Mobile Suit Gundam - The 08th MS Team |
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Introduction Another year does not pass without Bandai milking its sacred cash cow for what it's worth, releasing yet another show of the same namesake. The show in question is Mobile Suit Gundam, of course, and just recently another OVA was released in Japan. This new title, Mobile Suit Gundam -- The 08th MS Team, returns to the Universal Century storyline (in the middle of the One Year War to be exact), and many a fan who was disgusted by G Gundam or indifferent to Gundam Wing cheered Bandai for "returning Gundam back on track". As popular as the One Year War period
is among Gundam fans, however, be warned that a return to said timeframe
does not automatically guarantee a great story. For what it's worth,
The 08th might as well take place in an alternate universe.
There are more continuity violations in The 08th than you can
shake a beam saber at, and by the time this review is over, the die-hard
viewers may find themselves wishing they had stuck with Gundam
Wing instead.
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 Shiro sallies forth in a Ball.
 The Federation's last hope -- trashed by a mere Zaku.
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Continuity? What Continuity? The first episode starts out with our protagonist Shiro Amada, an officer fresh out of the academy, taking on a Zaku with a mere Ball. As the two opponents exchange blows, the viewer is forced to suspend his disbelief when the Ball shrugs off a barrage of 120 mm shells fired at point blank range. Excuse me? It takes only a few 90 mm rounds to turn your average mobile suit into Swiss cheese, and the Ball isn't even armored with titanium! Then there is the issue of the Gundams.
In the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series, a lot of effort
is made to shepherd the Gundam prototype safely to Jaburo so that the
Federation can obtain its data and mass-produce it. Never mind the fact
that Char's forces were chasing the White Base halfway across Earth to
destroy the Federation's surviving mobile suit prototypes. The
08th nonchalantly tosses these facts into the wastebasket by giving
the Federation military mass produced mobile suits (GMs and Gundams by
the bucket loads) two months early.When a Gundam gets mass produced, it
becomes a GM (Gundam Massproduced). The Gundam itself is always
meant as a testbed for the upcoming mass production model--the
Federation is too pragmatic to construct a special mobile suit just for
their ace pilots. This fact is completely ignored in the new OVA: Each
MS Team has three Gundams, and there are at least eight MS Teams, making
for a whopping 24 Gundams total. The reputation of the Gundam as the
ultimate mobile suit killer is further ruined when several Gundams get
thoroughly trashed by mere Zakus.The rationale behind the GMs and
Gundams in the new OVA seems to be this: many of the current Gundam fans
haven't even seen the original Mobile Suit Gundam, so they
either won't know or care about the errors. This attitude is
surprising, considering the fact that many fans of Gundam come second
only to Star Trek fandom when it comes to upholding continuity in the
show. The introduction of a new Gundam model in every new Gundam show
is somewhat understandable (Bandai needs to sell toys, after all), but
it should have been handled better. As things stand, the writers of
The 08th dropped the ball on this one--no pun intended.
(continued)
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