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A thread titled “Why Gundam X Is Unpopular” went up on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board, drawing a wave of comments criticizing the mecha designs, characters, and scattered storytelling.
While some praised certain units like the Divider, plenty of complaints stood out too — weak mecha designs on both the hero and villain sides, the Frost Brothers feeling too small-scale as final bosses, and the two secondary Gundams barely leaving an impression.
What people said
Unicorn and GQuuuuuuX kind of overdid it though
Blame Amuro for pushing that meteor back
And Tiffa's not even cute but acts stuck-up about it, so annoying
Z and ZZ had that too though
the good guys just don't hit that hard
It's all "a unit that shoots a lot" and "a unit that shoots even more," so the battles end up monotonous and boring
Leopard… a rehash of Heavyarms
So is the Aegis Gundam, a rehash of Ashtaron, fine then?
This
It's phoned in across the board
once a show catches on with fujoshi fans (women into shipping/BL subtext), doubling down on fujoshi-bait character designs and setups for the sequel kills it
Gagaga wasn't really fujoshi-bait though
The earlier series had light fujoshi appeal, and when Dagwon leaned hard into it, the whole franchise tanked
Gagaga already had its ending decided before it even started, so they just went full risqué with the character designs and did whatever they wanted
On top of that, even the moment-to-moment fun falls short of Wing, so there's nothing going for it
It ended like some war had wrapped up, but who was actually fighting who?
If you need that explained to you, we can't even have a conversation
Classic move — playing dumb to bait replies for affiliate blog clicks
My theory's proven then
That was the series' lost period
Turn A got a pass though
Don't insult Wing
That's probably the simple reason V and X get overlooked
Iron-Blooded Orphans and The Witch from Mercury get tons of figures and kits even with garbage scripts
I think ZZ's mobile suits have great designs, so why don't they ever get new model kits 🥺
The only new ones come as Unicorn bonus extras
Having clearly superior abilities but getting written off as "defective" because it's not the type society wants —
that's them embodying the show's core theme
They don't have a design that's super popular like Deathscythe,
or a late-series awakening arc dropping strong enemies left and right like Duel,
or an iconic battle moment like Cherudim's 1-second Trans-Am
Brothers aside, I've never seen anyone say they actually like these two units
They're actually pretty active though
They just don't have final-boss presence
By that logic Le Creuset, who pulls basically the same stunt, doesn't have final-boss presence either
Background and Key Points
Gundam X (1996) landed in the so-called “dark age” of the franchise, airing after Victory Gundam’s ratings collapse forced Sunrise to cut the planned 39 (or more) episodes down to 39… actually to roughly half its intended run, squeezing years of planned plot into a truncated 39-episode broadcast. That compression is the root of most complaints above: factions, the Vulture gang’s motives, and the Frost Brothers’ backstory all got cut down mid-production, which is why posters like >>61 can’t even agree on what the Freeden crew’s “journey” actually resolved. Its take on Newtypes (here called “Newtype descendants”) was also ahead of its time thematically, which is why a 2019-era poster (>>5) argues it only reads as prescient decades later, in the Unicorn/GQuuuuuuX era.
The thread doesn’t actually split on whether X is good or bad — nearly everyone agrees it’s a weak entry — it splits on *why*. One camp blames the mecha design language (lame MS designs on both sides, villains lacking “final boss presence”), another blames the writing/compression (jumbled factions, worse than even Wing), and a third (>>86) proposes a market mechanism: weak kit sales for X and V fed back into weaker merchandising support, unlike later shows such as Iron-Blooded Orphans that got kit support despite thin scripts.
What the thread never states outright: X’s ratings crash is well documented as the direct cause of Turn A Gundam’s subsequent “back to basics” reset, and Bandai’s toy-sales-driven model means a Gundam series’ creative freedom is downstream of kit revenue — so the “bad designs -> bad sales” causality posters assume may run the other way, with budget and schedule cuts (themselves downstream of V Gundam’s failure) producing the “subtly not cool” designs fans are criticizing.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Why Gundam X Is Unpopular.”
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