If you've seen Z Gundam, then you should be prepared for Tomino women and the things they get up to. The sudden time skips just leave you to infer the details for yourself rather than having to sit through several episodes while it happens.

Oh yeah, I know; I haven't seen Z as of yet, but I'm aware of the broad story strokes, so that didn't exactly come as a surprise, either, it was more of a "wow, it really is as bad as people say it is"

The time skips didn't bother me too much in all honesty, for what it was, the pacing was pretty graceful for the most part, even

Watched Noin's debut in Wing episode 4 and while she exudes confidence in her duties training her soldiers, in the heat of battle she proves she's far too sentimental since when she realized Wufei was a kid, she wouldn't shoot at him which led to an amusing but rather unlikely scene in the end of Wufei yelling at hyenas to go away and shouting at the moon because he's mad that he fought such a weak enemy and also a woman to boot. As for her and Zechs, it's clear from the get go that she's crazy in love with him which somewhat amuses him as he lets her act in a teasing way around him and also he points out that Noin could've been the number one student at the military academy but she purposely let him get the top spot so he could look better.

Blockio wrote:Oh yeah, it is extremely pretty, absolutely. and I mean, for the most part, the story is easy enough to follow, the only time it truly lost me was when Annabelle or whatever her name was spontaneously switched sides, but that doesn't really make the rest of it particularily good. The first third is a really solid start to a Gundam show, but hooo boy the rest

AFAIK, a lot of it is basically the parts of the story that they had fully fleshed out and whatever animation was ready. I have to say that I look upon F91 rather fondly*, and somewhere am saddened by what it could have been if it had been a full series.

* Although that's also because it has a few very awesome Gundam variation suits as well as a manga/model kit-only followup called Silhouette Formula 91 that only has really cool suits. Both the 1/100 F91 and SF91 model kit series are also very good for their time (think CCA kits, but with better detail).

Oh yeah, as a series F91 would probably have been really good. But the movie unfortunately is not that

@Blockio Her name is Annamarie just to clear up your confusion about the character that randomly switched sides only to die a few minutes later.

Oh yeah, right, that was the name. Movie went a bit too quickly to memorize it xD

For all it's faults, F91's characters had interesting names like Seabook Arno, Cecily Fairchild, and Leahlee Edelberry. Catchy and attractive to utter.

Cecily Fairchild is a shockingly normal name for a Tomino character while still sounding pretty decent.

Arthur had a pretty normal first name but Jung being his last name reminds me of Gunbuster. As for Leahlee, I still cannot find any real life women who carry that identification. Another weird name would be Birgit Pirjo.

Birgit is a decently common first name over here, but the last name.... yeah

Gundam names are notorious for being odd grab-bags of syllables and random non-Japanese words or names -- like Cancer Kafka, from Ɐ Gundam. F91 was comparatively restrained compared with other series.

Oh yeah, definitely. There's some wild names out there, and that's not even getting into the shit that shows like Wing with its number fetish and "hey let's have the same name for two people for every name" get up to

On a whim I picked up Unicorn, so far I am not exactly impressed by it. My main gripes with it are
1) Everything is way too floaty for how fast it supposedly is
2) half of the dialogue feels like a late night discord chat between some drunk political science majors and
3) the show is extremely up its own ass about very basic and obvious things

Unfortunately, all of those points so far are very in line with my admittedly limited experience of mainline UC

Blockio wrote:On a whim I picked up Unicorn, so far I am not exactly impressed by it.

I like Unicorn a lot, but I don't really recommend watching it without watching MSG, Zeta and CCA first. I think a pretty good way to watch the UC stuff is to watch it in the order of when it was released. Even though I think MSG and Zeta are the high points of the longer UC shows, Double Zeta and Victory are still fun enough watches.

I suppose one could watch 0080, 0083 or The 08th MS Team with only a limited idea of the UC universe since they're all wonderful OVAs, but I think it's fun to follow the whole story through all the years and characters and mobile suits.

Well, let's just say that if I went in release order, chances are I'd never have watched it at all. I'm plenty familiar with pretty much all of the major plotpoints of UC by virtue of having been active in Gunpla circles for a year and a half at this point, and the only way I could motivate myself to watch UC at all was through "I need to watch Unicorn and Victory so I can create an overly elaborate shitpost that includes the Uni and V2AB", so I am doing just that now :P

Believe me Blockio, you probably don't want to watch Victory for your sanity. Tomino was going through a depression brought on by stress of pleasing the money hungry producers that it's basically the Anno situation all over again. Many characters meet untimely demises and to boot, one female character who started off good but then turned to the bad side was still alive but dead inside by the end putting it mildly.

I know how dark Victory gets; I mostly just want to get it out of the way, since I ultimately plan on watching all of Gundam, and if I don't, I'll just postpone V indefinitely

Victory is more boring than anything else. Like there's a lot of stuff that sounds crazy on paper like the Bikini Death Squad or whatever but its mostly just kind of a tedious slog of a series.

I've gathered as much, yeah. One of the big reasons why I want to get it out of the way.