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The story
A Yahoo News article titled “Gundam Mobile Suits That Seem to Have an Extremely Low Return Rate” sparked a thread on 5ch where users debated which Mobile Suit they’d refuse to pilot no matter what. Names that came up one after another included the Federation’s mass-produced Ball, the Zeon Zudah (a limited-area combat unit that saw action after returning from Jupiter), and the Pabrikk, which is used in something close to suicide-attack tactics. Many posters backed up their picks with in-story depictions and lore rather than just a “looks weak” impression, and some even took a contrarian stance, arguing that the Ball’s small size might actually make it harder for enemies to hit. The thread ended up going well beyond simple “weak mobile suit” mockery.
Which one would you least want to ride…!? The “MS of nightmares” that seem to have an extremely low return rate in Gundam works
This year marks 47 years since the original anime series, Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), first went on air.
The show has plenty of highlights, but its huge variety of appealing mecha—Mobile Suits chief among them—is surely one of its biggest draws.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
If you're Zeon, the Zaku.
The Zaku's actually a solid machine, though—
it's just that Gundam is overpowered.
The Galop, you mean?
That flimsy cockpit could give you a compound fracture just from piloting it.
Forget survival rate, that's a whole other problem.
Hitting that tiny thing in all that open space seems surprisingly hard.
It's only short—it's still bigger than a GM curled up.
Isn't basically everything on a 0/1, 0% return rate?
You'd be better off in a nimble fighter jet.
It goes down the moment a beam so much as grazes it.
Guess that's what happens when the Federation's whole approach is "cheap and mass-produced."
Let's just aim for a peaceful world without war instead.
Celestial Being, huh?
For Bandai's profits,
the war goes on.
The real enemy to defeat isn't
the Zeon Army—
it's Bandai Co., Ltd.
If we're sticking to Gundam-type units, the Gundam Ground Type—getting its head blown off in one hit by an Aggai, even if it was a surprise attack, was hilarious.
It's basically a suicide run.
At least have it combine before launching in the first place.
Tomino: "I need that combining scene to pad out the runtime!"
Self-destructing shields conveniently never actually self-destruct in the anime, so…
If that movie actually did that for real, would it have been lame, or would it have actually been awesome?
I remember buying a Ball model kit at a Showa-era plastic model shop as a kid and getting laughed at by the other kids…
Sounds like some of them had shark-mouth paint jobs and stuff, so there were probably some ace units among them.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The “return rate” in the original article isn’t an official stat or setting—it’s a provocative framing based on impressions from how things play out on-screen, without any rigorous basis. What split opinion in the thread was partly a statistical nitpick (can you really call a one-off prototype that got destroyed a “0% return rate,” when it’s just 0 out of 1?), and partly a reversal in how the Ball got evaluated—the idea that this general-purpose support unit might actually be more likely to survive precisely because it can avoid close combat. The Gundam franchise has gone through a lot of setting changes driven by production circumstances, and a mobile suit’s perceived strength often shifts depending on pilot skill or the needs of the story, which is why “weakest MS” rankings like this one are still a go-to topic of conversation 47 years after the show first aired.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Anime] Gundam – Which is the one you’d least want to ride…? The “MS of nightmares” that seem to have an extremely low return rate.”
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