Blu-ray I have, doesn't show characters. It shows, like, you know, the main characters

running and they're kids, and they've got backpacks, and they've got little toys of the, of Azaku and a Gundam on their backpack. So, like, even there, you know, you've still got the idea of Gundam as toys, but it's more of a commentary on, you know, like, hey, these are fun, and cool collectibles. It's so neat to see these giant robots and, you know, insignia that a real officer war. But then what does that actually mean? What, you know, where do those things come from when you actually encounter these giant mecksuits? When you actually encounter the soldiers who have to fight and die in this war, what does that mean? And so it actually, you know, it's about contextualizing the idea of toys and collectibles, you know, to a certain degree

and saying, like, stop and think about what all this actually symbolizes and what actually it means. That's why I think that 0080 is the best pure Gundam story out there. And everybody always says, Kat, if I'm going to watch Gundam, where should I start? And I would say, well, you should either start with probably Gundam Thunderbolt, 0080, or 8th MS team because they're, A, digestible, and B, they just tell really good, strong independent stories that aren't hugely reliant on the lore to be able to appreciate. You think Gundam Thunderbolt is a strong story?

Well, maybe not a strong story, but sure is beautiful. Oh, the soundtrack, man. It's gorgeous. It's worth watching just for the music. But yeah, okay. I was actually surprised to hear you say it's a strong story because there's good things to say about Thunderbolt, but it's really steeped in lore. And if you aren't familiar with the one-year war, it's kind of like, what the?

I was combining all three, okay. Okay, okay, okay. I think the one thing that maybe changes this. So I used to be someone who also said W-O-A-D or O-EthMS team because they're so digestible. Also because I think O-A-M-S team is, it's not, when I say it's a great place to start, it's not because I think it's perfect. It's because I think it has a lot of the problems you will find in Gundam in it as well. And it's a good way of judging, hey, will I be able to put up with some of the BS of Gundam in general as I continue down this journey. But I will say Crunchy, just picked up, Mobile Suit Gundam, 0079, and I think that show holds up, and I think it's worth watching that show. If you can stand the 1979 animation, which I think is really beautiful in places, especially with its like pan shots and, you know, mural backgrounds and stuff. It has some really dynamic stuff for its age. And also, it can be fun to watch stuff that gets a little goofy sometimes visually. Yeah, and I think you get the tone set

for you with the disco-enka theme that starts the show. And if you can, if you can handle that, then, like, the datedness is not going to bother you too badly. Yes, it's 41 years old, 42 years old, but it's okay. But wow, it's 42 years old. That's incredible that something that old still resonates the way it does and, like, lean on that and enjoy it for, for, for that sake. It is a beautiful show, and it's a very acquired taste. And I think it takes a particular type of person to be able to sit down and go, I appreciate this 1979 animation and these depictions of women and these character designs for what they are. And I can just put that to one side and just appreciate the story, which is very good. Well, I think, you know, the thing

that 0079 has going for it is that even though it does have a very rambling story, it's ultimately there's basically like three arcs. There is, you know, the white base escaping and getting to Luna 2, the white base heading to Earth and making its way to Jabarro, and then the white base heading out to Abu Oku for the final encounter, or the final conflict with Xion. And, you know, if you break it down into kind of those three arcs, within those arcs, you have a lot of really interesting stories. A lot of the standalone episodes are really strong. You have, you know, kind of some limited arcs with specific characters like Ramba Rall, but then you also have just like standalone episodes where, say, for example,

Amaroe, you know, encounters his mother, who he hasn't seen in years. And what does it mean, you know, to encounter your mother after you've become basically an ace soldier in war? What does it mean to find the father that you basically destroyed his life without even realizing it? You know, there's a great episode that I think Tomino directed that I just really love. And it's totally incidental to the story, but it's where a bunch of just kind of work a day Zion. soldiers know where the white base is coming through and they come up with this this completely like you know makeshift plan to destroy the Gundam to destroy the white base and it's you have to just watch it to appreciate it but it is very much time be still it's an incredible episode and yeah it's it's it's one of those things that that is a reminder that episodic television that you don't need the sort of serialized high stakes a cliffhanger episode ending, everything is tied to the larger meta plot in order to tell interesting stories in a setting like this. And I think that speaks to how strong the kind of

core premise of the series and setting are. But then you have the three kids in their hijinks. You do get that, yes. Yeah. And so, you know, I will say about time stand still or whatever it was called, like that one episode, I think does more to humanize Zeon than any other single incident or show or, sorry, episode in the entire 0079. But also, yeah, the whole thing with the kids, like the actual kids, like the prefubescent kids who keep showing up, is really weird. Like, why in the middle of Zeta does Char return to the Argama? And he's like, hey, I brought some kids. Like, what the hell? Was there an explanation for that? I just, it was just like, all of a sudden he

shows up and he's like, yeah, I have some, some like, preschoolers with me. It was so weird. Because we've got to have kids. I know, but like, is there an in-universe explanation of why Char the Ace of Zeon, the Red Comet, has preschoolers with them? They're orphans. Are they? Is that the thing? I think that, yeah, they're war orphans, if I recall correctly. And they just got to go somewhere. Yeah, they got to go somewhere. And the problem is the place. Let's put them in the thick of combat. The ship that sees the most action in the war. Even by Zeta Gundam, they were playing on the, appeal and the nostalgia for the original Gundam. And this continued into Char's counterattack,

which they did not make it as a final kind of exclamation mark on the series. They were doing it to play into nostalgia for the original Gundam. And so whenever you see weird elements like that, where it's like, well, now there are orphans running around the ship again. It's because they're like, well, this element worked in the original Gundam. Right. Let's use it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean... In scare quotes. Shinto and Coom are definitely like, yeah, so this is basically, you know, the three orphans from the first show, except there's only two now. But now that those orphans have grown up, you know, and one of them is going to go fight in combat, I guess they can't be the plucky little kids anymore. But it was just kind of a weird little, what the hell?

Did I miss something? I have a question for you all, would you, if you were to recommend the original series, would you recommend the original series, or would you recommend the movie trilogy? Because as much as I enjoy the movie trilogy, I do find the first movie in it to be a little bit slow. I would recommend the series. I think if you're in for penny, you're in for a pound. I think the movies have some really beautiful additional stuff. And musically, there are some tracks that are only in the films that are great. But I really do think that the pacing on the films is off. You don't get, even though there's three of them, and they do break down along the lines.

Jeremy just kind of set up in terms of the three arcs of that series, you don't get the sense of travel and distance. And that's so important about what White Base's journey is to me. And you need the series for that. Yeah, I agree. I, like, I've tried watching the movies. I watched them after the TV series, and they just feel, you know, they feel like digest. They feel like the kind of thing that you watch as a refresher as opposed to, like, this is the first, you know, your first encounter with the series and you're going to really absorb the full scope and the full substance of this show, of this story, by watching these. It just, it doesn't have that. And you miss so many of those moments in the series, like I was talking about, where there's just, like, standalone episodes. And those are completely cut out of, of, the movies is if they were inessential, but they're really not. They're so important. And they really, you know, they show the universe that these characters live in and kind of the way people deal with the war and with the reality of it. And to me, that is, that is really kind of the heart of Gundam. I mean, robots are neat and stuff, but it's really, it really is about the

people and about the terrible impact of war. And so I think you miss that if you don't watch the series. And yeah, the series can drag and it has some goofy stuff. But, you know, maybe it's just because I'm old and I grew up watching TV series kind of, you know, with the same quality of animation. But I don't mind, you know, style that is pegged to a specific time. That's, that's fine by me. It's, you know, it's dated for sure. But, you know, you look at any, any section of the Gundam franchise and you can definitely see the hallmarks of its date. Like F-91 or Char's Counterattack are gorgeous, just absolutely beautiful, full theatrical. animation, like up there with Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and that sort of thing, except

not that much like Ghost in the Shell, because that was a few years later and had a different, you know, cleaner art style. You look at something like the MSO8 team or, you know, 83 or 83, and those look, you can definitely tell those were created later. They've got more of the look of the late 90s in them. Or you look at something like unicorn, and you can tell that was, you know, 2010, that era, because it's got that kind of clean digital animation. There's a lot of of integrated CGI. God, I love how Unicorn looks. The first five minutes of Unicorn are so beautiful. All of them are tied to their specific era. And yeah, Unicorn, the first time, the unicorn transforms to the Gundam. And the music hits? I'm not really into the whole mech side of Gundam. Like,

I think it's like cool mecks and stuff. But man, that is like a shivers down the spine kind of moment. It is a very, very good piece of animation. You know a good Gundam show when the, you know, the the mooch suits, the lesser suits that aren't the super ones are actually competitive. It can actually do some damage. And that happens. And actually, the opening fight in the original, in Unicorn is one of my all-time favorites. Because it has a sense of, I mean, it's just a one-on-one duel, but it has a sense of impact to it that you're not going to find in very many other places in the entire franchise.

And when the two beam savers are clashing, um, they, make wonderful use of sound to make it really like feeling like it's crackling with power and everything. And they're actually, and the faceless Federation suit is actually, they have some tactics. They're not just kind of charging in and everything. And it feels like, oh, he might actually be able to do something and then he dies. But still, it's excellent. I actually think, I actually think my favorite thing about unicorn are the in-cockpit shots, because the way everything moves and rotates, it's the first time you really get a sense of the actual mass and scale of these huge robots. Like, there is just, whoever did the mechanical animation in that series,

you know, whatever team that was did an amazing job of really giving you a sense of like, wow, these are these bulky, multi-ton robots that are moving around and they shouldn't be able to do this and they are a miracle of engineering and they are so damn cool. Seeing the full frontals, Zananju, do those flips and turns as it's blasting those rockets, it's like, oh, okay, yes, this is what it means to fight a new type. How does anyone compete with something like this? It's so good. Also, another video game connection, Sano, the composer for Unicorn, of course, did the excellent Xenoblate Chronicles X soundtrack that I think is way too slept on.

Unicorn has an amazing soundtrack for sure. It has a kind of like, it grounds it immediately in this hard sci-fi kind of feeling where it feels like a real departure from, say, the likes of Gundam Wing with its poppy anime and everything. It's like, yeah, this show means serious business and they establish that in like the first five minutes. And by serious business, they mean this is pure fan service. Yeah, the other thing Gundam Unicorn does really well is to give you a sense of the actual space of the physical locations of colonies of asteroids. Kind of early in the series when they're, there's an attack on, is it access? I can't remember. One of the big asteroids that there's a bunch of people living in, the base. Like, there's air and smoke and depth, and you really get a sense of the atmosphere inside of that. And, you know, things being blown out and jettisoned into space. And it just, like, it really has an impact and a sense of scale, like no other Gundam. And it's really amazing. And to me, that's a really important part of Gundam. And something we haven't really

talked about. We've talked about, like, hard sci-fi, but we haven't really talked about the actual scientific grounding, like the real science fiction that, you know, even though we're talking about espers and giant robots fighting in space with beam sabers, there's still like a fundamental emphasis on something that approaches real world science. And, you know, we're talking about space and space colonies and, you know, robots fighting in space. But it's important to specify, this takes place all within kind of the gravitational sphere of. The gravitational sphere of Earth. Like when when people go to the asteroids or even to Jupiter to collect, you know, helium 3 or whatever, that's a year's long journey. They, they are out of the story for a long time.

Like, Judah disappears at the end of double Zeta to go to Jupiter. That's it for Judah. We'll ever see him again because he's, he's like gone to another part of the solar system. There's no, there's no super light travel in this universe. It is all... Judo returns in crossbone Gundom. He sure does. It's incredible. Okay. But, but, but that's because crossburn Gundam doesn't. does take place out beyond the intersphere and years, years, years later. Okay. Like a generation later, basically.

But anyway, what I was saying was like to really kind of understand Gundam, and the series does a good job of this, both in original Gundam and even in Double Zeta, of showing you like what the Earth sphere actually is and how all the colonies relate to each other, but it's all based on Lagrange points and on the gravitational influence of the Earth and of the moon. And you have these, you know, these asteroids, these, like space colony, well, not space colonies, but like these rock structures out in space, Luna 2 and Axis and so forth. And those are all asteroids that have been basically transported at great cost into the proximity of Earth to be used for mining and then to turn into kind of residential spaces. But the mines

then are used to create these massive cylinders. And the cylinders are basically, they're called bunches, but there's like 40 bunches per colony, and each bunch has like, you know, what is it, five million people living in it or something? It's five miles wide, 20 miles long, a sphere that's rotating, using centrifugal force to create 1.0 gravity, you know, Earth equivalent. And it's a massive human undertaking, but it actually seems like something that, you know, far in the future with enough money and enough determination, actually could be done. There's no warp speed. There's no, you know, Like, the most magical thing are the Minovsky particles, which something like that could exist, something that, you know, basically turns radar and line of, you know, forces electronic communication,

you know, reaches the moot. Yeah, totally. I think that it's worth saying that a lot of the science is grounded in a book called The High Frontier by Gerard O'Neill, who's this sort of scientist, who's writing in the 50s and the 60s and working in the 50s and the 60s. And High Frontier comes out after the Apollo space program kind of gets mothballed, I believe, if I'm remembering that correctly. And is kind of meant to be a kick in the pants of kind of Western scientists to say, we need to stay in space. Hey, there's a way to do this that would provide energy and could be corporatized.

And Tomino is very much pulling from High Frontier. This is why they're called O'Neill cylinders, I own O'Neill Space Colonies. because they are the design. If you go look up the High Frontier and look through some of the images of it, it's like looking into a Gundam colony or a Gundam cylinder, you know. And ironically, or maybe apropos, Jeff Bezos a year or two ago decided to say out loud that what he wanted to do is pursue a world in which O'Neill cylinders were built in his lifetime. And it's like, you should watch Gundam.

It doesn't go well. Yes, lots of people move up there. And then they become the exploited working class. Which, you know, Jack Bezos may be ready to do that anyway. Who could say? I think that's more of an Elon Musk thing. But yeah. Yeah. So. Bezos is the one who raised it. That's, you know, it's surprising to say it. But like, all of those billionaires have their eyes on the stars. That's where the, you know, the future resources are. But yeah, the thing about, you know, the big robots and cool mecks and stuff in Gundam is that they are all against this backdrop of, you know, a science future that could exist. around Earth. And also, you know, a lot of the drama of Gundam, the big drama, revolves around

the fragility of the system, of the fact that, hey, there are millions of people living in this single contained space, and they're very vulnerable to poison gas. And by the way, these things aren't, you know, they're in space and they're kind of, you know, held in place by gravity and by the relationship to other objects and, you know, how the Earth and the moon relate to one another and those fields and everything, but you can nudge them out of place and you can drop them on Earth. And what happens when, you know, five miles of glass and steel smash into the Earth from orbit? It's not pretty. Rest in peace, Sydney.

So these become kind of the big crisis points in Gundam, like using basically physics to destroy, you know, entire swaths of humanity. Yeah, Jeremy. And I think that that kind of is embodied in one of the, always one of the most dramatic sequences in any given Gundam series. And they do it a lot. They keep going back to that well, but it's the reentry episode, as I would call it, where inevitably they need to get, go down to the earth, and there's a big fight that erupts, and two of the characters end up falling into the atmosphere, and they're going to burn up. It's like, well, what's going to happen, and they're fighting as they're going? And that is those moments where you're like, oh, yeah, like, Gundam is trying to lean into the drama of the actual science and everything.

And, you know, they fudge it for sure. But I would say the very first time they do that is still the most effective. I think they kind of rely on your familiarity with the concept after that. But the first time, like they really go to great pains to explain, you know, you have to avoid going below this point. You have to keep your speed up. You have to avoid being caught by the gravity of the earth because once you're caught, your suit doesn't have the power to escape. And you will burn up on reentry. And, you know, the fact that the Gundam doesn't burn up because it has, you know, ways to circumvent that to protect itself, that makes it, you know, like that's for everyone is a real revelation. Like, wow, this is truly, you know, a next generation mex suit. It is beyond anything we've ever seen before.

And then there's a wonderful moment right after the white base enters the Earth atmosphere the first time where a little kid who's only ever grown up in space goes, what are those? And they're like, those are clouds. And that's the ocean. And it really drives home that, hey, these people live out in space and they have no idea what the Earth is. all about. And that ends up being a recurring thing, right? Both the people who don't know what Earth is like who've never been there before. You end up even seeing that in something like 08MS team. But also the kind of ecological through line for most of UC Gundam, the idea that what we've done is ruined the Earth is returned to again and again, and not only because of the colony drops, but also simply because of mass production and factories and everything else that, you know, we're really doing currently. And along with the question of

can we evolve beyond the kind of murky, ugly form of humanity that we are today, the other kind of ethical question is, can we prevent ourselves from destroying the planet? And if not, what's that cost look like when it becomes too late? And I think it's important to also situate that in the kind of 60-70s sci-fi movement, right? Yeah. And, you know, I guess Shar actually ultimately becomes an eco-terrorist. Desertification is a huge theme. You know, a lot of earth-based Gundam is either in the jungles of South America or else the deserts of North Africa. And, you know, there's discussion, I think, in double Zeta where they're talking about how desert is encroaching into Europe and they've had to plant massive belts of trees just to push back against desertification and how parts of the earth are just being taken over by sand because no one feels it's important.

to prevent desertification there. And, you know, Char ultimately, Sharr, sorry, ultimately comes to, I guess, the conclusion that, you know, humanity doesn't deserve to survive and it's impossible to protect the Earth and not pollute the Earth. So the best thing to do is just wipe out humanity by, you know, making an ecological disaster on Earth, but one that the rest of the planet will recover from, but humanity will not. So that's what he comes to.

Not to be my, not to be the classic Shar defender here, but it is worth saying that at the time of Schar's counterattack, the vast majority of humanity lives in space. And that is part of why he can justify that decision. It's because he isn't killing all of humanity. He's killing all of humanity left on Earth, which is still, let's be clear, many, many, many, many people, but that's part of the calculus he's making. They ruin Char and Char's counterattack question. They do. I'm I'm the person who still thinks that that show is fun, or that, that movie has a question. When's the last time you both saw that, that show? I saw Charles Counterattack a couple years ago. I saw it three or four days ago. Okay, so you've just seen it. I got to see it. It was like one of the last movies I saw in theaters before COVID hit. That was the first time I saw it was when they had the anniversary, right? Yes, totally. And one of the most striking things about seeing it is the way it ends. For people who are listening, who maybe have not seen Sharr's counterattack. We're obviously going to spoil it like we've been spoiling everything else. But the core premise is Char has risen to leader, to the leader of

Neo-Zion, finally having stepped up after years of refusing to do that, and it's kind of one of the big plot points of Zeta is that he really struggles with the idea that he should be a public figure and a leader, and instead kind of lets things go to shit multiple times. But now he's done that. And he's begun to bombard Earth with these asteroids in order to get everything everyone off the planet or kill them if they stay. And the big final thing is that he's going to drop Axis, which was the kind of home base of Haman Karn's version of Zeon, and drop that onto Earth, which will permanently damage it in such a way that all humanity dies and theoretically allow it to slowly heal. At the end of that film, the kind of Axis shock happens,

this miracle in which Amaro tries to push the asteroid back from falling on to Earth. A number of soldiers from both sides of the conflict, realize what's going to happen, realize in their hearts they don't want this to happen, go and try to help push it away. And then this sort of like green, glowy mist surrounds the asteroid and pushes it away and kind of pushes it into an orbit where it will not fall on Earth and destroy it. And that ending is not met with fanfare. That is not the Star Wars, you know, Gungan parade music playing. It's actually like very quiet and haunting as everyone looks up at the sky and sees axis drift away. And for me, Tomino is asking the question, how far are we willing to go to change history? Should we be

defending the status quo in which the earth will continue to degrade? Or are we going to side with Shar and take huge dramatic revolutionary action that will hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to get to something better? And Amaro and Shar align on that axis throughout the entirety of the show. And, you know, I don't think the tommy no sides necessarily with either of them, but he's deeply frustrated by our refusal to do something in the face of the devastation of the earth. And so it's why I think it's so fascinating that that does not end with Amaro in a parade. It does not end with, you know, the horns calling for success. It ends with like the sound of the wind and everyone kind of stuck back in the status quo. And that is why I end up really

liking Shar's counterattack, because that's the position we're kind of in ecologically right now. We would need a huge dramatic shakeup, and I don't mean the death of billions of people. Most humans do not live in outer space. I would prefer most people to live. But we would need a huge dramatic shakeup politically and sociologically in the world to stop ecological catastrophe at this point. And we refuse to drop the asteroid. We refuse to resituate humanity's place on Earth in order to save the Earth and in effect save ourselves. And that's why I think CCA still speaks to me, despite a lot of stuff that I get why people don't like that movie. In fairness, I think dropping an asteroid on the Earth is kind of an interesting comparison to

say the Green New Deal. Yeah, sure. Kind of the opposite. But the thing is, I think we need to go, I, you know, I suspect we will need to go further than the Green New Deal in order to save the planet, right? Yeah, I think that's meant to be a first step. But yeah, I, um, You know, when I went to see Sharr's Counterattack in the theaters, I took my nephew, a teenager, who's also really in a Japanese cartoons, anime, but he doesn't have a lot of experience with Gundam. And I feel like I took that poor kid way in over his head. He left. He was just like, I, what just happened? What have I watched? You know, I had never seen it before either. I was like, hey, this will be fun. This is, you know, a classic series, a classic film. I've heard good things about it. I'd like to go see it. He was like, sure. So, like, I, you know, I knew who Lala was and I knew what was going on. But at the same time, I was like, man, this is throwing stuff at us fast. Like, it is just all over the place. And he was just kind of shell-shocked at the end.

So kids don't start with Shar's counterattack. Which is interesting because Char's counterattack is, it was kind of framed explicitly at people who weren't that familiar with Gundam. But I suppose when it came out in 1989 or whatever, the idea was that probably everybody has at least a passing familiarity with the concept of Gundam. because Gundam was the Japanese Star Wars and whatnot. But so, yeah, like, Charles Counter Attack, one of my problems with it is that it is specifically geared toward people who didn't know it were just there to enjoy movies.

So it's interesting to me that it was like, no, this, this movie was way too much and they had no idea what the heck was going on. It's such a poorly paced film. It jumps around so dramatically. It relies on. And it has quests. I understood that already. I love Quest. Quest is great. She's such a little brat who understands the world in a way that no adult will let her, like, no adult will admit that she actually does understand the world and understand her place in it and the conditions that have brought everyone to where they are. I'm, I am quest defense force 100%. Okay. And she just, she just plays into Char's a predilection for young girls is what she is. That's what it is. That's what Quest is.

That's what Quest is. The thing, the thing is the worst version of that is stuff that was not written by Tomino, stuff like the Hamann Karn book that is just like incredibly gross. And for me, like, I very much think that that is about Sharr being emotionally a child and not knowing how to make human connections. You know, he has a partner in that film who is an adult woman. And I think his closeness to children is the same as Bright's closeness to children, which is he wants to use. them for their power and does not understand how to connect to them in a, I mean, we see this with the way he treats Camille. He's not a good mentor to children. He wants to sharpen them into his weapons over and over again. And that is a real fucking problem. I was going to stand

up and defend Bright, but Double Zeta kind of messed him up. So it's, it's, it's, it's, Double Zeta ruins everything. It's true. And what's really annoying is that double Zeta, another show about young girls who are being victimized in various ways, is that it, so much of the lore established in double Zeta gets leaned into real heavily in shows like Gundam unicorns. So it's true. It's true. It can't excise it like you should. No.

And also, speaking of characters who didn't get their just desserts or didn't get the positive ending they deserved, justice for Merida Cruz, one of the best characters. one of the best characters in Unicorn. I haven't seen what happens with her yet, so... Don't spoil it for me. I did not realize you were... I'll be there in a few days. Yeah, you'll get there. But it's okay. How far are you in Unicorn? I'm halfway through.

Like, yeah, literally at the halfway mark. Did you see the entire thing on Torrington base with the march of the mobile suit variations and all that? No, I haven't been there yet. Okay, I look forward to that. There's like there's, I think they're attacking. Is it Torrington? It's someplace.

It's in Australia from Gundam O'Dobo80, But like I said, fan service. Right, right. Okay. So anyway. I'm excited for you to find out the mystery of Laplas's box. Yes. What is Laplace?

Oh, my God. I mean, there's so much to impact there. That could be a whole podcast. Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, that is definitely, like I was saying earlier, where shows are, these shows are clearly products of their time. This is clearly literally like a post-lost mystery box type show.

Like, it's right there. They're hunting for the mysterious Laplace. box. They don't know what it is, but it's really important. It's some sort of McGuffin. They're going to find it. What could it be? Who knows? Please let us know your thoughts when you find out. I will spoil it for everyone. Very divisive is what I'll say. Okay. Take a lot of it. The time machine back to before the world went to hell, around the year 2000.

The 80s and 90s were so rad. The movies, the music, the TV, the games? That's what I want to talk about. If you're cool enough. Join us and listen to less than 2000, because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here? Timmy's in a well.

Sequelcast 2 in Friends is a podcast looking at movies in a franchise, one film at a time, like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit. And sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well. And now it's part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. Oh, Lassie, we don't need a rescue Timmy. He likes the well. Well enough, I guess. Darth Vader is Luke's father.

Lassie, I told you to play off the spoilers. Here at Chat of the Wild, our Game Club podcast, we have been using our lens of truth to do deep dives on the Legend of Zelda series. in order covering one to two dungeons each episode. Our show also looks at Zelda likes, such as Crusader of Scenti, Golden Axe Warrior, and the bizarre journey of For the Frog, The Bell Tolls.

Join us right now as we play R.E. and The Secret of Seasons, our first new release since season one, or check out our past seasons breaking down nearly 20 action-adventure titles. New episodes drop every Wednesday, here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. We're the Spirit Hunters, and we're a show that treats Hunter-Hunter

and Yu-Hakisho's author as the center of the universe. Some weeks, we do linguistic analysis, so the Chinese meaning of this character is to smelt or refine, but so the changed meaning, in Japanese it means to temper. Other times, we get absolutely smashed. So we take one shot every time. Yuske uses the ray gun. One hour later. This is the least coherent episode.

I think your pirate is haunted. I think you... We're trying to find out more about the spirit hunters right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So yeah, anyway, we've talked a lot about the franchise. It's been in kind of nebulous, not nebulous, but general terms, I guess. We haven't gone too much into specific summaries or anything like that, but this has been a much more interesting discussion than just, you know, Wikipedia summaries of episodes. So that's good.

But this is a video games podcast. So we do need to spend a little time, maybe 20 or 30 minutes, talking about some video games. And what I did was I went through the list of games related specifically to Universal Century, no SD Gundam allowed because that is crap and I hate it. So I have one second, one second. SD Gundam G generation. Actually, very good tactics game. Okay, I'm done.

Okay, but the aesthetics of SD Gundam makes me vomit. So it's out. Fair. No, it's just some UC games, some of which came to the U.S., some of which did not. But I kind of highlighted these as having been notable either for coming here or for getting a lot of press. So actually, I think the oldest one on this list is mobile suit Zeta Gundam hot scramble for Famicom, which did not come to the U.S., but was part of a big tradition on the Famicom, the Nintendo Family Computer, of kind of mediocre video games about fighter craft that could turn into robots

and not being very convincing at either. I've played a little bit of hot scramble and remember not really liking it, but I thought maybe I just don't understand Gundam. I don't know. It's not particularly good. Here's the thing that's nice about it. I really like the music in Zeta Gundam. And so you get three NES era takes on different Zeta Gundam songs.

I remember playing it for the first time and thinking it had a really fun sense of speed. You know, it's not Afterburner or anything, but the kind of first person aerial combat, space combat sections do have the classic space dust coming at you from in front. and you're approaching the different, you know, major locations. But it's kind of a mediocre game. My understanding is it sold really well. But of course it did because Zeta Gundam was hot, right? Has great box art. But I think the problem was Zeta Gundam hot scramble is that it tries to be multiple different types of games.

It has both the first person point of view, but then it also has kind of the side-scrolling point of view. And any time you start splitting up a game that dramatically, you're probably going to have two very watered down gameplay types that make for something that's not altogether satisfying. That's true. Hot Scramble sounds like something you'd order at a diner. I'll have the hot scramble ways with toast. As soon as this pandemic's over, I'm going to definitely go to the diner and get a hot scramble. Just ask for the Zeta Gundam hot scramble. Okay, so the first game I actually really wanted to talk about a little bit is Giren's greed, just because that game was all over

the press. Even though it never came to the U.S., it was mentioned in so many magazines and websites back in the late 90s, came out on Saturn and PlayStation 1 in Japan only, but I remember constantly hearing about Garen's greed. So when I actually finally sat down to watch Gundam a couple of years ago, I was like, oh, it's that guy, Giren. I guess he's going to be the main villain. He actually wasn't, but, you know, he was kind of greedy. But yes, actually this game is, you know, in Japanese, it's got the same title structure as Nobunaga's ambition, Giren No Yabo. So it's very overtly attempting to be a Nobunaga's Ambition-style game set in, you know, Universal Century, 0079, where you can play either as the EFF or as Zeon under Gehrin, I guess, in that brief period where he's running the show after he kills his dad and before he gets killed. Sorry for the spoilers.

But anyway, it seems very kind of complex and elaborate. And apparently I found out while researching this episode that it has been fantrans. into English. So I don't know if either of you have attempted this. I have read let's plays of it. I've never played it myself. And I have friends who've played the English translation. Kat, I don't know if you have direct experience.

I don't have direct experience because it's kind of an esoteric game. The thing that's most interesting about it is if you're a real Gundam lore nerd, it's really fun to change history and see all the different ways that things can play out. it's exactly like playing in Nobunaga's Ambition or Romance of the Three Kingdoms in that you can see similar very similar, you know, events, but, you know, changed based on your own inputs. You know, what if the Titans didn't come into power the way they did? And instead, they came into power under Haman Khan or whatever, right? Like, that's not a, that's not a specific example. But those are the sorts of things that can happen. Having different sub-factions inside of the major factions take power, having people die or. instead of live or live instead of dying and how that ends up shaping things out. In some ways, it reminds me of another series, Super Robot Wars, which I were going to talk about at length, but Kat, that's fair to say, right? That like one of the big pulls, one of the great things about Super Robot Wars is the way it intersects with popular mecca anime storytelling and kind of like puts it on its ear sometimes. And not only that, but being able to, if you know that show well enough, being able to do things. things like prevent character deaths or being able to recruit villains over to your side and having lots and lots of lore gags and that kind of thing. But yeah, so Giron's greed definitely plays into

that aspect of Gundam. It would be like if somebody decided to make a Star Wars strategy game and we're like, okay, but in this version, the Death Star is able to blow up Yavin, now what happens? Not right. Totally. Yeah, so, you know, when I was putting together the notes for this, I stopped and asked myself, Why did I hear so much about Girin's greed, this game that clearly was never going to come to the U.S., was just not playable if you don't read Japanese, or you could play it, but he wouldn't really get anything out of it because it's so dialogue-heavy, so lore-heavy. And I really feel like it's just a factor of timing, because the late 90s is when Japanese animation was really starting to gain traction in the U.S. And for this like five or six year period in there, there was this real kind of upswell of sentiment that, you know, there were so many cool Japanese cartoons coming over, so many classic anime, but Gundam is the most important of them all. And it's never come over here. It must come over here at some point. And so I feel like there was this real kind of surge of interest in the U.S. press, you know, the kind of nerds who wrote about video games in, you know, classic Gundam. So this game was kind of a, you know, a flashpoint for that, a chance for them to say, like,

hey, here's this thing. It's tied to something that everyone should know that really should come to the U.S. Let's highlight this and talk about it and how cool it is. In many ways, it was the ultimate import game in the late 90s because Gundam still wasn't extremely well known here, except for Gundam Wing. And then meanwhile, he had this incredibly crunchy console strategy game, which was not the kind of thing that would normally be brought over here. So you had two of these things that are combined.

into one for this extremely esoteric experience, and so you could really establish your nerd cred by being like, you know what's an amazing game, Gieran's ambition is come over to America. I did import and play Gundam Battle Online for the Dreamcast, which is also a strategy game, or I think it leans more tactics. There is a strategy layer, if I remember correctly, and was an online tactics game that you would play on the kind of Dreamcast online network. And I remember getting a lot of joy out of just seeing the units move. around in space, seeing the animations, being able to deploy my favorite suits. And so that was probably the closest I got to importing a Gundam strategy game. I had no business importing because I didn't speak or read Japanese enough to actually

play it without a guide open next to me, you know? You know, this isn't a strategy game, but Gundam Battle Universe, which was on the PSP back in the day and came out when I was living in Japan and I ended up picking up. And I really enjoyed it because you go through the entire UC time. line. But you start out with the original Gundam and you can choose whether you want to be on Zeon or Federation. But when you get to the Zeta, then you can choose your side again. So you can kind of chart out your own course with your custom pilot where you're like, well, you know, I was originally on the Federation side, and then I ended up on the Titans, but then I decided to

defect over to here. And so you're kind of creating your own little storyline going through the entire universal century. In the meantime, you're also unlocking iconic suits from throughout. I was always sad that it never came over to console. It was always stuck on PSP. Yeah, the one thing that's probably worth mentioning here is that it took like 20 years for Gundam to make it to the U.S. I think there might have been some sort of attempt at localizing the Universal Century, the 0079 movies in some limited capacity before Gundam Wing. But Gundam Wing was really the first big push.

And prior to that, I, you know, the only Gundam media I saw at all. were Tomino's first three novels were localized by Frederick Schott into English in like 1990 or so. And I actually had all three of those in paperback and never got around to reading them and then I don't know where they went to. I was really, I was hoping my parents,

you know, brought me a whole bunch of stuff, a bunch of books and things that they had in storage recently. And I was like, maybe the Gundam books are in here and I can read these and what they're actually like. But no, they are not in there. But that was pretty much it. Like I think those were only picked up because the publisher, Ballantine, I believe, had some success with the Robotech books,

and we're probably like, well, this is the next best thing to getting some more of that sweet, sweet Robotech money, so let's do some Gundam. So that was like the weird little Gundam blip that made it to the U.S. prior to the big push with Tunami and Gundam Wing. And that's it. I'm kind of surprised, given that Robotech was, you know, it was at least a success. And there was also success with shows like Starblazers and whatnot. So I'm surprised that Gundam.

didn't get picked up in turn, you know, modified for American audiences. Can you imagine how, how that would have been localized in, like, 1983, though, how, like, how badly it would have been butchered or bowerized, like, miserable, yeah. Here's Andy Ray, the pilot of the gun bot. Freedom fighter gun boy. So, yeah, that's, you know, kind of where we were up until the early 2000s, really. There was just no gun to me. Is that why you've put this Gundam Wing game on this list of what's supposed to here?

No, who puts this on here? I did. Okay. I'm sorry. Leave me alone. I put the rules down at the beginning. Universal Century Over. That's not Gundam Wing.

Okay, go ahead and talk about this game. Well, in the mid-90s, we were talking about Gundam X, actually. So Gundam Wing comes out in the mid-90s and really spurs American Gundam fandom. And that was when Bandai Namco goes, oh, Gundam has finally arrived in America. Well, let's release the original Gundam U.S. see double 79. It's time for Americans to see real Gundam, and Americans did not respond well to real Gundam 0079. It also doesn't help that that was airing in like August and September of 2001, and after September 11th, the Tsunami was like, hey, maybe let's not

air this extremely, you know, kind of gritty war story as it is. So it just kind of cut off. Yeah. I always thought it was a mistake. They should have put out Gundam X in North America after Gundam Wing because Gundam X would have resonated really well with American audiences, I think. But they didn't because they saw Gundam X. It's a black mark because it was the first show to get canceled since the original Gundams. So there was no way in heck that they were going to allow it to go to go overseas. That was kind of the mindset. It would have been huge. You're totally right because unlike Gundam Wing, it has like such a focus on new types. And I think we would have been primed coming off of like years of loving X-Men and Star Wars to have this sort of like, wow,

there are some people who are born with special powers and its post-apocalyptic setting would have would have done really well. It's kind of a show about land pirates and these big kind of landships. The Frost Brothers would have been great villains. They would have appealed very much to an audience of straight, cisgendered women. Uh-huh. Absolutely. Has this show been localized now because you're really selling me on it?

You can get Blu-Rays. You should get Blu-Rays. I think it's, again, so like Great Gundam Project, the podcast I joined for just this one season because I've never seen Gundam X. We're working through it now. We're about 18 episodes in, something like that, 16, 17, somewhere in there. And it's not a perfect show, but it's like an incredible Shonen show that totally fits a kind of model of show that I don't think was ascendant at the time in Japan. And so, of course, it kind of fell on its face. But I think it has a lot of really fun ideas, especially around new types. Like, it's a show that is about new types from

episode two. And that has not happened previously in Gundam. Except Gerard is not a new type. That's the interesting thing. It's so fascinating. It's so fascinating. But, you know, it's almost as if what if Amaro had lived through and failed at Shar's counterattack and then devotes the rest of his life to protecting and recruiting baby new types to keep them from being used as weapons by, you know, military forces in a post-apocalypse. That's the pitch. It's not actually Amorow. And the captain is a combination of bright Amaro and Quatro all in one. It's kind of interesting. No, it's a cool show, and I actually kind of want to revisit it. I discovered it on one of my hard drives not too long ago. But for a long time, Gundam X was one of those shows that, along with Turn A and Victory, just never, ever got localized to North America because they weren't popular enough.

And Turn A is probably the one we should be recommending to Jeremy. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. Jeremy, skip Victory Gundam. Don't bother with it. Watch Turn A. No, I'm going to power through. I'm in for a penny, in for a pound, just as Austin said. If you say so, well, watch turn, just make sure you watch turn A, because it's very good. Yeah, even if you bounce off of the other shows between it and between where you are now and it, watch turn A. It's something, it's fantastic. It really is. I consider turn A the true finale to the universal century stuff. Huh, okay. Interesting to know. All right. So, um, that was kind of about Inless Duel. Did you actually want to talk about Inless Duel, the video game?

The reason I brought up Gundam X in the first place was because that was a very specific time in the Gundam franchise where they were just kind of throwing ideas at the wall. And one of the things they wanted to do was create shows that would play well into fighting games. That's why they created G Gundam in the first place. And so Endless Duel was kind of the follow-up to that because they were like always just trying to get that precious, precious street fighter money. Yep. Having said that Endless Duel is gorgeous. It has some of the best spray work in the series, and all I want in my heart is for ArcSystemWorks to do an Endless Dual game. Wow, you're breaking my heart, Kat.

I want that so bad. People should also look up Battlemaster, which was a two-part series for the PS1. That's sort of the spiritual successor to Endless Dual that has kind of big PS1 pixel art, which is also really fantastic. I think Battlemaster 2 came to the U.S. as Battle Assault, and it puts here. Hiro, Yui, from Gundam Wing, into, sort of into the world of UC. It's just Hero and then a bunch of UC characters because it was just UC suits in the original Japanese release. And then the wing got added for the US release because obviously Gundam Wing was big in the US. So worth looking at those, just at least look up some video because they look really fantastic. All right. So that was a non-Universal Century game. But there were a few Universal Century games that started coming out around the turn of the millennium with the Dreamcast and

the PlayStation 2. That was really, really, you know, decided, let's go for it. Let's bring the kids, the American kids, some games. We're going to make them love Gundam, even if the games are terrible. So, I guess the first Gundam game released in the U.S. would have been Gundam Side Story 0079 Rise from the Ashes for Dreamcast. Is that correct? I think that's correct. That's certainly the one that I remember going to a Habachi grill next to a mom-and-pop game shop. And after my dad, my stepmom, and I finished getting dinner, I was like, can we just stop in here really quick? I want to see if they have something I read about. And because I must have read a review in EGM or something of side story, picking it up and then just being, you know what, I would have

already played the demo because there was a demo that released maybe in a magazine somewhere else that was just the first level or maybe the first two levels of side story. So I would have already played that and was just on the hunt for it. I remember being so excited to bring it home after picking it up from this little mom-and-pop game shop and getting it home and just devouring it. It's a first-person Dreamcast Gundam game in which the feel of the suits is incredibly heavy. You're in the cockpit. You can see the cockpit. You are slowly switching between weapons.

It's not quite Mech Warrior, right? Because mobile suits in the Gundam franchise are more maneuverable, more humanoid than something like the mecs, the battlemex of Mech Warrior. battle tech. But it still had that sort of, you know, I think over the last decade, we've heard this term used to describe Dark Souls combat over and over again. Deliberate style action, which is to say the animations took a long time and you couldn't cancel out of them. If you did a dodge or a dash, you were really committing to that sort of movement. And the game even committed to putting you in grunt suits basically the whole time. You never got to be the Gundam. You were always a, I think maybe you started as GMs and eventually unlocked

like a ground Gundam variant. And I remember even one of the big things is in the final couple of levels, you finally get a beam rifle. And that's this huge dramatic moment that feels incredible because you've been just using machine guns, Vulcan cannons, your beam saber, and then, you know, maybe a bazooka or something like that for heavier, for heavier shots. and those great kind of artillery guns, the heavy tank anti-tank guns that show up in O8MS team. And I just, that game is not particularly good. It's a level-based, you know, first-person mech game,

and it probably doesn't hold up particularly well. But everything from the way the suit controlled and felt like you were in a mech versus just a character walking around to some very basic, like, wing commander style, giving the rest of your team order. on who to attack and where to go on the map. I just adored it. And it was, in some ways, that's maybe what cemented my love for UC, for grunt suits, for that scale of combat.

One of my problems with these types of games was that they just can never seem to find the right feel for controlling a mobile suit in a video game. Either they're hyper- arcady, sort of like the Gundam versus games, or they're like this really heavy kind of first-person view like you might find in Gundam Side Story or Blue Destiny or the Gundam pod game or something like that. And it makes me think that one of the big problems with the Gundam game often is that they don't get the feel of the beam saber, right? Because when you're, it's sort of like a lightsaber problem at the same time where if you connect with a beam saver on an enemy mobile suit, you should probably be cutting them in half.

but instead it's always more like a baseball bat where you're just kind of beating them over the head or a beam rifle doesn't feel that very good to shoot at an enemy and that kind of thing and I always kind of wish that they would lean more into like being able to actually duel with enemy mobile suits being able to get the space combat right but then again these games they don't usually have the best teams attached to them

no disrespect and they don't have very big budgets so they're doing what the best that they can But I feel like there's a kernel of an amazing mech experience that they've just never been able to capture with these dang video games. It's tough. The thing that they actually get right more, especially these grunt suit games, so to jump ahead a little bit, both this Gundam Side Story, 0079 Rise from the Ashes, but also Zionic Front, which also came out in a similar time period, which was sort of like, what if Rainbow Six, the original? with all of the plotting your kind of different units as they would move through a map? What if that, but you were all in Zaku ones and twos? Both of those games, the thing they get right is when you come across an ace suit from

the other side, it's scary. In Side Story Rise from the Ashes, going up against a goof or a dom felt really wild because they move so differently and have different styles of attack. And I remember being, like, overwhelmed. And then in Zionic front, there are times that as these kind of grunt zion troops, you end up fighting against Amaro and you don't get to win that fight. You might survive that fight. You might avoid that fight. But Amaro is Amaro. And I loved that those games understood that they should impart that feeling on the player. Again, even if they were kind of messy and didn't always feel particularly good, they knew that that was an important part of the, the, sort of playing as a random trooper in one of these worlds, you should be afraid of the aces on the other side of the board. It definitely plays into the single best moment in eighth MS team.

And I would argue one of the best moments in Gundam overall when they had the big fight with the goof custom. And it's like the first moment they say, it's an ace. And they're just getting completely wrecked in really interesting ways. They know how to use the environment in the city so wonderfully in that particular fight. And I feel like everybody remembers that very specific fight very well because that was what really grounded the setting in so many ways. So these video games, what you were just describing kind of plays into that aspect of it,

I think. Definitely. So you mentioned Zionic Front. There was also another one for PlayStation 2 called Journey to Jabaro, which is just, you know, basically a straight up retelling of the first half of original Gundam, basically. Like you get to play as a guy on the white base. Are you playing as Amaro? You're playing as Amber. You're in the, you're in the, the Gundam.

They have many retellings of classic. They have a retelling of the original Gundam. They have a retelling of Zeta Gundam. They have a retelling of Zeta Gundam. They have a Gundam unicorn game that I think from Software had a hand in at some point. I think that makes sense. I think it's the, it was probably the team that did Another Century episode, which are. That was the game I was thinking of Another Century's episode with the very arcadey gameplay. But anyway, continue. But yeah, I believe that the Gundam Unicorn team is from that. same team as the Ace, the Another Century episode crew. And, you know, and obviously there's some overlap with the armored core games between those teams. And yeah, they just never, none of these games, going back to Journey to Jabrero, really, you know, they're video game-ass video games in that way of, like, it's a licensed game, it's a third-person action game. You know, you have a heat meter and you're trying to manage your ammo and stuff, but it never commits to that great feeling of what you saw on the screen. And I think it's all that stuff that Kat, you were just saying about, like, Beam Sabers

feeling weak, movement, not feeling particularly exciting. It doesn't feel dynamic. I played it three or four times, you know, despite everything because I was a Gundam fan, and I was desperately hungry for more Gundam. All right, to kind of wrap up this episode, there's a few others maybe worth mentioning. Let's see. There aren't actually that many games based just on Universal Century, not a crossover, not an SD Gundam. So it's actually a pretty small number.

There's F91 Formula Report 0122 for Super Famic. com only came out in Japan. It was a tactics style game based on Gundam F91 that was released concurrently with the film. I have never played it, but from what I've seen of it, it just seems like a dry menu kind of driven game and kind of lacks the visual pizzazz and excitement of F91, like whatever you want to say about FN1 and its story, at the very least, you know, it is a gorgeous film. It's stunning to look at. And at the very least, that bullet shell, sure did fall and crush that lady communicating a lot about scale and danger at the start of that film. The colony

attack feels like a blueprint for the colony attack that happens in Gundam Unicorn. And I would actually say that Gundam after 91's colony attack is better. Yeah, I agree with you. Beautiful hand-drawn animation. Miss, again, poorly-paced strange movie that jumps around. We now know because it was conceptualized as a full season of television, and then they had to take those notes and turn it into a film instead. They basically just did the pilot episode and then added in, and then they were like, okay, that was the pilot episode. Wrap it up, done. We have a movie. The end. Yeah, it's funny. When I was watching F91, like last week, I did not know that it was meant to be a TV series. And as I was watching it, I really thought, like, there's enough here that they could have made an entire series about

this. It's kind of weird that they just went with a movie because it feels like there is enough substance to this plot that they really could have built it out and developed the characters and, you know, giving you more about the, this section of the universe, but instead it's all condensed into two hours, and it feels like I missed opportunity. And now I know why. Bugs. Freaking bugs, but it did give us cross phone Gundam, which was kind of a manga spin-off slash, it kind of worked its way into the video games as well, and it had various models and action figures over the years. But a lot of people are.

very into crossbone, which is basically space pirates. They took the space pirates from Gundam F-91 and put the focus squarely on them. And it's always kind of struck me as a weird missed opportunity that they haven't turned that into a proper anime. I think we'll live to see it. We'll see. You know, Hathaway's Flash is coming out. And obviously, that's kind of the end of that era of UC storytelling. And so after that, maybe we'll jump, we'll get to late UC. I don't I think they want to verge into the F-91-slash-victory Gundam era because that's such a fraught period in Gundam's history. But I want them to. Me too.

The only other thing here I have anything to say about is Gundam Verses. Okay, go for it. And that's because the original couple of games in that series. So Gundam versus today is an incredibly fast-paced descendant of virtual on, arcade-based combat, very, almost like a, an arena fighter, third person, behind the back, a million suits, and each one has its own kind of little quirks that you have to come to learn, not just unique attacks, but also the way they move can be a little bit distinct. There's lots of tricks. It's a lot about positioning and timing, catching an enemy as they finish their boost, blah, blah, blah, right? And it's been like

that probably for the last 15 years, 20 years, honestly. I guess 15 years is probably more right. because the original Federation v. Xionn and then the follow-up to that, which is the Zeta Gundam one, I forget the name of it now. It's probably just AUG versus Titans, is a much slower-paced game. It's still based on the same kind of ideas around movement. It's still based on like a stock system or a cost-based pursuit system in some ways. But they both have single-player campaigns. And in the Federation v. Zon one for PS2, you pick aside, either Zion. or the Earth Federation, and you begin with very basic suits, either a ball or a gym on the Federation side, I think, and then just like Azaku 1 on the, the Zeon side. And over the course of the war, you unlock new suits. You can capture enemy suits and develop palette-swapped versions of those. So if you want a GM custom in Zeon Green, you can get that. If you want to get yourself a Gelgug, but it's dressed up like a Gundam. You can get that in this game. And you're kind of bouncing from mission to mission across the entire map, picking different encounters and deciding

which way you want to kind of pilot the war. It's not a strategy game per se, but it does have this sort of meta layer of choosing missions on a map that feels really fun. And again, there are these kind of big moments, these big crossover moments where Amaro will show up or Shar will show up and you'll get the mission of Garma being killed in the Seattle or whatever, right? And, sorry, New York. And that stuff was really fun. And I love, this goes back to what Kat was saying about, I figure which game this was, that you were saying, oh, the PSP one, right, Gunned Battle Universe.

That sense of like the war is progressing is a really fun thing to see represented in the game. And I don't know that that game is very good. They're all very small arenas. It doesn't feel, it's very repetitive. But I have a lot of fondness for it. It was very much a game I played in and after college when I had a lot of free time on my hands. And it was like, let me just do a campaign of that this week. That's the thing I'm going to do is a full campaign of Federation v. Zion.

And it was just a great way to immerse myself in those worlds and those soundscapes. So we haven't said anything about this besides saying the music is good sometime, but the sound in Gundam is so distinct and good too. Sound effects in particular. Yeah. Playing a game with those lock-on sounds, with those beam-sense. Sabre Sounds can just be a joy if you're a fan of the franchise. And Gundam versus is the quintessential arcade series. It's been kind of dominating Japanese arcades for like 20 years at this point.

My first real kind of contact with Gundam outside of Gundam wing was when I first moved to Japan and going into an arcade and suddenly realizing that there was an entire floor taken up by these machines. They've kind of been an anchor for arcades for a very, very long time because they are a perfect. They're really nifty 2V2 kind of fighting arena-based fighting games. So they require a lot of teamwork and team composition. And I think that just immediately grabs people's attention and really wants

them to get invested in the series because it's really satisfying to be able to come up with a great combination of units. And I am glad those games are coming out to the States finally. The most recent one, Maxi Boost, I want to say, was out in the U.S. for the first time in forever. I guess there was a PSP one before that also. And so, So I hope it finds a great competitive audience.

It's a blast to watch people play. It's hard to watch them play it online because it's such a fast-paced series that it's hard to stream it. It's very twitchy. Yeah. Without problems. All right. Well, normally this is where I would say, where would you recommend people get into Gundam? But it sounds like we've already answered that question, actually.

So I think that wraps it up for this episode. It's been a long one. And I guess we've had a lot to say about this sprawling franchise or at least one facet of it. I'm sure we could do episodes on quite a few other facets of Gundam at some point, including SD Gundam, I guess. But for the moment, we are going to wrap here. This has been the Universal Century in two hours, thanks to the delicious talents of Austin Walker and Kat Bailey. Thank you so much for joining the show, and we will go through our usual farewells now. So you, the person listening to this podcast, have been listening to Retronauts, which you can hear,

weekly every Monday on your favorite pod applications, whatever that may be. I'm not sure what the hotness is right now, but go to the internet or go to Retronauts.com, and you can find the latest episodes and hundreds and hundreds more. So many episodes. Good God. And if you are really, really into Retronauts, you can go and support us at Patreon, patreon.com slash retronauts, where for three bucks a month, you can listen to every episode a week early at a higher bit of quality than you're listening to right now, and without any cross-promotional advertisements or, you know, shoutouts to other shows or anything like that. If you really, really like the show, you can pay an extra two bucks a month and get bonus episodes every other Friday, as well as

weekly columns by Diamond Fight and some other neat stuff that we're rolling out throughout the year. So anyway, that's Retronauts. Or sorry, patreon.com slash Retronauts check it out. Anyway, Kat, where can we find you on the internet? Hi. I'm the host of a podcast called Acts of the Blood God, which is an RPG podcast. You've probably familiar with it. It recently went independent. We have a Patreon now, patreon.com slash blood god pod. And one of the cool things we're doing for $10 patrons is the pantheon of the blood god. We did Lufia 2 this month. And basically what we do is you go through the history. We talk about its best moments. We really dive deep into it. And then in the end, we decide whether it deserves to go into the panthe. and also you can follow me on Twitter at the underscore catbot. Austin, how about you? You follow me on Twitter at Austin underscore Walker. You can listen to Waypoint Radio by doing a search for that.

You can listen to Friends of the Table by doing a search for that or going to Friends of the Table.net. We just wrapped up a big mech season. So if you like, if you want to hear a bunch of nerds play out a sci-fi tabletop mech game about revolution and empire, you can go to Friends of the Table.net. And then lastly, I am on this season of Great Gundam Project. So if you want to hear me nerd out about new types, you can do a search for Great Gundam Project. It is a $1 subscription on the Abnormal Mapping Patreon. It is a great Patreon to support. And I say that as someone

who was a patron of that, of their content long before I was part of it. So shout out to M& Jackson and everyone else who does stuff at abnormal mapping. Come listen to us, be nerds about Gundam. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite. You can also find me doing stuff with limited-run games where I work during the daylight hours. And you can also check out my YouTube videos on the history of various console games in chronological order. Right now I'm doing Sega's SG-1000 and Nintendo's Famicom before the NES launch. My goodness. You can check that out on my YouTube channel. Just look for me, Jeremy Parrish. There's only one R in Parrish, and don't you forget it.

Anyway, that's it. That's Gundam, Universal Century. So many things to say about so many big robots, so many children screaming and anguish. Wow. Being traumatized for their whole lives and even into the ghost parade after their lives. That's right. But anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this new type of podcast. And until next week, just remember, Moero Agare.

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