Victory Gundam has strengths and weaknesses that will be very familiar to those who have watched the preceding run of series in the Universal Century. When it is depicting scenes of the brutality of war and senselessness of authoritarian rule, it shines. This is perhaps the grimmest of Tomino's UC series - while it contains a fairly large amount of goofy comedy, the intensity of the scenes of death and destruction is amped up considerably. There's also a real sense that constant war has gradually broken down civilisation in the Federation. Earth seems poorer than ever, and the main characters are mostly illegal immigrants trying to scrape a living at the start of the story. The battle with the Zanscare empire isn't being led by the Federation, but by insurgents with fairly limited equipment. Humanity clearly can't keep going on like this. Victory also contains moments of gentle, familial tenderness that feel truly warm and genuine. The bond between the protagonist Uso and his childhood friend Shakthi, surrogate maternal figure Marbet, and the rest of the motley crew they pick up along the way is pretty subtly written by Tomino's standards, and when given proper focus creates a real atmosphere of care. These are people who come from nothing and are thrown together through the wringer of chaos and battle, but turn into a real community by the end. They are children and feel like children, and I can forgive and understand their foolishness more easily than prior protagonists because they are considerably younger. Even the youngest children feel more real than the comic relief gremlins of prior instalments. I wish the rest of the series had as much substance.
The main problem in my opinion is the pacing. Even after this many bites at the apple, Tomino still hasn't worked out how to fill fifty episodes with meaningful content. The series meanders all over the place with little sense of direction, one battle after another that somehow doesn't translate into a proper atmosphere of grinding warfare. Shakthi gets captured or hands herself over to Zanscare custody enough times that it is able to become repetitive. Lots of characters die but the weight of them is wildly inconsistent because those outside the main cast get very limited focus. The antagonists also come out feeling underwritten. Cronicle is a decent attempt at creating a Char-like character who is deeply unlike Char, impetuous and often incompetent, yet he isn't in it enough to get a full sense of his motives. The violent, unhinged Fuala similarly feels somewhat underutilised, and her arc doesn't feel entirely coherent. The Zanscare Empire they are agents of feel insufficiently fleshed out, they're either career military men or fanatics. Kagatie is ostensibly the main antagonist and he feels like a bare sketch of a character. The series resident "female Newtype antagonist with an emotional entanglement with the protagonist" is the worst one yet. She just turns evil offscreen, for no properly discernible reason. As usual, Gundam is a vehicle for Tomino to try to work out what the deal is with women, and fails badly as he has done every time before.
Technically, Victory has animation that's noticeably rough, although the look of it is generally quite pleasant. The backgrounds are often more impressionistic than previous instalments, and it gives a lush and painterly quality to the scenes set on Earth. The action is serviceable. Most of the better constructed action set pieces are near the start, and as in Gundam ZZ the modular nature of the Gundam is leaned into heavily to create interesting scenarios. The later parts contain a lot more suits flailing at each other in space, as creating dynamic looking fights in zero gravity remains a challenge. Some of the more daring directorial flourishes work and some are deeply silly. The end of the series once again leans into weird cosmic stuff, better realised here than in prior instalments, but still not quite poetic enough to really work. Technical design is also mixed. The Victory Gundam, in all its forms, is a beautiful thing. It looks just right, exactly how a Gundam which is ultimately for securing a future for humanity ought to look. Mobile suits in this series heavily use energy shields over physical ones, which is a nice way of showing the progress of technology. Not everything looks as good. The Zanscare mobile suits have an insectoid theme which leads to some memorable designs and some that are over the top and ridiculous. The protagonists get a small ship in the later part of the series called the White Ark which looks very toyetic. There's also a bizarre obsession with putting wheels on things. Mobile suits have wheels or ride in wheels and there's also spaceships with wheels. The spaceships with wheels are part of a plan to do genocide to people on Earth, and I feel that the horror of this is undercut by part of the plan being battleships with wheels. The soundtrack also warrants a mention, it's a lovely sweeping orchestral score by Akira Senju which really elevates the series.
The bottom line is that Victory Gundam is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. If you liked what Tomino did in the previous series, you will probably like this because it's got more of the good stuff. If you didn't, this is not going to win you over because it's got all the same faults. I'm about in the middle, which is roughly how I felt about the things that came before. Watching the original run of Gundam series has been an interesting, sometimes gratifying, often frustrating experience. I'm glad I got to see how the foundations of the franchise were laid. I'm not going to do it again.
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