[4Tran]

Originally Posted by Nightengale

Seriously, I think Gundam suffers from being known as a robot show rather than a war show with humans piloting robots. One thing I've noticed is the trend of conceptuality that Gundam drives the story of cool robot action/battles and the contrast of slower, more methodical structure of telling a story on characters piloting robots in war. And thus, I think it's fairly obvious that almost every Gundam anime employs episodes where the battles fought weren't meaningful and while a minor part of the story, it could've contributed so much more as a character episode than a more fighting episode with only little character development.

I think that part of this problem dates back to the tradition of giant robot shows where there's a sortie/battle in every single episode. I've noticed that in Gundam shows, this holds true for every non-recap episode of every TV series up until Seed. The sole exception that comes to mind is the first episode of Turn A - more of an exception that proves the rule. Turn A is probably the show that could have benefited the most from having a few non-combat episodes. Zeta and ZZ could also have done with a few less meaningless fights, and a little more story development. This is sort of why I'm rather pleased that they decided to break away from the one battle per episode policy in the Cosmic Era series. Still, I actually think that they would have been better off if they had dropped about half the battles from Destiny. Then again, this would probably alienate the action fans (more so than they were already alienated).

Originally Posted by Rin-Sama

Another series that turned away from the origanl Gundam was SD Gundam. And we all know how badly that did..... <_<

I'm not sure what you're talking about. What I saw of SD Gundam was great! It boiled down the familiar characters to their essences, and presented them unrelentingly as caricatures of real human beings - and all in the search for a few laughs. It was insightful, witty, and had perhaps the best writing of any Gundam show prior to Turn A. It... oh, wait... you're talking about SD Gundam Force! Never mind then...

I haven't seen SD Gundam Force, but I would imagine that it would be a bit of a stretch to compare it in any way to any of the other Gundam shows.

Originally Posted by jonli

It also kinda sucks how most main Gundam series always takes the same formula in terms of story.

I think that this statement is overly generalized, but it definitely has a grain of truth to it. Perhaps the Gundam franchise should take a page out of the Macross book and try to reinvent itself a little. My one reservation to this is that the Gundam creators are reluctant to change too much. I hope that Seed Destiny is a step in the right direction in this regard - while it uses the elements of the formula you pointed out, its dramatic impetus is in an entirely different direction.