Yes, I'd say it's worse than Seed Destiny. At least GSD gave us Stargazer and the best girl (that's Shiho, you rubes) being stubbornly alive at the end of it all. AGE is worse because it is conceptually far superior show to Seed - in fact, in terms of raw concepts alone, it's among the most ambitious Gundam titles ever - but it is all horribly, horribly wasted.

Let's list some of the good concepts that could have (and should have!) yielded a good show. The whole "one show, three generations" thing is just balls to the walls ambitious and new and deserving of a skilled director and an experienced staff. The first generation recycles Nadesico's big plot twist, but it's not like the same idea cannot be utilized for a good effect. The timing certainly couldn't have been better after Trailblazer's out-of-this-world weirdness. Furthermore, the AGE system is conceptually fascinating, a Pandora's Box that eats battle data and craps out more war. When you think about, when you get the damn thing going, it has the potential to go all Ide-horrifying as it keeps blindly cranking out ever bigger guns and swords. Alas, there's no Oppenheimer moment to be had here, as AGE only uses the device as an upgrade vending machine, with the writing seemingly totally blind to the implications of the existence of such a McGuffin. The third generation even goes as far as to introduce another Pandora's Box called the EXA-DB to serve as the AGE system's dark half, and it's retarded beyond belief. What's the matter? Was this because you can't have the main character build a god-device and have it turn out to be a spectacularly bad move? Good lord, the AGE system is such a fountain of plot holes I could write an entire essay about, but I'm sure /m/ has already taken care of that over and over again.

The second generation features the classic Gundam rivalry, but with a big twist: the main character isn't a Newtype whereas his rival is. In proper hands, this would've led into creative, exciting action, with Asemu being forced to think smart and play dirty in order to outwit his far stronger opponent. But no, he just becomes hax Newtype-good, somehow. The third generation should have been a gripping exploration of extremism, as our former gen 1 hero Flit falls ever deeper into senile genocidalness. And to AGE's credit, it actually handles top-level political extremism better than Cosmic Era did, although that's just being the least challenged out of a group of three special needs kids. However, the lower rungs of Vagan military do have plenty of cackling horn-helmet wearing villains, so it's not like we get to forget we're watching a modern Gundam show.

To reiterate: whatever good concepts there might be, it's all sabotaged by the show's bad, lifeless writing. This time the big conflict is essentially a war over healthcare because living near Mars keeps giving the Vagans space aids. But here's the plothole: they could have moved. Not to Earth, obviously, because there would be a nasty welcome committee waiting, but just farther away from the aids-radiating planet. Why not relocate to the asteroid field and use drones to mine Mars' riches, assuming that's the reason they voluntarily stayed in the aids zone? And really, 70 years of all-out war with not even the slightest attempt at honest diplomacy? You must be shitting me. But then again, AGE seems to hate politics and it goes as far as to employ a non-recapping clip show in order to bypass the icky political drama as fast as possible. Episode 28, the poster-child of this attitude, was just unbelievably bad, mixing the worst so-called politics the franchise has ever seen with probably the worst romance in its history, and that's saying a lot.

What does Gundam AGE do? The answer is, it copies, but like a faulty Xerox machine and not like an artist creating a remix.

To illustrate how AGE just copies things without putting any thought into it, its Zeta-era suits still don't have panoramic cockpits and the pilots just keep peering through their stupidly outdated video-portholes. The Diva transforms into the oh-so-familiar Trojan Horse configuration, but curiously it (and all the ships, in fact) seem to be lacking any gravity blocks. Even the Archangel had one of those under all of its curves. There's a lot of superficial Newtype hax to go around, but it's not at all explored as an evolutionary concept. Instead, all the emphasis is put on the fact how the Gundams "evolve" as the AGE system keeps crapping out new spoilers and rims to be installed on them. Of course, this is not evolution but metamorphosis, but that I'm going to let slide as pretty much all "soft" science fiction consistently screws the concepts up.

It's not that I oppose UC cannibalism out of principle, because UC cannibalism, or massively derivative works in general, can be tremendously entertaining, as in Metal Armor Dragonar, or in Unicorn, which revels in in-universe referentialism and "you've seen this before" fan service. I mean, they keep having these polls as to which old UC suits should have cameos in the coming episodes, and it still manages to do things of its own and feel like a complete, well-formed creative work. Not so much with AGE, which just copies soullessly. Okay, so the show has a golden Death-Ball. This could've been a creative re-interpretation of an MSG staple, had Gundam 00 not employed the exact same trick years earlier by turning a previously shit-weak grunt unit into a fancy end boss.

In fact, all of this hackneyed copying is actually somewhat analoguous to how the AGE system works. You input some parameters, and based on that, the fully-automated milling machine spits out some more disposable spoilers and rims. No human thought required.

It's largely the same thing with character relationships as well. AGE retraces the footsteps of its predecessors, mostly MSG - there's a Char clone, there's a remote-controlled Lalah, there's Matilda (during the third generation, no less!), and from the more modern iterations there's the omnipresent forever alone tomboy. But like with the mechanical aspects of series, these characters just are there, doing their pre-programmed thing without really being much else. It's actually shocking how little we learn about anyone who isn't a part of the small, all-male Gundam club. For example, after the first generation you'd asssume we'd get to see how Millais and Courage Woolf's relationship has developed, but nope. Same thing with Spunky McTomboy; she fills her role by being useless and forever alone, and then she completely disappears from the story when the third generation rolls in. All we hear from her is that at some point she stopped being forever alone and popped out at least one kid, but that's it. I don't think she was even given an older, third gen character design.

AGE's apparent distaste for its own characters is nowhere better illustrated than it its very short epilogue, that features a voice-over narration, a statue and not much more. Practically no people are shown. The last couple of battles have decently high body counts, but combined with this detached meh-approach to characters in general, the result is just some more mechanistic Zeta Gundam aping, becausee gee willikers, we sure haven't had enough of that after Seed Destiny and 00 S2. In fact, AGE's characters really are just another of its mechanical aspects.

I truly realized AGE's miserableness when I realized that it isn't interested in anything else than being a rehash of a rehash of a rehash. The show isn't interested in giving us good character development, political intrigue of any kind, new and refreshing twists or a plot that would make even rudimentary sense. At one point, we hear that the Vagan forces have taken over 40% of Earth's surface, and then the show forgets this little fact which never comes up again. If that isn't lazy, I don't know what is. AGE doesn't even have Wing's fashion sense. Instead, we get rejected Naruto villains:


Today I shall destroy the Hidden Leaf Village for good!

Verdict: 4/10, my GMs were rustled.