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The story
A thread kicked off on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board with a post claiming that Mobile Suit Victory Gundam lacks “flair” across the board — its mobile suits, characters, insert songs, and story all included. Pushback quickly followed, citing the strength of the ending theme “Stand Up to the Victory,” the actual in-story performance of the successor unit V2 Gundam, the treatment of villain Katejina, and the buzz generated by the mobile game “G-Generation Eternal’s” gacha banners. The discussion soon expanded beyond V Gundam itself into the rise and fall of the whole Gundam franchise’s popularity.
What people said
Everything from Zeta to F91 was pretty solid, then suddenly it's as lame as the original series again
That's just a V Dash that looks strong, nothing more
Apparently "Baldy" (fan nickname for director Tomino) always trashes those parts right away since they're just stuff forced on him by the toy makers
Didn't Uso even complain in-story that the V2AB piles on way too many needless weapons?
I figured the G-Self's P-Bits would get smashed early too, but they actually got used all the way to the end — that caught me off guard
They hit Uso with a psychic attack and smash it while he's reeling, so…
the Buster's a bit of a gray area though
Probably because the V2AB was the featured gacha unit for G-Generation Eternal's 1.5th anniversary
"Next time on Mobile Suit Victory Gundam: Lives That Vanish, Lives That Bloom — please watch!"
That line alone deserves a place in anime history
And the kicker is it's the "Grim Reaper" character saying it
Victory's battles are packed with gimmicks, that's exactly what gives it flair
Having the most vicious rival character be a woman just doesn't get people as hyped, I guess
Getting dragged out of his cockpit by a 13-year-old kid is genuinely pathetic
He's so weak there's basically no contest
He barely lets the shoulder cannons do anything before snapping them off
Honestly he probably dislikes V2 too
It's got that overly toyish color scheme, kind of like the Bilbine
Its beam shield gets casually punched through by the Gottolatan, and it can only block that by throwing the wings of light fully into defense mode
Honestly the Gottolatan and Zanneck are the broken ones — their beam weapons perform way above VSBR level
It's not like it dominates everything by a mile, but
I'd still call V2 the strongest unit
The Minovsky Drive is just busted in all sorts of ways
Plus the story keeps swerving away from expectations at every turn
There's real logic and craft to it, and it's interesting, but at the end of the day it's just people killing people, so in a sense it's nonsense no matter how you slice it
War in the Pocket, 0083, and SD Gundam had neither Amuro nor Char, though
and they were way more popular than the F91-to-V line, weren't they
You can tell from the name of a certain mobile suit
"Gengaozo"
Genga Ozo
(sounds just like 原画遅 — "the key animation's late," a dig at the troubled production schedule)
the franchise was on a steady decline after Char's Counterattack and was basically on life support until SEED set off its huge fireworks in 2002
back then it was genuinely surviving more on SD Gundam's popularity than anything else
There's a gap like W >>> G >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> X, sure
but the first two were on the popular side
W even got Endless Waltz made
I'm from the SD generation, but the Another trilogy never aired in my area so I couldn't watch it
I just read the Comic BonBon manga adaptations and figured that was the story
Lumping G/W/X together is a stretch though
G had intensely distinctive characters with real impact and keeps getting pulled into crossovers, W was popular enough to get an OVA
X got cancelled early
There's a clear gap between them
Yeah, its female fanbase was strong enough that tons of female-oriented anthology comics got made for it
There's still one more person missing from it
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Victory Gundam aired in 1993, more than a decade after the original Mobile Suit Gundam, during a period when the franchise’s popularity had cooled considerably. As the thread notes, the series kept struggling through the following “Another Gundam” era — G Gundam, Wing, and X — and didn’t regain real momentum until SEED lit things up in 2002. The thread also pointed out that V2 Gundam’s reputation as the “strongest unit” doesn’t quite match the show itself, where it struggles in plenty of scenes; much of that reputation comes from games and later reassessments taking on a life of their own. The comments about the flat-looking animation, meanwhile, are a long-running fan in-joke about how rough the production schedule was at the time — not a jab at any specific individual.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (“Nandemo Jikkyo G”) thread “V Gundam ← Nothing about it has any flair, not the suits, characters, songs, or story.”
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