Man.

Man.

What a beautiful tire fire. Lots of style, lots of potential, but just a mess obsessed with the past in the end. After seeing the first couple episodes in theatres with friends, I was SO excited to see more. Felt it may be leaning on the original series a bit too much, but overall was extremely optimistic.

There are a lot of elements of gqux that I really liked. First, the obvious. It's beautiful. Utterly beautiful. Animation is utterly fantastic, fights are dynamic and fun, characters are so expressive, and every design by Take is fantastic. Utterly fantastic. It was such a big win to get her to do the character design. A big thing that kept me watching was seeing a new Take design and going “Yo that looks so good!”. Same with the mobile suit designs. I am 100% buying kits of the gqux and the gfred (why is it called that) at some point. Incredible designs that are really fun to look at and see fight, and are refreshingly unique for the series.

The music is also wonderful throughout of course, especially the songs by Suisei (I am a simp). The ed was always a treat at the end of each episode, and I’ll likely be listening to the Ost for a while. The vas also deliver great performances, though as a non jp speaker I can't really elaborate beyond “they sounded good!”.

In summary, in presentation? Style? Gquuuuuux super nails it.

Now the positives will be shakier.

I really like Machu and Nyaan. Like uh. The base starting point characters. They’re fun characters! Machus rebelliousness and mix of selfishness and shortsighted care for others is really fun to watch. She is a violent ball of energy and probably the show's most consistently good element writing wise. Nyaan is a great contrast to Machu, being very reserved and more forward thinking, while also dealing with discrimination and poverty from being a refugee. I spent a lot of the show waiting for them to bond more, as their dynamic seemed like it could be so fun and interesting. It didn't happen but uh. It could’ve!

The setting is a very fun idea. Zeon wins the war. Simple, but elegant twist on uc… even if very little interesting is done with it. However, when it is focused on, it's very fun. The episode with Shiiko is probably the strongest in the show because of this. Really focusing on the spite and resentment that built up in a survivor on the losing side of the war. No wonder I still see art of her despite her only being in one episode.

Challia Bull was a very fun character to follow. A deep pull from the 1979 series I didn't even remember existing, made extremely fun and intriguing, and just generally extremely likeable. Especially his relationship with Char. He does, however, wear out his welcome for me somewhat as it becomes clear the writers are more focused on him and other old characters, then the new ones.

Alright thats all I got, let's start bitching.

One of the major issues with this show is its utter obsession with 0079. I’ve watched 0079, Zeta, ZZ, CC, and some of the UC spinoffs. I really like them. They’ve aged really well. They’re fantastic shows, and the franchise grew from them and became huge for a reason.

But holy shit. Shut up about Char. Shut up about the Zabis. This is gquuuuuux. You hired a big pokemon artist to make designs for cool new characters for your new show! Focus on them! Stop sidelining them to show what fucking Char or Kycillia or some other old ass character who had their show already is doing. Stop showing footage of fucking 0079 in the final episode! What’s wrong with you! Why!

Fantastic designs and ideas for characters like Shiiko, Deux, Lalahs maids, the pomeranian pit crew, are chucked in the bin, killed off, written out, before they get to do anything, because hey, if we spent time doing things with them, we might not be focusing on what Challia Bull or Kycilla are doing! What are we doing here? These characters had their stories. The new characters have utterly no time to breathe under the weight of nostalgia pandering this show does.

The finale is the utter worst for this, waving around the RX-78 as a nostalgia toy to the point I think I’ll be a bit annoyed seeing it for a while. A character ominously calls it “the white devil” despite the main reason it was called that was war trauma from it annihilating zeon forces, something that obviously didn't occur here. Maybe it was beamed into her head via newtype magic. I don't care. It's cheap. Alongside Char, Kycilia and Challia needing to be given a moment to think about how cool and intimidating it is, alongside Challia announcing “I feel like it killed me in another world”, a moment that I'm uncertain was intended to feel really funny in how forced it was.

It's very much not helped by how a lot of recent media's obsession with the past and nostalgia pandering, has made such callbacks extremely tiring and annoying. And on a similar note.

I hate multiverses I hate multiverses I hate multiverses. I’m so tired of multiverses!

You were already juggling so many elements gquuuuuux! Why did you add multiverse bollox on top! No!

It just serves to make the finale even more of a busy mess, have even more nostalgia pandering by just having old stuff teleport in, and really do very little interesting. I liked the idea of saying Lalah can be trusted to be strong and protect herself. But then she’s just paired with Char again so who cares I guess.

But, moving on to what I think is the show's biggest issue.

Shuji.

Fucking Shuji.

Holy shit, I do not like Shuji at all.

He starts as an utter nothing character, who huffs paint, yaps about his imaginary friend. The show refuses to actually give him ANYTHING in the first half where he’s actually around. He’s just mysterious and feels like he’s just kinda existing.

And yet.

Machu and Nyaan become OBSESSED with him. He’s all they care about very quickly, alongside occasionally talking about freedom in a vague sense. Nyaan after one fight goes from having no strong feelings for him, to deeply extremely in love and obsessed. Their characters, and the show as a whole, are utterly TANKED by being centered around a love triangle that feels extremely shallow and uninteresting. It is the crux of the plot, and yet it's utterly unbelievable and uninteresting as a romance story. The show seems to want to use newtype magic and the kira kira vibe as a shortcut for bonding, like “oh the newtype magic just makes em feel really close”. But that's dull. Utterly dull. The appeal of romance is how the characters bounce off each other and grow to care for another. This doesn't happen in this love triangle. The characters just decide they’re in love, and are willing to kill and ruin their own lives for him, because he helped them have a nice magic drug trip. Because the writers either didn't know how, or didn't care enough to make an actually interesting romance, despite it being the driving motivation for the two main female leads. It's insane.

This is made even worse by the end. Before then, there are excuses you can make. Oh it's all on purpose. It's meant to be shallow. Char mentioned how one sided love was annoying, see! It's deep! But then after a fight where shuji tries to literally destroy their universe, machu and nyaan still love him, and also he decides he loves machu, because fuck it, we’ve got like 5 minutes left, who cares man. Shuji is also suddenly a cold, ruthless universe hopper who is dedicated to helping lalah and can grab the rx-78 from another world and also turn it giant for reasons that are not really elaborated on in any satisfying way despite this episode having tons of exposition. No time to talk about why the guy your mc is doing a final fight against, is doing any of this. We need to yap about 0079. This dude sucks! If anyone's favourite character is Shuji. We’re enemies! Watch your back!

Another thing certainly holding the show back is pacing. Many have noticed this. Things happen ridiculously fast in the back half, fifty things are being juggled at once, characters are introduced to immediately leave or die, the clan battles at the start of the show feel utterly pointless by the end, and most characters are underdeveloped.

However,

Unlike others, I don't think another season would have suddenly fixed this show. It doesn't feel like gwitch season 2, a lot of good stuff far too truncated. More time would not solve the core issues of gquuuuuux, in my opinion. It would just make them less bad. Maybe.

The clan battle half of the show would still feel like wasted time. The love triangle would still be bad. They had six episodes to give it substance. Another six wouldn’t have helped if they couldn't give it anything at all in the time it had. And it would still be a show far too obsessed with nostalgia instead of elaborating on its interesting ideas. I dont think theyd use more time to flesh out new characters, I think they’d use it to shove in a Gihren sub plot for some godforsaken reason.

Overall. I really wanted to like gquuuuuux. I really truly did. It had such a strong start. Then it got worse, and worse.

Gundam, and media in general, needs to focus on doing its own thing, doing new things, making stories that stand on their own. You can't make a good story by just reminding the audience about how a story they read years ago was really good, in the middle of your own story.

Also get Take to do designs on a show that doesn't suck please, their designs are so good, it can't end here man, cmon.