SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING

DESCRIPTION

CAST

OVA ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz
MOVIE ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz Tokubetsu-hen
OVA ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam Wing: Operation Meteor - ODD＆EVEN NUMBERS
MANGA ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam Wing
OVA ActionGundam EVOLVE
SPECIAL Mecha30th GUNDAM PERFECT MISSION
ANIME DramaKidou Senshi Gundam
SPECIAL ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam Wing: Frozen Teardrop Picture Drama - Tsuginaru Tatakai
MANGA ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam W: G-UNIT
MANGA ActionGundam EXA
NOVEL ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam Wing
MANGA ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam W: Endless Waltz - Haisha-tachi no Eikou
MANGA ActionGundam EXA VS
SPECIAL ActionShin Kidou Senki Gundam Wing: operation 30th

REVIEWS

• 

  asphodelic

  50/100
  Neglecting the Humane

  [There is no such thing as an objective review. Interpretations and opinions of all forms of art and expression are subjective.]

  Mobile Suit Gundam Wing! You know what that means? Mechs! Space battles! Socio-political conflicts! But most importantly, giant fighting robots! All very exciting things on paper. Though there is too much of a good thing.

  With a hefty 49 episode count, Gundam Wing offers a story about the warring factions of Earth's inhabitants and space colony citizens in a fight for dominance. As expected of the franchise, two of the biggest appeals are proudly on display: bombastic warfare and mech fights. Bombs, assassins, guns, and missiles, both sides are using every weapon in their infinite arsenals. In fact, Gundam Wing features multiple battles each and every episode. A fine spectacle? Most certainly. But the quickest way to desensitize someone is to expose them to the same thing frequently.

  With nearly half of its run time dedicated to combat, Gundam Wing lets its large cast of characters fall to the wayside. This is not to say they are idle or not present. But they are neglected, only working with an archetype for a base, and left unfinished. They fulfill their roles and that is enough. All the decisions that they make are to move the plot the way the creators want it to go.

  This is a plot driven anime doing its best to masquerade as a character driven anime. It’s evident that the story was conceived first. The characters are simply cogs in the machine, made to serve necessary roles and existing to serve the plot, rather than steer it. Every choice they make feels obligatory. But it’s not only their actions that feel hollow—their words are equally banal. As any hope for deeper emotion and more nuanced characterization fizzles out, they gradually decline into little more than mouthpieces for their personal beliefs and philosophies. Anyone who wishes to see these characters in a different light other than mech pilots, soldiers, and politicians will never have that chance.

  Gundam Wing takes itself so seriously that it seems to have forgotten the human aspect of war—the necessary moments of reprieve, the need for levity and rest, the precious pockets of joy and laughter. Soldiers are not an infinite resource, and they certainly are not machines. A person cannot fight every day. Yet war is all Gundam Wing knows and it is the only road everyone walks. The only way these teenage soldiers know how to express themselves is through fighting, and in many ways, that is terribly sad.

  Ultimately, Gundam Wing is a just a small piece of an enormous franchise. One of its primary goals is to sell merchandise. There’s no shame in that. But even as far as series attached to a multimedia project with merchandise sales in mind go, there’s so much better out there.

  Continue on AniList
• 

  Juliko25

  55/100
  Gundam Wing is the prime example of how constant spectacle and bombast can actively hurt a series rather than help it.

  Okay...I have some explaining to do. Years ago, I told myself I was never going to watch Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in any capacity, mainly because I'm not into mecha series, as I often find them too hard to follow a lot of the time. I have a really hard time keeping up with hard sci-fi and technobabble, as it all just flies over my head and does not compute in my dumb autistic brain, and Gundam Wing really leans HARD into all of that, which is why I gravitated towards stuff like fantasy and slice-of-life in anything I watch, read, or play. Though funny enough, one of the first anime songs I discovered, by accident at that, was Two-Mix's Just Communication, aka Gundam Wing's first opening theme, by way of a random Neopets webpage I found in the early 2000s that had it as background music in the form of a midi file. Remember those? I still have that midi file on my flash drive! The only other thing I knew about Wing was the fact that one of the characters self-detonated their Gundam, and that's because one of my college friends spoiled the events of that episode to explain something to me. But one day, I was bored. I wasn't in the mood for the other shows I was watching, Anne Shirley got delayed by several weeks, I couldn't watch the rest of one of my Full Moon discs because episode 19 had a glitch that made it unwatchable, and I found out GW was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I decided to break the oath I swore to myself and I watched the first episode...and now here I am having completed the entire series. Seriously, what is wrong with me? I'm a masochist, apparently. So as of now, I've seen seven Gundam series in their entirety: Both seasons of 00, Witch From Mercury, After War Gundam X, the War In The Pocket OVA, and now Gundam Wing. So what's my verdict? Eh, it's...nothing special. I know it's the series that exposed Americans to Gundam and popularized the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, but honestly, I don't feel the series is as good as people make it out to be.

  Centuries in the future, in the year After Colony 195, Earth is surrounded by orbiting space colonies. The colonists are cruelly oppressed by the Earth Sphere Alliance, which uses huge humanoid fighting machines called "mobile suits" to control the populace. Behind this tyranny is the secret society called Oz, which has infiltrated the Alliance military and steered it towards its repressive course. Now, the space colonies are ready to strike back. Five young teenage pilots, equipped with advanced mobile suits called Gundams, are sent to Earth to wage guerilla war against Oz and its Alliance puppets. Relena Darlian, the teenage daughter of an important colonial diplomat, accidentally discovers the identity of a Gundam pilot who was shot down during his entry to Earth: a teenage boy named Heero Yuy. From there, Heero and the other four Gundam pilots find themselves having to blast their way through the various groups in power behind the UESA (and eventually their own force). The Gundams have near indestructible armor and enough firepower to overwhelm entire armies, but the pilots find themselves limited in making positive progress through brute force. In turn, Relena discovers her true family heritage and fights in her own way to bring about peace between the Earth and the colonies amidst various political power shifts caused by the Gundam rebellion.

  Honestly, just the plot summary alone doesn't really do that great a job explaining just how off-the-rails the series is when it comes to its plot. For a series with 49 episodes, with every single one being mandatory viewing and moving the plot forward, this is not a series you want to use as baby's first Gundam series IMHO. Normally, serialized narratives are a good thing, but in the case of Wing, this format actually works against it in that in its attempts to constantly have stuff happen, it feels like the series is constantly trying to one-up itself at every turn, constantly introducing plot points and subplots at a breakneck pace, with little to no reprieve from any of it, oftentimes dropping them just as soon as they're introduced. For example, you know that whole thing where Heero accidentally kills a guy named Noventa, and the guy’s wife asks Relena to deliver a letter to Heero forgiving him for what he did? For all the importance that was given, we never see Relena give Heero that letter, nor do we ever see his reaction to it. Characters constantly go from place to place or change sides with little to no explanation, or behave when the plot demands it. As a result, Wing lacks cohesion and feels completely disjointed, preferring spectacle and bombast over actually allowing itself to breathe or let the audience take everything in. Not to mention there are plenty of subplots that feel completely superfluous and unnecessary, that you could cut out from the show and it'd be to Wing's benefit. The biggest example of this is episode 13. You'd think an episode titled Catherine's Tears would be entirely about fleshing out Trowa, his time at the circus, his relationship with his friend Catherine, and making him feel like more than just the strong silent lone wolf, right? Nope! 90% of the episode is taken up by this pair of awful, generic villains of the week who only exist to be cliche villains and make Zechs look like a complete idiot, whereas everything involving Trowa and Catherine is only in the last five minutes! False advertising, much? I did read that a lot of the show's narrative choices were due to director Masashi Ikeda being very loosey-goosey in his approach. In my opinion, that loosey-goosiness is Wing's biggest problem. It's constant need for spectacle and lack of narrative consistency drags it down to an insurmountable degree, resulting in it becoming a convoluted mess.

  This unfortunately extends to the characters as well. For a series with 49 episodes, it has a huge cast of characters, but doesn't use its time to actually develop them, save for a select few, and even the development they do get feels slap-dash and cobbled together. Most of the characters feel either one note, or their characterization is wildly inconsistent, often changing with literally no explanation whatsoever, sometimes acting completely out of character. The biggest victim of this is Wufei, who honestly feels less like a character and more like a plot device. He starts off as an angry little misogynist or a prototype Sasuke, then he's suddenly helping the others for seemingly no reason other than the plot demands it, then he's back to working alone and being a dick, and so on. I always felt like the writers never seemed to know what to do with him, and considering the series was originally meant to just have four pilots in its early planning stages, maybe they should have stuck with that instead of shoehorning Wufei in here. The only characters I feel who got anything even resembling character arcs are Relena, Quatre, and Noin, who are quite honestly the most interesting characters in the series. But by this show's standards, that's still not saying much, and even they have their issues caused by the director's loosey-goosey approach. The characters have so much potential to grow into a memorable cast, but because Wing is more interested in spectacle and bombast rather than proper characterization and storytelling, they're not given the chance to evolve beyond their base archetype, and they're not fleshed out and developed enough as a result.

  This is made even more egregious by way of the existence of Episode Zero, a manga that actually explores the pilot's backstories and explains crucial parts of the plot, which were meant to be episodes in the series, but were scrapped due to production issues and members of staff either getting fired or quitting, and replaced by two fucking recap episodes!! Seriously, of all the episode ideas to scrap, why would you do this to episodes that would actually help to make the series better and convince the audience to give a damn about the characters?! I will admit, I do enjoy Duo as a character quite a lot. He and Quatre are my precious little murder muffins. Speaking of Quatre, what's the deal with his whole Space Heart thing? It's implied he has some kind of psychic/Newtype power, but it's only brought up twice, never explained at all, and never brought up again. Why even throw that in there if you're not even going to commit to it?! I'm also going to piggyback off another review on AniList, where that reviewer pointed out that Wing doesn't allow its characters to just breathe, take a break, or be anything other than soldiers in a war, merely cogs in a machine to serve the plot rather than steer it. You know what? They're absolutely right. Wing could have easily benefited from having episodes that didn't focus on the plot and actually showed the characters doing other things, and I mean for an entire episode, not just for a one minute scene and that's it. Seriously, how is it that Gundam X and War In The Pocket understand this better than Wing does?! Well, at least there's plenty of fan fiction that does just that. I know a lot of people like to complain about filler/anime original episodes and such, but having seen a lot of them over the years, I feel that the best ones can do a lot to both further a character’s development and show what they’re like outside of the main plot. It’s okay to have episodes where the characters aren’t worrying about the world being at stake for a while! I wish Gundam Wing understood this.

  Wing's problems are so entrenched in everything about it, they're extremely hard to ignore. To springboard off this, I want to talk about the setting for a bit here. Wing's setting is a huge, sprawling world with a lot of space colonies getting caught in the war, but for all that it touts itself on Earth oppressing the colonies, we hardly know anything about the actual colonies themselves, the people living in them, and their history other than the narrator spouting it at us whenever he feels like it. They hardly receive any attention outside of their involvement in the war, and because of this, it's hard to care about them at all. An example of a series that actually did this right is the Gundam: War In The Pocket OVA. That series actually took the time to flesh out its setting, a singular space colony, show what life is like on there, flesh out the characters living on it, and actually tied it into the plot in a way that gets you to actually give a damn about it, so the setting isn't just window dressing or a chessboard so the characters can move from point A to point B because it's convenient. They say less is more for a reason! Wing's problem is that even though it has 49 episodes to tell its story, it still feels too big because it wants so badly to be bigger, more epic, and more bombastic, but every single attempt it makes ignores practically every basic rule in storytelling to get there, and a lot of the time it really loves to pull stuff out of its ass to make things more convenient for itself, like having most of its characters survive events that absolutely should have killed them and refusing to answer basic questions.

  Now, I don't want to be a complete negative Nancy, and Wing does have some good stuff in it. One of its biggest highlights is the soundtrack, which is absolutely bitchin'. It's almost better than I feel the show deserves. It's sweeping, epic, and bombastic, almost on the level of Star Wars, with plenty of horns, oboes, percussion, and orchestras that truly make it feel big. I still find it hard to believe this was done by Kou Otani, the same guy who did the music for Haibane Renmei, Shadow of the Colossus, Outlaw Star, Popolocrois 1998, Digimon Ghost Game, and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. You could claim that they got the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra to do the soundtrack for this and I’d believe you, that’s how good it is. Do I even need to mention Two-Mix's openings? Seriously, the fact that I can recite the entire first half of Just Communication from memory, and have been able to do so since I was probably eight or nine, tells you how memorable it is. I will forever be grateful to that Neopets webpage for introducing me to Just Communication and by extension Two-Mix. Minami Takayama, you a queen. I have less to say about the ending theme, but it's nice, even if it doesn't fit the tone of the show at all. Also, as someone who doesn't watch a lot of mecha anime, I did like the mech designs here, especially Wing and Deathscythe, though I have to question why they made every Gundam except Heavyarms share similar color schemes in the first half. The animation, for its time, is fairly serviceable, though there are times when it goes really off model and some characters are drawn with hilariously bad facial expressions that make them look constipated. I also liked the stuff it had to way about the dangers of using robots as tools of war, especially considering war drones and unmanned combat vehicles are a hot topic IRL. I honestly wish Wing had zeroed in on that rather than the constant serial escalation it tried to do for its ridiculously melodramatic, off-the-rails plot.

  Sadly, none of those good qualities are enough to save Gundam Wing from being a campy, ridiculous, convoluted mess of Victorian proportions. Seriously, how in the world did Cartoon Network expect children to be able to understand Wing's plot? I'm a 32-year-old woman and I don't know what the hell is going on half the time! Wing could have been a better series had it restrained its scope, focused more on its characters rather than constant action and bombast, and bothered to flesh out its concepts and setting. Thanks for reminding me why I don't bother with mecha anime, Gundam Wing. That said, I'm not gonna deny its impact on Gundam as a franchise. Wing was the first Gundam series to be exported to North America and was, for a short while, the highest rated show on Cartoon Network of all time upon its premiere. Granted, its English dub is very rough, even if it did allow now famous Canadian VAs like Scott McNeil, Brad Swaile, Saffron Henderson, David Kaye, the late Kirby Morrow, and Brian Drummond to get their feet through the door. Wing helped pave the way for Gundam to gain exposure outside of Japan in general, so for that reason, Gundam fans owe the series that much. I still find myself liking Gundam X, War In The Pocket, and Witch From Mercury better, their own issues notwithstanding. But man, characters like Duo, Quatre, Trowa, and Noin were wasted on this series! They deserve better! While Mobile Suit Gundam Wing's impact on the Gundam franchise as a whole is substantial, its overall quality as a series leaves a lot to be desired, and nostalgia can't really do much to hide its massive flaws. I absolutely wouldn't recommend this as baby's first Gundam series, even if it was that for a whole generation of children who watched it on Toonami/Cartoon Network in its early days, and honestly, there are better Gundam series out there you can watch.

  Continue on AniList
• 

  scottelot

  70/100
  Gorgeous art +awesome mechs + loveable pilots. Not perfect, but still very good. :)

  Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (TV) – My Review - 7/10

  SOME UNMARKED SPOILERS WITHIN - BE CAREFUL

  TV series only. I haven’t watched Endless Waltz yet or read any supplemental material.)

  ---

  I ended Gundam Wing with a 'smiley face' - which is honestly the best way to sum it up. I liked it. Not in a “this is flawless” way, but in a “this drove me insane sometimes and I still had a good time” way. Wing is gorgeous, weird, ambitious, frequently confusing, and occasionally accidentally hilarious. It also has moments where it absolutely nails what it’s going for, and moments where it sprints and meanders at the exact same time, which I didn’t know was possible until now.
  
  What I liked
  

  The art style is beautiful.

  The environments have this lovely painted look, and I’m a huge fan of the minimal shading on the characters. It’s charming and clean, and then when the show decides to “badass up” the animation for a mech moment or a big character beat, it really hits. Wing can look unbelievably good when it wants to.

  Queen Relena was a masterpiece arc.

  Watching Duke Dermail screw himself by putting Relena in charge and then immediately losing control of his own room was so sick. “Day 1: I’m still in charge!” and the council going “uhh… Queen Relena is in charge, not you?” absolutely destroyed him. Political slapstick, but in the best way. It really showed that Duke Dermail's ways were probably starting to waver within the Romefeller Federation as well, and this was the push they needed.

  The boys won me over. All of them.

  Even Wufei. Yes, I will give him shit, but by the end I liked the whole team. They’ve all got such distinct energy, and when the show lets them bounce off each other (or react to the madness around them), it’s great.

  Mech design was consistently strong.

  There honestly isn’t a single design I disliked. The core Gundams are excellent, and Epyon is iconic. I wasn’t too fond of either Tallgeese (sorry ?), but enemy suit standouts for me were Mercurius, Vayeate, and Virgo. Overall, the mechanical design work is one of the show’s most reliable pleasures.

  The doctors were a neat moral grey.

  I liked that the show didn’t make them saints or cartoon villains. They clearly care about the boys, but they’re also… not exactly righteous. That tension worked.

  OPs/EDs are great.

  Rhythm Emotion is a banger, but it taking ages to fully show up feels like the show trolling me. ESPECIALLY when they were teasing it as an insert song. Then when it DOES become the show's OP and it's... not finished yet, but they've laid the groundwork but it's still just: “Here’s the full OP!” (with like two episodes left.)

  Also, It’s Just Love as an ED is funny and cute. Relena in those mundane “photobook” moments while still looking sharp the whole time really works.

  ---

  What I didn’t like

  Pacing. Pacing. Pacing.

  This is my biggest issue. Wing will spend episodes doing almost nothing, even though it’s juggling a whole pot of factions that could be used for character work or political clarity. Then it piles even more factions on, and somehow consolidates everything near the end.
  It also skips the kind of episodes that should exist, the “pilot backstory deep dive” episodes, and instead we get this weird feeling of: meandering + rushing at the same time. I don’t know how it pulls that off, but it does.

  Treize is my personal nemesis.

  I get what he’s doing. I get the plan. I even get why he’s compelling to people.
  But I hate how much time he spends speaking in flowery nonsense prose that feels like it means nothing half the time. It’s hard to take a character seriously when every conversation is a poetic riddle. Also, his death was… too funny to me. I’m sorry. I couldn’t emotionally land it.

  Relena’s momentum gets shunted.

  The Sanc Kingdom arc into Queen Relena arc is such a strong stretch for her, and then she starts taking a backseat. It sometimes feels like she drifts toward the early-series role again: “please stop fighting” while nobody listens. That’s frustrating because her growth was one of the most interesting parts of the show, and it feels like the story doesn’t always know what to do with her after her peak.

  The ending wraps up fast.

  The doctors die with Quinze, peace is achieved, Relena becomes Vice Minister, new Earth Sphere Alliance formed. Happy end, sure. But it feels like we got there too quickly for how much chaos the show spent time setting up. It lands emotionally in places, but structurally it’s abrupt.

  Epyon action gets repetitive.

  I understand the point (demonstrate speed/power), but “red blur streaks through → Mobile Dolls explode” happens a lot. It looks cool, but it starts to feel like the show found one animation trick and used it as much as possible. It’s especially noticeable once you hit the Heero vs Zechs stretch.

  ZERO / Epyon System feels too magic-button.

  I know it’s not literally magic, but it’s treated like a future/decision cheat device in a way that sometimes feels like the writers using it to shortcut character logic. It’s a cool concept that can feel like a narrative “because the system said so” lever.

  Quatre’s implied Newtype-ish vibes go nowhere.

  The show hints at something, doesn’t develop it, and then just moves on. I wanted it to matter, even a little. It doesn’t. Not really.

  ---

  Standout characters

  Dorothy: incredible. A perfect foil to Relena. She’s funny, she’s cruel, she’s kind of right in the worst way, and her grief makes her understandable even when she’s being awful. Also, her and Relena’s dynamic? Yim yum. It was also so fun they put her in an actual physical battle with Quatre, and someone who WILL challenge her 'war is awesome' point of view.

  Relena: probably the standout of the series. I just wish she got to do more consistently after her strongest stretch.

  Noin: I loved her, which is why her “back to Zechs” trajectory left me conflicted. I get it, I get the logic, but emotionally it felt like a step back after how much she grew.

  Lady Une: amazing, and early Une is genuinely hilarious in how brutal she is. The “smile more” → split-in-two arc is genuinely sad. She probably should’ve died when she got shot, but then she comes back to miraculously save Treize, and it’s hard not to side-eye the plot armor.

  Trowa: unbelievably cool. Heavyarms is my second favourite unit. But I’m torn. The amnesia arc is both sad and… not good, and I kind of feel like he should’ve died when Quatre “killed him” to give the story more weight. Same problem as Une, honestly.

  Catherine Bloom: that’s my wife.

  Heero: the show can be wishy-washy with him, but I can see the story it’s aiming for. A boy-soldier who doesn’t know how to feel, slowly learning how to be human. By the end, when he tells Relena he’ll protect her with a smile on his face, it genuinely got me. I don’t even ship straight ships often, but Heero/Relena warmed my heart.

  Duo: best boy. He brings much-needed grounding, which makes him reacting to the insanity even funnier. And Deathscythe Hell is my number one forever.

  ---

  Final thoughts

  Gundam Wing is messy, rushed, poetic to a fault, and sometimes so contrived it loops back around to being funny, but it also has a ton of charm, striking visuals, and characters I ended up caring about. I can’t pretend it’s tightly written, but I had fun and I’m glad I watched it.

  Now I just need to see if Endless Waltz!

  Continue on AniList

SIMILAR ANIMES YOU MAY LIKE

• ANIME

  ActionKidou Senshi Gundam 00
• ANIME

  ActionKidou Butouden G Gundam
• ANIME

  ActionFull Metal Panic!
• ANIME

  ActionKidou Senshi Gundam: Tekketsu no Orphans
• ANIME

  DramaKidou Senshi Z Gundam
• ANIME

  ActionAldnoah.Zero
• ANIME

  ActionKidou Senshi Gundam 00 2nd Season
• ANIME

  AdventureKidou Shin Seiki Gundam X
• ANIME

  ActionSaint Seiya
• ANIME

  FantasyKyoukai Senki
• ANIME

  Action86: Eighty Six
• ONA

  MechaOBSOLETE