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Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Getting into Gundam (and Other Long-Running Anime)
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KrowRhogan
Posts: 61 |
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With Gundam? Pick a series. If you start with anything set in the UC timeline, start with The Origin.
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2412 |
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The correct way is to start with Cross Ange.
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4660 |
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I kind of lucked out with the timing of when I started DBZ, and anime in general with that. I missed Raditz, but that is still very early in the series overall, and Dragonball had just gotten going on TV. It did help that Dragonball is a simple enough story overall that I could watch both in tandem and be fine. About the only surprise was seeing how various characters that didn't do much in DBZ were bigger deals in Dragonball.
They aren't wrong that linear TV encouraged just jumping in whenever since you didn't know when, or sometimes if, there would be reruns of the stuff you missed. Overall, I prefer having access to stuff on-demand these days, but having to make do with what you were given encouraged a level of experimentation back then. Last edited by Greed1914 on Tue Feb 06, 2024 11:47 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1259 |
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Years ago I thought about writing a Gundam viewing guide based on the premise of "Can I watch this?" - because I think a lot of the time, a new viewer looks at one Gundam show, thinks it looks cool and wonders if they can watch it, but might back down just because they see there's so many of them. So the guide would list each title and all it'd answer would be, "Can I watch this (without seeing anything else first?)", and if the answer was "No" what they'd need to see first.
Of course, as observed here, like 95% of the time, the answer was "Yes", as by far most of them don't really need any prior knowledge. |
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Nyapan
 Posts: 40 |
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With franchises I just watch the series in release order. That's what I did with Gundam when I watched it in 2022. I didn't watch everything though because some of them didn't interest me.
I really enjoy long series so having a ton of entries or a big episode count is a positive for me! I'm going through Bleach for the 1st time and I'm enjoying it a lot! |
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lemurs
Posts: 108 |
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Funnily enough, I actually did start into the Gundam franchise with the likes of 08th MS Team, 0080, 0083 and G Gundam because they happened to be airing on Adult Swim/Toonami. I even started in on Unicorn before I got to ZZ. None of them are really representative of the main Gundam franchise as a whole, and it was clear there was a bunch of extra context to them that I didn't have at the time, but I didn't need that just to follow the stories being told. But it was enlightening to rewatch them later on after I'd gotten more Gundam under my belt and pick up on all those things that I missed the first time around.
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db999
Posts: 346 |
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With Gundam you can really start anywhere you want with it. Almost every series is designed to be stand-alone to bring in new viewers even if it’s a direct sequel. Yes, the Universal Century does have a timeline, but most of them are designed so they can work for new viewers, so you don’t need to think about it too hard.
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 559 Location: PA / USA |
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I've talked in the past about some of the Gundam shows any time ANN has brought them up in an article. There are very definitely some Gundam shows and movies you probably don't want to start with.
ZZ Gundam and Char's Counterattack come to mind - ZZ because a lot of it is "extended/overtime" hours for Zeta Gundam and does more to service and build the UC timeline's general lore and Newtype reasonings, Char's Counterattack because it is pretty conclusively the payoff & finale to the story that the original Gundam show had started telling about Amuro and Char. F91, Victory, Gundam X and Turn-A are all sitting in a weird stretch of the series where you could probably argue that they each stand on their own merits, isolated from needing to know anything about the UC timeline, but they're also having of this very "experimental" or "a product of their time/incomplete" sort of vibes that I don't think are fitting enough for new people to jump in and form an emotional connection with the series in a way that a lot of other Gundam shows can. I want to say Witch From Mercury falls into this grouping as a longtime Gundam fan, but the interesting thing about a completely new viewer jumping in and watching any one of these particular titles is that they won't know any better, that odd production choices, weird cuts, or just generally uneven story pacing is happening because they won't have anything to compare it to. Wing is a tough sell in 2024 because of how obtuse some of the episode-to-episode writing can be. I would argue that if there is any singular Gundam series that needs a Dragonball Z Kai treatment or a complete remake & modern take, it would be Wing. Its Endless Waltz finale is probably some of the best cinematic Gundam that exists from that time period, but you have to sift through some very hard-to-follow motivations and slow episodes to be able to really appreciate the action & character growth that Endless Waltz is showing off. One of the more recent projects that surprised me was Narrative - it's probably one of the best standalone Gundam stories set in the UC timeline that has been released in recent years, but you get more out of it watching Unicorn first..... but then I would also argue you would get more out of watching Unicorn after seeing Zeta > Char's CA first as well, specifically because one of the central core elements of Narrative is something that Char's Counterattack and Unicorn explores. I have to really hand it to Toonami - they caught lightning in a bottle and capitalised on every kid that saw an existentially-frustrated Heero Yuy try to blow himself out of his giant robot; kids that then went on to wash over every new entry in the franchise as they desired to find out more. Stardust, 8th MS, even Mobile G Fighter aired in the US during those "lighting in a bottle times" and without them I don't know how long-lasted Gundam would be as a series for me. There hasn't been that sort of a Gundam momentum in recent years, and the closest I feel that we've come has been Ironblooded Orphans to that level of approachability & emotional connection without the anime angst of Gundam 00 or SEED. Last edited by LinkTSwordmaster on Tue Feb 06, 2024 12:28 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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encrypted12345
Posts: 728 |
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Older long running shounen are behemoths that it's a good idea not to jump in blind and ask for some sort of watch guide. The only existing shounen of that nature nowadays is One Piece though; new long running shounen adaptations are much more reasonable to get into due to the lack of filler and being split up into cours. Amusingly enough, the types of franchises that are intimidating to get into are the yearly toy commercials like Gundam or Precure (though I mean that affectionately), but since they are meant for kids, that means each season is meant to be standalone for the most part without too much emphasis on cross season continuity if at all. It might be better to watch UC in production order, but you won't lose all that much by watching Zeta Gundam before the OG Gundam. It might be a good idea to listen to the fan base of such a franchise for ideas on good starting points as they are familiar to the pros and cons of each iteration of a franchise and how accessible they are to a newcomer, but there's no need to stress about it as long as you don't expect your first experience with a franchise to be absolutely perfect.
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6356 |
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Wasn’t too much better at times I remember watching stuff from Anime Network on Demand when it was still on Time Warner Cable. Can’t count on both hands how many times stuff was uploaded out of order/skipped over entirely. And not having a computer at the time couldn’t just fire up the desktop and find a torrent and watch the episode I missed.
Or Saint Seiya with most series being continuations of one another. |
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psh_fun
 Posts: 102 |
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For long running series: Start with episode 1
For franchises with lots of series: Watch them in release order. I don't think it's that complicated.. |
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Kicksville
Posts: 1259 |
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The bottom line with those listed shows is that you do not need to have watched any previous Gundam shows to view them. That's it, that's all that matters. Anything beyond that is all one's personal opinion, which is totally fine, but you do not know if someone else is going to share that view. If somebody thinks V Gundam looks super cool and they want to see that first? Sure, they can. Whether or not they like it is on them. |
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Glordit
 Posts: 685 |
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I too can attest that X and Turn A are easily watchable without absolutely any prior knowledge. You are likely to get more enjoyment out of Turn A if you've seen Gundam series that pre-date it. It's not mentioned but...G Reco on the other hand, I would not recommend at all, unless you are a die-hard fan and want to watch absolutely everything. |
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Kicksville
Posts: 1259 |
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G-Reco can be watched without any prior knowledge of any Gundam show, if that's what you mean. This is putting aside how much sense the show makes on its own, and one's own personal enjoyment of it: bottom line is, it only references UC in a vague, general sense and no previous characters or relationships need to be known at all. What I'm trying to get at is, "needing to see a previous show in the strictest sense" and "one's own personal opinion on what they'd recommend" are separate things. I feel like folks overcomplicate things by combining the two. |
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Wack Sage
 Posts: 51 |
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Starting from episode 1 does not seem very hard. I would not trust anyone speedwatching a show to retain much information or enjoyment out of a show since they seem to just be treating it like a science or a job rather than for entertainment. Especially true when all the guides I see out there are just awful and tell you to skip "filler" episodes which may or may not actually be important depending on the guide author's definition of the word or those really bad fan-edits that jump around narrative all the time and have such a disjointed editing. Everytime I see guides telling people to skip the Kakashi's mask episode of Naruto I know they just hate fun. If people are so concerned about getting "caught up" with a show rather than watching something to enjoy it then I would argue they're doing things wrong. |
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