Kidô senshi Gandamu: Fukushû no Requiem

I really love Gundam and have been watching and playing with it since the 80's.

But I have an extremely hard time trying to enjoy this due to the absolute wonky and amateur looking visuals.

As if they hired a company that only showed them pictures of what it could look like and the character facial details which looked amazing. So they accepted them for doing the visuals and never asked for actual movies scenes and just released it with full confidence.

I mean the characters look, act and behave so unrealistically.

Especially their facial expressions... It's just a pain to watch and only those that don't care about visuals would be able to enjoy this.

I'd rather listen to this as if it's an audio book then expose myself to these horrific visual.

I just finished watching the first season of Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance (2024-) and while this show was decent at best, I was also very disappointed as a Gundam fan. Then again, this show was made by Netflix, so I shouldn't be surprised.

Positives for Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance (2024-): I thought it was an interesting angle for this show to have the Principality of Zeon as the heroes and the Gundam Mobile Suit as the villain. There were some good characters interacts in between the action set pieces. And finally, you do get some great action sequences in these six episodes.

Negatives for Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance (2024-): This show suffers from the same issues as almost any movie or tv show made by Netflix. First off, I didn't feel like I got to know a lot about these characters. This season only has 6 episodes and it felt rushed. And finally, the show does the bare minimum like a lot of other Netflix projects.

Overall, Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance (2024-) was a good enough anime that can be improved upon in future season, but I'm starting to get very annoyed with Netflix now.

I'm a major gundam fan and this show was a honestly a disappointment. The concept of showing these events from the regular soldiers point of view was a great idea in my opinion. I like that it shows the struggles of war in a more dark tone than gundam normally does.

This is definitely not a children's Gundam side story, it's rated MA for a reason. Just putting this here incase a parent didn't realize.

As far as the bad goes: I really did not like the animation style. It's one of those weird attempts at trying to make animation look more like live action and it just doesn't work. I don't like how the MC contradicts her morals for the writers to try and make her look like a beacon of morality. This is kind of a theme throughout, you can tell it was written for western audiences. I also don't like the heavy plot armor to keep the show going. I would rather have seen some of the main characters fall. It would have made the story more realistic. It's hard to explain well without spoilers, but there's many situations where atleast one of them should have either made a sacrifice for the team or fell heroically, etc. Not doing so took all the weight of the decisions away and makes everything feel pretty pointless. Most good war movies show this because it's important to make the characters actions feel important. I feel like MC should have been like the only one to survive the horror which could have fundamentally altered her view of humanity.

Overall I like the base idea, but the executive was pretty bad imo.

I am a huge Gundam fan, so it's sad to see how bad this one is, but again it's Netflix so wasn't expect much.

The CGI is really bad, like we had better CGI movies 5 or 7 years ago, this looks more like cut scenes from a PS3 game. It's not helped along by the bad lipsync or that it was made with English mouth movement in mind instead of Japanese, as only a tourist would choose the English option.

It's also got all the modern DEI thinks to check of, which is something you will notice really fast, and given it's something that means lower quality in the story and work in generel I would say they don't break that mold here. They even use the classic "touch girl" hair style we are seeing every time now, so when ever people I know and myself sees the half bold haircut we tend to write the show of then and there as they all go the same way anyway.

The sounds the Zaku used seems off when you are used to them sounding in pretty unique way. I don't know why they changed it here.

The ending is... well it's bad, I don't know why they don't focus test their shows, or at least hire fans to make them. We have seen with One Piece that it can be done, if they listen to the creator and have fans working on it without change everything to please the modern none existing audience.

I can't really give it more than 2 stars, as I see many trying to pump up the scor, and because it's not really that good even if you could look past the nightmare inducing CGI.

The first 2 episodes are incredible. The action is superb and ruthless. The depiction of the Gundam was like an unstoppable entity of warfare horror and I loved it. I found it difficult not to root for it. What helped this was that no identity of the pilot was given until the second to last episode; and the voice acting in this movie is a bit cringe, the characterizations even more so, exacerbated by the subpar CGI of faces. Whereas the effects excelled in the suits and combat, they failed with the people. I found this passable though; for episodes 1, 2, and 4. Episode 3 was a yawnfest and the last 2 episodes, while having some good action, were crippled by awful plot twists and revelations. Barring spoilers, I won't get into it, but...laughably bad. Nonetheless, a fun series to enjoy parts of if you like mecha.