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Jan 20, 2022
Having marathoned several Gundam shows, starting with the Gundam 0079 movie trilogy and making my way to Wing, as well as having watched 08th MS Team, other Gundam nerd friends of mine convinced me to watch Unicorn. Going into it, I had an understanding that it was a highly regarded entry in the series, that was well animated and tied deeply into the narratives of the UC shows. You can see from many of the other reviews here that a perfect 10 is a quite common rating.
For myself, though, Unicorn turned out to be an exercise in disappointment and exasperation.
Step one, we'll get the
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extraneous elements out of the way. Unicorn is indeed well animated, in fact that's the primary redeeming factor of the OVA for me, between the MS fights, loving character animation, colorful palettes, and so on. Sound is fine.
Narratively, Unicorn blows. As the earliest episodes dragged on, it rapidly became clear that the main characters were going to be boring vapid regurgitations of the age-old Gundam philosophical arguments, with no augmentation other than filtering it through the perspective of 2010s anime tropes. To be fair, it doesn't exactly reek of trite, shitty anime tropes in the way that Code Geass does, but it still mostly spins its wheels with surface-level pseudophilosohpy in much the same way as any given pretentious high school anime would.
Banagher endlessly grated on my nerves with his inexplicable obsession over a girl he met once, and particularly his insistence on calling her by a fake name that she came up with to deceive him. Ditto towards her, Mineva doesn't really provide a compelling Zeon-perspective, and I ended up being driven up a wall by her continued Mary Sue-ish self-importance black hole swirling around her.
Side characters vary significantly in quality, my favorite characters were in the side cast, but it also contains verifiably some of the worst characters in the franchise. Blondie Ace-man, whose name I know but don't care to repeat, was impressively hilarious in his arc, culminating as it did with him huffing copium after getting cucked into unconsciousness. Neo-Char, ironically, is a literal regurgitation, and ultimately seems to exist so that people could point and say "Hey, it's that Char guy, I wonder what he's doing here.". Also, having a major character whose existence is rooted in ZZ is a major faux pas by any measure.
The plot too is weak and only gets weaker. Starting off, it was completely ill-advised to base the driving plot around a mystical world-changing MacGuffin. Going on, there's a prominent Zeon bias throughout the series, both in the MS fights and in the narrative perspective, which seems to ring of real life Japanese revisionism about Imperial Japan: that is to say, sure, good guys both sides, but there's far too much praise being lavished on Zeon and their history for my taste, compared to the show's opinion on the Federation. Stupid love-triangle nonsense and touchy-feely newtypery that exceeds the most excessive moments of Zeta serve to fully remove any investment I could've had in the show. Finally, the most spoilery elements of the plot are by far the worst, with the final episode essentially feeling like a multi-hour slog of utter wasteful nonsense.
Basically, I'm pretty disappointed. While, by virtue of its earlier episodes, Unicorn never sinks to the level of ZZ, Wing, or 0083, I can not say that I enjoyed my overall watching experience, and I'll certainly remember Unicorn for all of its worst elements.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Nov 26, 2020
Recently, I've been getting into Gundam by watching the series in rough release order. The 08th MS Team was one of the series that I was most looking forward to, considering that most of the fandom (as well as non-Gundam fans) seems to hold it in high regard, as well as its reputation for being the "muh realism" Gundam, or "space Vietnam", both of which were enticing concepts to me. Much to my surprise and dismay, as I watched 08th I quickly found my preconceptions about the show to be horribly misleading.
Firstly, though, we can talk about the Art and Sound design, which I'll bundle
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together here. In this regard, I can say that 08th is exactly what I thought it would be. The scenes are beautifully animated and the mobile suits are certainly the most realistic feeling in the series that I've seen; There's a weight to the suits that often doesn't manifest in the other shows', and each suit is clearly designed to evoke the fact that it is a gigantic mechanical weapon of war. We get to see the inner workings of individual mobile suits several times, and it's clear that they've redesigned classic suits like the Zaku, the Guntank, the GM, etc. so they would be more in line with this realistic vision of the One Year War. Sound design keeps in line with this, with the heavy stomping of mobile suits and the sounds of the guns that they use coming to mind.
Alternatively, I would say that the character design is in contrast to this realism ethos that the studio was going for. The late-nineties anime design that clearly echoes the likes of Gundam Wing or G Gundam certainly doesn't mesh as well as perhaps the style of War in the Pocket or Stardust Memory, but at the same time I wouldn't say that it automatically put me off of the series. Generally the characters look decent and are well-animated, I'm just confused as to this design decision, although it arguably ties into the severe problems that arise in the series.
That is to say, that I think the story and characters of 08th MS team are downright bad. We have several main plotlines that are various shades of poor: Firstly, there's the relatively inoffensive but certainly underwhelming main threat of Zeon developing a dangerous new mobile armor and the 08th's efforts to stop them. Next, we have the "shades of gray" narratives, so to speak, where we get to see that there's decent people in Zeon, bad people in the Federation and civilians that were caught in-between; not a novel plot thread but one with potential. Finally, we have the inter-personal relationships and tribulations of the 08th MS team as well as particular Zeon characters, the most prominent of these being those of the main character Shiro Amada, and the main Zeon perspective, Aina Sahalin.
As mentioned, the plot about the Zeon mobile armor "Apsalus" is inoffensive but doesn't really do much other than act as a threat. For the Feddies it just acts as a Macguffin threat that they need to stop, and on the Zeon side we don't really get much interesting intrigue out of it, just the normal Zeon betrayals. Meanwhile, the "gray" stuff mostly flatlines; nice guy Zeons is par for the course, we've had that since 0079, and bad guy Feddies is also not exactly new territory, both of these are explored in pretty surface-level manners and they've been done significantly better in preceding shows (watch Zeta and WITP). Ditto for the civvies caught in the middle, but luckily we get to see 08th distinguish itself here by making the guerilla fighters pretty irritating. The rebel shenanigans were the first real indication to me that my opinion was rapidly souring. Generally, whenever the main guerilla character "Kiki" showed up, I was already prepared to be annoyed. These characters also elude my understanding by being anti-Zeon freedom fighters that treat the Federation with open hostility for very hand-wavey reasons (soldiers, am I right?).
Which ties into the fact that the characters and their interpersonal problems in 08th suck and ruin the show. Out of the main characters, we have 2 of them that are the most likeable by virtues of not grating, Karen and Sanders. Both of them are generally competent and don't go out of their way to be annoying, so they're the best ones, but they also go through perhaps the least development or exploration despite both of them mentioning clear character motivations and backstories. Michel and Eledore both get pretty exhausting to watch, particularly in the episodes that center around them, and they both lack any meaningful depth; Michel is pining after his girlfriend in space, and Eledore wants to make it big as a musician, and they both don't want to die in this bad bad war, that's basically the run of it. "Ginias" is a pretty generic and lame evil scientist, not really much to say about him, there's no depth.
Shiro and Aina bring about the worst of it. Shiro and Aina both fall in love, somehow, after a fateful meeting in space, spawning by far the shittiest plotline in the OVA. The absolute superficiality of this relationship boggles the mind, after their heavily contrived first encounter and another heavily contrived second encounter, they somehow grow to love each other SO MUCH that they would rather die than live without each other. I can't say that I was very much invested in their relationship.
Needless to say, my enjoyment was essentially nil. Whenever the show was focusing on the military aspect, I perked up for long enough to enjoy the spectacle, with a particular high point in episode 10 that was one of the best fights of the franchise, but I was quickly slapped back down by whatever new annoying character beat or whatever new unimpressive plot point.
From here on I would like to nitpick miscellaneous things that delve into spoilers so keep that in mind if you haven't watched it already and weren't deterred by my incredibly talented polemic wit.
The survival of Aina and Shiro after what is VISIBLY a complete disintegration is worthy of taking off an entire point from the score. The final episode with the cyber newtype children was grating enough that I almost couldn't bring myself to watch it. After their second get-together, Aina finds out that Shiro was noticed and photographed by one of the Zeon rescue squads picking her up; why didn't they capture him? Eledore nearly gets killed after taking over a construction mobile suit and refusing to close the cockpit even in the face of certain danger; it's not explained why, and he gets shipped off with severe injuries that nearly warranted amputation but inexplicably returns later, awesome! Earlier in the same episode, Eledore and Michel start beating the shit out of each other in a really irritating argument while they're imprisoned by Zeon, but it works out that the Zeon guard comes in and then gets knocked out so they can escape; I figured this was gonna be the reveal that they planned it this way, but in fact it was entirely accidental and they were actually just being annoying pricks, and then their escape isn't even shown, you just have to assume they made it out somehow despite the place being swarmed with Zeon soldiers. It's hard to understate how much I hate Kiki, and how much I really don't care that she was in love with Shiro, also I would appreciate if the camera wouldn't shove her crotch in my face. Norris is the best character and he deserved better, his fight is obviously the best and my main complaint is that he honestly should've done even better, I find it hard to believe he couldn't have wiped them all out.
Overall I give this a 5 because it's pretty bad but the animation brings it up a bit, and I can't in good conscience rate it lower than ZZ which is obviously worse.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Apr 12, 2018
Let me immediately say that Sword Art Online is a bad anime. Late to the party or otherwise, this is my opinion. I don't care about the innumerable other people who have already said this, that's irrelevant to my own conclusion. I'll do my best to accurately describe the reasons I feel this way.
I'll start by getting elements I feel are superfluous out of the way; The art design, animation, sound design and music are mostly not worth noting, with occasional exceptions (constantly distracting sidemouth, music tracks that sound stolen from Naruto, etc.). They don't add or detract from the experience.
The most important elements of
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any story, I would say, are the aspects directly related to writing, be it the plot, the characters, pacing, theming, atmosphere, whatever. Sword Art Online fails rather egregiously in this regard.
The plot synopsis to SAO is misleading; Sword Art Online isn't really about being trapped in a death MMO, it's a love story masquerading as a harem anime with a death MMO as the back drop. Although that doesn't inherently present a problem, the love story is terribly uninteresting, and all of the other story is also rather uninteresting.
Kirito is a deeply offensive Mary Sue. He's the fastest, strongest, bestest player in the game, and he's so good at everything, and he's so charming that women fall in love with him after meeting him for a couple hours. He doesn't display much character, and when he does it's usually boring and generic, or it's brief and insignificant.
Asuna begins the series as a generic tsundere and ends as a completely generic love interest. Her main characteristics are also being the fasterest and strongerest and besterest, as well as being a loner type, until she stops that. After that, her only characteristic is being in love with Kirito.
Anyone that isn't the main two characters gets at best brief flashes of being characters. The two other waifus in Kirito's harem turn into non-characters after their respective episodes, and his sister's main characterization is "I really want to have sex with my brother, but I know I'm not supposed to, what do I do!?"
Three male characters could qualify as recurring side characters: Klein is almost likable but unfortunately comes off as creepy with his repeated attempts to solicit underage girls, presumably for sex, Agil is likable but he shows up so rarely and briefly, and "Recon" (I had to look up his name) is an annoying cuck who's only characteristic is that he desperately wants to have sex with Kirito's sister.
The main antagonists are also not good. Kayaba Akihiko is supposed to be enigmatic and all-seeing, but he ultimately ends up being a generic scientist person whose motivations are confused, contradictory and lacking. Sugou Nobuyuki (I also had to look up his name) is just a weird rapist fellow, and other than wanting to be a creepy rapist fellow, he vaguely alludes to being a corrupt businessman.
The pacing is incredibly poorly executed. The season has two arcs, and neither of them have particularly good pacing. The first arcs pacing begins as schizophrenic and confused, and then slows to a crawl, and then abruptly ends. The second arc is BORING. It remains boring until you realize that you have somehow finished watching the season. Nothing matters except for the ending, and there's also bizarre diversions that seem to only detract from the narrative.
SAO does its best to ignore any themes or ideas it could explore. It often flirts with being about the blurred lines between virtual and non-virtual reality, but it only ever touches upon it in a shallow and unintellectual manner. It even seems to specifically shirk ways to build upon a theme, by discarding potentially interesting ideas.
SAO has a superficially diverse palette of ethos and mood. Horror, comedy, tragedy, romance, drama, all of these and more are attempted in Sword Art, but none of them are mastered. The horror aspect is at first acknowledged but then abandoned, the comedy is unfunny, the tragedy comes off as melodramatic and laughable, as does the drama, and the romance is hollow.
Ultimately, Sword Art Online is a bad anime because it doesn't have anything about it that is good. I was not entertained except by laughing at it with close friends and pointing out all the innumerable flaws. I was not intrigued by any of the themes or characters. I was not invested in the plot, or in the world, or the interpersonal relationships. Sword Art Online achieves a 3 by virtue of being mostly coherent and generally competently made, (writing aside), which is something that is unfortunately not invariably true for anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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