After 25 years we finally tackle the second part of Gundam Age. Also there's a time skip within the series. Link to the Discord: / discord Link to Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=312627...
At some point someone must have realized that they remade a Martian Successor Nadesico x Macross Fanfic Show but badly. Then the writing team had no idea what to do next.
Gundam AGE may not have been a super good series, but the cross generational march of a decades long war was an important aspect of war that Gundam managed to look into here, imo
This middle arc the best part of the series. After some consideration I think that's because it feels more like a Macross series than Gundam. Which admittedly is difficult to parse the two conceptually, but I would say the emphasis on the young pilot squad feels particularly Macross-ish and the emotional core of the conflict being focused on the Asemu/Zeheart relationship feels like the kind of melodrama you'd find in Macross.
The AGE system was considered to complex and expensive.(War is just as much about money as it is guns after all.) As for the Gundams, I point you towards the Adele for the AGE-1 and the Clanche for the AGE-2.
This series had so much potential but it was muddied by so many things. The fact the main writer was used to writing for game cutscenes and thus didn't know how to pace for a full 50 episode TV series. The fact that Sunrise opted to stick to fifty episodes instead of... I dunno, give each protag 25 eps a piece per 'Age' to better handle things, or just keep it to two generations. I was hyped for the idea for a multi-generation G-series but...AGE crashed and hard. The third act is just... a mess, an absolute mess and they actually created a protagonist in Kio that makes rivals my dislike of Shinn Asuka, and I mostly pity Shinn for having his own series hijacked by the fan-favs than actually hate. Kio, I wanted to Bright slap the kid so hard he'd recoil into atmospheric reentry. Great machines and soundtrack, great idea for a story, but shitty execution sums up Age. Also the way the female characters are handled is god awful.