Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation II: Lovers is little better than the previous installment. As with Mobile Suit Gundam II: Soldiers of Sorrow, it has the intrinsic handicap of being the middle act of a story instead of an opening or closing. However, this fares substantially worse than 0079 's second compilation thanks to the same 90 minute runtime that doomed the previous New Translation film.

The bulk of my criticisms of Heirs to the Stars apply here: the new animation sticks out like a sore thumb, everything is too rushed to leave an impact, and newcomers will be lost and confused. However, I will give credit and say a few things in this film's favor. For one, there's a couple new scenes I actually like here: namely, a short scene of Four Murasame after her battle in Hong Kong showing her dilemma in having to fight the boy she loves for her goal and an admittedly cute scene of Kamille and Fa having an awkward first kiss in space with helmets on. Also, there's more new footage as a whole, so there's slightly less disruption. Additionally, the infinite stupidity of Katz Kobayashi is slightly more bearable since his stupider moments while on Earth are trimmed out for time.

That said, none of this is able to save the movie. In fact, it might actually be even worse between its status as a middle act, the increase of plot holes created by all the trimming for time, the omission of iconic lines and scenes from the original, and the sheer neutering the characters undergo. One example is Paprimus Scirocco, whose moments of tactical brilliance and charisma are trimmed so heavily that he hardly stands out. This is a big problem when he's the show's main antagonist and absolutely stood out in the TV version. As a result, he goes from showing that he's a darkly charismatic tactician to being a charismatic tactician simply because the story says he is. Furthermore, most of Reccoa Londe's moments are removed, including scenes foreshadowing her slide into darkness and defection to the villains. Jerid Messa's rivalry with Kamille and the death of Jerid's love interest Mouar lose impact since Jerid and Moaur barely have any screentime or characterization here.

The character I want to discuss most of all is Four Murasame, the tragic love interest of Kamille. At first, it seems like she gets off easily from the film's compression, with the bulk of her first arc of episodes largely intact. However, that changes near the end of her first arc, when the film makes a wild swerve and has her shot in the head onscreen for helping Kamille escape to space, complete with a shot of her falling corpse to confirm that yes, she is indeed dead. In the TV show, her fate after helping Kamille is left ambiguous for several episodes. Much later in the show, a two-parter reveals that she survived, only to end up in an even worse state due to intensified torture and brainwashing. Throughout this two-parter, the audience is dangled with false hope after false hope, teasing the possibility that Four can be saved or even regain her lost memories just to keep pulling the rug out. And right when she's finally broken free of her brainwashing, she dies moments later to save Kamille in a repeat of the doomed love triangle with Lalah from 0079. This two-parter is perhaps the bleakest string of episodes of Zeta Gundam, with Four having lived and died as nothing but a disposable pawn who was doomed from the start and Kamille powerless to do anything but hold her body and weep. The sheer tragedy of Four's dehumanization and death right when she's on the verge of being free is what makes the character such a compelling part of Zeta Gundam. In this compilation film, those two pivotal episodes are entirely nullifed in favor of having Four die a more heroic death, in which she chooses to save the life of her love interest and is killed for it on the spot. This decision to soften Four's character arc feels a conscious decision on the part of Gundam creator and Zeta Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino to soften the source material, having overcome the depression he struggled with during the original show's production and becoming more optimistic by the time of New Translation (this also explains the most notorious aspect of the compilations, which shall be discussed when I cover the next film). While I understand the decision to soften the tragedy of Four's character arc, it comes at the price of removing the core part of her character and reducing her to yet another love interest who dies in Zeta Gundam.

As with its predecessor, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation II: Lovers is a failed experiment. It changes and compresses too much to be an acceptable compilation film in the way the Gundam 0079 films were. At the same time, it has too much of the original TV show's DNA to be a ground-up retelling in the vein of Macross: Do You Remember Love? or Rebuild of Evangelion. As a result, this film and its predecessor feel like a master of none.