A flawed replacement Gundam show

After a long wait, Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance has arrived on Netflix and it is a disappointing and flawed attempt Gundam Series.

Set in the final stages of the One Year War. Requiem for revenge takes the viewpoint of the Zeon forces being pushed back into space during Operation Odessa. It’s a nice change and reminiscent of the excellent PlayStation 2 game Zeonian Frontwhere you see the conflict solely through the eyes of Zeon soldiers.

However, there is a lot here that is quite awkward, confusing and just plain weirdly wrong.

To clarify the classics Gundam The lore wasn’t really messed with here. Not really. There are a lot of solid and consistent nods to previous Gundam anime, with a nice appearance from Yuri Kellerne 08. MS team be remarkable.

Also interesting is the way new types are handled, not to mention the introduction of Federation mobile suits like the new Gundam EX, as most Zeon soldiers don’t yet know that the Federation has its own mobile suits.

It’s refreshing to have that too Gundam is portrayed as some kind of relentless, inhuman monster, as you have no real interaction with its pilot for most of the series. It gives a new look at how Gundams are generally perceived outside of the Federation, and that’s interesting.

Nevertheless, the general quality of the script, story and direction is good. However, I’ll come back to that in a moment, as the CG side of things should be highlighted first.

For a CG Gundam Anime, the environments, particle effects and general hard surface work are very well done. If this is intended to show what Unreal Engine can do for CG animation, then these aspects are a solid technical demonstration of the middleware in action.

Unfortunately, the characters are like that, Requiem for revenge is just completely terrible. The facial modeling and animation look very out of place, and the entire body animation looks like something unclassic Thunderbirds. It’s really bad, made of wood and just looks very out of place compared to everything else.

After that, the mobile suit and vehicle animations are really off. The mobile suit’s floating physics lack any real weight and just look wrong, even compared to other CG elements Gundam Anime, such as MS Igloo and the Gundam Evolve Shorts.

Even the smaller vehicles like cars and tanks don’t move as they should and I’m not sure what happened here and whether this was a poor implementation of Unreal’s physics setup or just something else entirely.

This all flows into the overall direction and camera work. Most of the plot isn’t presented properly and never really establishes what point of view to take, either from people on the ground or from above. Also, you often get a strange tilt-shift like effect when setting the camera, which makes everything look more like a toy.

The problem with this is that the core execution of the story and the way it is presented feels very strange most of the time. The dialogue never flows properly and the poor character animations and designs undermine the storytelling even more.

Kimitoshi Yamane’s mecha designs also seem overly detailed and strangely out of place with previous ones Gundam will appear at the same point in the timeline.

In this respect, the Gundam EX mentioned above just looks wrong in terms of overall design. Even compared to the designs Yamane made for 08. MS teamlike the Gundam Ez8, just looks weird and doesn’t follow the same design language, let alone the same line of mobile suits as the classic One Year War mecha.

In total, Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is a jarring and unpleasant series to watch, mostly because of the terrible character CG and animation, but also because of the story, cinematography and general direction.

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is now available to watch on Netflix.

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