[Arabesque]

I suppose the biggest sign that AGE had failed is when even Kaioshin ends up calling it mediocre

(Glad to see you back here BTW Kaioshin)

Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama

Once the characters stopped developing as their own entity and started to become the representatives of concepts from past series the show just kind of lost any real gravitas it had ultimately. You just can't do this sort of finale when your main cast is this unlikeable and hard to sympathize with.

Exactly. Hell, even the ones we could sympathize with had either been side characters who either had taken an exit from the show once the generational concept rolled around and kept on changing the secondary cast to the point where we never got a handle on anyones personality long enough to be attached to, or they end up dying and forgotten for long stretches of time. As a result the only ones we can latch on were the three main protagonists, but as you had mentioned they had gotten to be so unlikable it was hard to really take a position with any of them.

I mean, it's not like I couldn't understand what made them the people they were by the end of the show, well okay not Asem since I still have no clue why the hell he ever left his family for 13 years to be a pirate (seriously, someone explain this one to me, and while your at it, explain to me what the hell was he doing in this final arc again? Whose side was he on?) but with someone like Flit at this point we had gotten to know him for long enough to know what made him tick, what was his specialty, why he was doing what he was doing, we had been with him long enough for him to be our crutch throughout the time span of this show. Problem was that at that point he had gotten so unpleasant to watch and every time he yelled ''Exterminate'' I just couldn't side with him at all. He had ended up becoming the very thing he was fighting against, and even when we had small moments where we see the older, more noble man through the surface of this genocidal old nuter, it didn't mean much since they were so few and far in between, and we get moments like him whispering in his Grandsons ear to kill every last one of them damn Vagans instead most of the time.

Kio certainly falls more into the category of being a concept than a character that had organically grown in-series to take up that position. I don't have much nice things to say about him or the situation he ended up in, other than it reflects pretty badly on all his family if they just allowed him to do whatever he wanted after being kidnapped by the Vagans.

Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama

It's a real shame that Level 5 and Hino didn't get something this basic, but hey they are game designers first and foremost and not anime screenwriters and well...ultimately I have to agree they betrayed that shortcoming in the end. Gundam as a franchise deserves better writing then this.

The saddest part about this is that I think that had they gone with their original plans and made it a game from the getgo, it would've been successful. Like I said, Level 5 are excellent game makers and designers, and whatever I read about the AGE game had been positive praise for it's game play, so it is a great shame they went ahead and made it into a show. Yes I realize how that sounds, but honestly I think that had it been a game the story could've been excused for not being all that great since at least it wasn't the main component that held it together.

Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama

The love interest was also Stellar Lousier a crazy almost lobotomized personality, whereas at least AGE had the likes of Yurin and Romary who while not anything approaching great characters I could at least look at as human.

I'll give you Yurin being someone closer to being human than Stella (and arguably the more effective innocent), but not Romary. Sorry, but the last talk she had with Asem had proven to me that her reactions approaches nothing close to being human. You don't fawn over your partner leaving you again after realizing he had left you and only child to go be a criminal for 13 years without even dropping a hint he had been alive. Worse still, they seem to have gotten back together in this episode ...

Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama

AGE HAD a sympathetic cast at one point just before the third act with the likes of Seric, Woolf, Grodek, Flit and dare I say even Asemu and Zeheart (pre Gen 3 Zeheart of course), but essentially tossed it all away for what I can only assume was to allow Hino to follow along with some easy already tried and true Gundam storylines that have worked in the past. However what he neglected was that these things worked with those shows and weren't going to work well with this one because what came before in the prior generations didn't really allow for it. It's pretty blatant to me that he just gave up trying to make AGE it's own thing, but really if seemingly everyone just summarily rejected you at the get go and you're dealing with a show that has such poor ratings and are getting so much hate for it (this was while things were going well in AGE land btw) are you going to put your best foot forward even when you lack experience?

I can not give you enough reps for what you just wrote here.

Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama

I'm not trying to whitewash Level 5 and Hino's shortcomings here, but I can at least sort of understand how things ultimately got to this point on the production side of events. In the end I'll probably look at AGE as a show that was never really given a fair chance by enough people to make it a success (look how many people are commenting compared to 00 to get an idea of how big the audience is) and the staff behind it more or less acknowledging it in both a reduced effort to match up what came before with what came after at the halfway point and also in an attempt to try and go more and more with what was popular before (how did people like that mini arc of Soldiers of Sorrow events at the start of Gen 3?) in an attempt to salvage something out of the concept. Damned if you do damned if you don't really, cause I could easily still see a lot of familiar faces complaining regardless of what kind of ending we got.

Yeah, and like I said it got to me when I read his comment when thanking everyone and saying how it was a painful experience for him working on a Gundam show, and honestly as much as I think the show sort of earned at this point a lot of criticism, I can not be a harsh on this show as I would be on a lot of other ones. The man had tried his best, and yet got more shit for it, a lot of it before he got a chance to prove himself, and it must have been a grueling and daunting year for Hino-san. This isn't giving them an excuse, but it certainly puts things into perspective.

(The AGE reenactment of Soldiers of Sorrow was honestly the better parts of the 3rd arc sadly)

Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama

Overall I'm not sure what's to be done with the Gundam franchise now. I already felt there was an overwhelming amount of negativity and scorn for any new entry in the franchise, and AGE has probably only made it worse by actually deserving some of it. How do you get a fanbase this rooted in the past, this critical of anything new...or familiar even to enjoy/appreciate/not gripe endlessly about something you create? The only two solutions I can come up with are to put the franchise on hiatus and then come back and be a little smarter about how they try to build a new audience. Like really do their research and find out just what kind of Gundam series might appeal to a newer generation of fans as opposed to having a company like Level 5 come in and tell them what people will like and assuming they are right because things worked for them in the gaming industry. The other solution would just be to end the AU experiment and go back to U.C for the next TV series since Unicorn seems to indicate that people are clamoring for and WILL buy product from the U.C timeline IF it's done justice. Be smart about it next time, and at the very least I think there has to be that long wait between entries, at least 5 years of hiatus. Let the negativity trickle out of the fanbase slowly over time instead of reigniting it so quickly with a new entry every 2-3 years.

Ugh ... I really hate these two options and sadly, I think you are correct in that it's probably going to be one of them that Sunrise/Bandai will end up going to do. I dislike option 2 for the same reason I'm not excited about Origin, since I had already seen the show like 6 different time from seeing the 0079 series, watching the movie, the dub, playing the game, you name, so at this point I am more or less sick of retreading the same old story again for the umpteenth time and as for a new UC story ... watch as comments about it not being ''TRUE UC'' and ''making a MOCKERY OF UC'' start to show up lol

Option one is going to be likely (since it's been the strategy to cycle through each Gundam every few years so they would leave room to arrange for the next show) but ... ugh, it's never going to work. AGE was announced 5 years following 00 and look at how it turned out (yes there was movie in between but you get my point). Granted Level 5's involvement didn't help things but at this point, I think Sunrise/Bandai need to realize that the only way they could hope to make the next series successful is to appease the older fans as well, which at this point means they need to make the next act them trying to juggle flaming chainsaws while blindfolded in terms of difficulty in that aspect alone, let alone trying to go and get a new fanbase all together.

One helpful element they could take from AGE is that at least once they get down to do an autopsy of the series, they can at least make sure not to fall into the same trappings they had with this one. Sadly, it is a Catch-22 situation with any new Gundam series at this point not already a proven quantity ...

Originally Posted by GN0010 Nosferatu

WTF was that all about? Sid repairs itself, flys to the battle, and humps the Vagan Gear for....what purpose?

Well, it flew into battle because it's a Bro and had seen the stupidity of humanity, so it wanted to rally them all up on a common foe so they'd stop being so stupid.

As for the humping ... well, space is a very large cold place, and that AI had been pretty lonely, it's only company is a database for nearly 2 centuries. So it seen that delicious piece of hard metal ass and one thing lead to another ...