Kidou Senshi Victory Gundam

I put off this late UC Gundam show for years after hearing critics (including it's creators) hate on it, but I am glad I watched it. The first third really rose my hopes. The middle was sadly a disappointing slog, but the last part was crazy in ways I thoroughly enjoyed. The main characters and their relationships are some of the best developed in the whole Universal Century Gundam series. Even most of the vast secondary cast gets enough unique little traits that you remember who they are. The battles on Earth are some of the most creative in the UC Gundam series and it is always clear what is happening, although unfortunately this does not carry through to the battles in space which are confusing, unimaginative and as such boring. But the series keeps wasting its own good ideas. A bunch of characters get solid introductions, then drop out of the story for long stretches only to come back as boring, screaming crazy people with no real reason for it. When characters verbally express them, Tomino's themes (about gender, the environment, generations, and war) come across as stupid, vague, pretentious nonsense. But when the show just shows those themes through character actions, they work well. It also repeats the same plots far too often, albeit with some small changes each time. Characters keep learning a lesson, then forgetting it the next episode leading them to make the same mistakes and learn the same things. The deaths are almost always telegraphed and used for shock value, but some actually land emotionally. Worst, there are THREE clip shows, only one of which does anything interesting with the format. The show may have been better with fewer episodes to reduce repetition. The show is really confusing at the beginning, even if you know the producers muddled with the episode order. It shoves a huge cast of characters, places and factions (including factions within factions) in your face from the get go. The other half of the cast is introduced in a more managable way, but throughout the show there are jarring jump cuts and events that take place between episodes. However, at it's core, the story isn't more complex than Star Wars and the motives of (the non-crazy) cast are pretty straightforward and understandable, which I consider preferable to complex but vague ones (like the crazy cast have). The Newtype stuff is pushed to the absolute extreme here. Desite Tomino's insistance they are not psychics, they clearly are here. This bothers some viewers, but I prefer it to the vague way older UC shows handle it.