A play on words from the second Mobile Suit Gundam movie, Soldiers of Sorrow, I heavily considered calling this article the Alternate Universes of Sorrow, truly displaying my bias affection for the original Universal Century. Instead, this title present a much more neutral view, which I think is important for Gundam fans especially, to look at the Alternate Universes from a neutral standpoint. Just as each universe is varied in setting, characterization and mobile suit design each is its own mixed bag that can be filed under ‘win’ and ‘fail’. Unlike many of the contemporaries of Mobile Suit Gundam and its franchise through the 1980s and early 1990s, there are probably only two others who’ve met success as a  franchise and not touched the ‘alternate universes’ concept. While many may consider the very idea of a work with a continuing, linear story to include tangential side-stories to be a vehicle for driving a soulless, capitalist machine, the inclusion of alternate universes of Gundam have demonstrated the pliability of the some of Gundam’s core concepts, a fresh look at the old franchise, and some things that may have sounded good in a staffing meeting but when finally presented to the public, just simply fell flat.

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No mention of giant robots, let alone robots of the more “realistic” persuasion, can hardly be made without mentioning Mobile Suit Gundam. It is arguably the most prolific franchise with animation productions, comics, novels, toys, models and untold other numbers of merchandise that fans will invariably spend their money on for almost three decades now. In fact, trying to cover the entire franchise in one article is awfully ambitions and, I’m afraid, cannot be done to do it justice. So, we’ll consider this the first of three parts.

Mobile Suit Gundam solidified the “real robot” genre which didn’t involve aliens from space, spirits or gods embodied in robots or wacky bell-bottoms. The real robot genre features robots as the tools of war, human conflict in said war and, particularly in Gundam’s case, the stench of death that permeates through war. It keeps some tropes of the genre - the idea of teenager pilots - and puts spins on them that aren’t entirely unrealistic (in most cases).

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It’s been a bag of crap up until episodes 10 and 11, which have rocked my proverbial socks.

Better late than never, I suppose. This review shall be made of short and rushed, due to our fearless leader’s new “Quantity > Quality” policy.

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Does the newest entry in Sunrise’s long running Gundam franchise manage to clean out the rancid aftertaste of their last effort, Gundam Seed Destiny? Or will it fail as hard as Gundam Wing? Either way, Bandai’s got models to sell, so here we go!

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