Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance Review - RIB22

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Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance Review

Disclaimer: My only experience with the Gundam anime is IBO. I still know stuff about the UC timeline and whatnot, but IBO is all that I’ve watched entirely before this. My reviews are spoiler free, or at least I try to keep it that way.

TLDR: I don’t really think this is worth your time unless you’re pretty big on Gundam. They do a lot of stuff wrong here, but there are some cool parts about it. Tough not to considering you’ve got big robots fighting each other, but you know what I mean.

        Requiem for Vengeance was not really my cup of tea. I want to say that as I was watching this, until about the fifth episode there were multiple points where I wanted to drop it. Then the last episode further irked me because, quite frankly, it was awful. Does that mean the show itself is bad? To be honest I would say so, but to my knowledge Gundam isn’t portrayed in 3D media all that often, so seeing the fights was pretty nice. So, what went wrong?

        Before I start bashing it I just want to say that it seems most people on Reddit and in YouTube comments liked it well enough. I think that I went into this with higher expectations than I should have because I saw the TV-MA rating and pretty much assumed it would be really gritty and philosophical. Instead, in my opinion, it was really quite a safe, toothless plot and there were multiple moments where I felt it was like if you let a soft-modern, millennial Redditor take the wheels. It was really quite rough for me.

        The music is entirely unmemorable, which I think is a shame. I think seeing the Zeon perspective is really cool. I don’t want to spoil anything, but seeing how the Earth Federation’s Gundam was portrayed was genuinely super cool and I wish there was more of it. I felt like there wasn’t enough action in the first two-thirds of the show. A lot of the characters really aren’t fleshed out well, are voiced badly, and their designs are abysmal. I think I can forgive this last note, but also, see, the mistake that a lot of Western media makes these days is that they sacrifice timelessness for approval points. People make fun of clichéd haircuts a lot, but the reason why is because you can spot certain things and tell, “Oh, a soft-modern Western millennial made this.” That’s not inherently a bad thing, but, minor spoiler perhaps, a big reason people don’t like the last episode (not speaking for everyone of course) is because family values and these sorts of writers mix like water and oil, so they simply make stupid decisions.

        I’m being a little too mean, but really I don’t have too many nice things to say. A lot of plot elements don’t make sense, though I’m being harsh there because I’m making a tactical game so I overanalyzed that part. The action and characters are lacking. I think people can rightly disagree with me on the former, but I’ll stand strong on the latter. The overall plot doesn’t reach a satisfying resolution. I don’t think anyone can say that this isn’t a fair opinion.

You know what, I’ll say this at least, the little intro sequence that Netflix shows tend to have is pretty decent here. A lot of people were making fun of the CGI, and rightly so, but I’ll say that it’s passable except for the facial animations, which are really quite bad. I feel bad for the production team because I can tell that polishing it up to be really good would’ve taken so much more time and the show is complete enough to showcase as is.

I don’t really know what to say. The whole thing felt slap-dashed together. I think (this is probably cope) that there was a lot more they were planning to do behind the scenes that had to be cut, because the whole thing is only about 2 hours long. Some of the characters felt entirely useless, some seemed as if they were going to be important and only got a smidgen of dialogue, the MC’s own background is presented so poorly that I completely failed to grow attached to her.

At the end of the day all I can say is that this was pretty unmemorable. I want to reiterate, however, that the way that the Gundam EX was portrayed was really cool and that seeing 3D mobile suit fights is as well. This show erred in many ways, but I think that if you’re a Gundam fan and are starved for content, it’s a fine enough way to kill 2 hours.

Nikhil Saxena

Founder, Destrier Studios

https://linktr.ee/destrierstudios

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