Dai
Death Scythe
Gundam ZZ
I held off on buying this until the Christmas sale due to all the criticism I'd heard about its tone, but I think I would have been happy paying full price for it. Despite picking up right after the end of Zeta, the first 20-or-so episodes of ZZ feel like a very different show. The comedy is cartoony with a lot of slapstick humour and villains who come across as goofy weirdos. It's a jarring transition if you come to it straight from Zeta, but it kind of works internally because these early episodes have relatively low stakes and small-scale conflicts. The comedy feels like part of an odd attempt to strip Gundam of its (at the time) unique selling points of 'real' robots and politics, and retool it into something closer to a traditional super-robot show. This comes across strongest in the ZZ itself, which is formed by three aircraft transforming and doing a full-on combination sequence. It even gets a Gundam-sized jetbike to ride around on in the show's weirdest design decision. If you can adjust to the tone, these are all entertaining episodes in their own way, though it's nowhere near as refined as the positive tone that Tomino would later master in Turn-A. This part of ZZ has the air of trial and error of someone exploring something outside his normal wheelhouse.
All this changes quite abruptly around the show's halfway point. It drops the comedy almost completely, the characters get involved in the larger conflicts in earnest, and the traditional Tomino Massacre begins. The lighter tone of the first half oddly help to enhance the impact of the latter. In Zeta, people tended to die in any dangerous situation, so I ended up bracing for it. In ZZ, people sometimes survive such situations, which adds more tension.
The second half feels like a true continuation of Zeta in both plot and tone, and resolves many of the plot threads that the previous series left hanging. It becomes every bit as compelling as Zeta in both its ongoing and standalone stories. In particular, there's a two-parter called The Blue Corps that might be one of the best distillations of Tomino's entire attitude to war. The only thing that surprised me was that it does nothing to set up the events of Char's Counterattack. I always felt that I was missing some essential connective tissue to that movie by not having seen ZZ, but aside from resolving the Haman/Axis story it does nothing to establish the scenario that CCA begins in.
ZZ does suffer the same problem that plagues most of Tomino's work, in that the overall series structure can feel a bit messy. A lot of characters are thrown around, and the story doesn't always place its emphasis on the ones you would expect, or necessarily give a satisfying pay-off for the ones it spends the most time on. It also repeats a lot of plot elements from earlier Gundam shows, though that doesn't have too much of a negative impact. The non-stop face slaps also continue, which never cease to be entertaining.
Overall, ZZ feels like two shows fighting against each other, but fortunately all its better parts win out in the end. I'd give the first half 7/10 and the second half 8/10, but due to how internally conflicted the whole thing feels, I'll even that out to:
7/10
I held off on buying this until the Christmas sale due to all the criticism I'd heard about its tone, but I think I would have been happy paying full price for it. Despite picking up right after the end of Zeta, the first 20-or-so episodes of ZZ feel like a very different show. The comedy is cartoony with a lot of slapstick humour and villains who come across as goofy weirdos. It's a jarring transition if you come to it straight from Zeta, but it kind of works internally because these early episodes have relatively low stakes and small-scale conflicts. The comedy feels like part of an odd attempt to strip Gundam of its (at the time) unique selling points of 'real' robots and politics, and retool it into something closer to a traditional super-robot show. This comes across strongest in the ZZ itself, which is formed by three aircraft transforming and doing a full-on combination sequence. It even gets a Gundam-sized jetbike to ride around on in the show's weirdest design decision. If you can adjust to the tone, these are all entertaining episodes in their own way, though it's nowhere near as refined as the positive tone that Tomino would later master in Turn-A. This part of ZZ has the air of trial and error of someone exploring something outside his normal wheelhouse.
All this changes quite abruptly around the show's halfway point. It drops the comedy almost completely, the characters get involved in the larger conflicts in earnest, and the traditional Tomino Massacre begins. The lighter tone of the first half oddly help to enhance the impact of the latter. In Zeta, people tended to die in any dangerous situation, so I ended up bracing for it. In ZZ, people sometimes survive such situations, which adds more tension.
The second half feels like a true continuation of Zeta in both plot and tone, and resolves many of the plot threads that the previous series left hanging. It becomes every bit as compelling as Zeta in both its ongoing and standalone stories. In particular, there's a two-parter called The Blue Corps that might be one of the best distillations of Tomino's entire attitude to war. The only thing that surprised me was that it does nothing to set up the events of Char's Counterattack. I always felt that I was missing some essential connective tissue to that movie by not having seen ZZ, but aside from resolving the Haman/Axis story it does nothing to establish the scenario that CCA begins in.
ZZ does suffer the same problem that plagues most of Tomino's work, in that the overall series structure can feel a bit messy. A lot of characters are thrown around, and the story doesn't always place its emphasis on the ones you would expect, or necessarily give a satisfying pay-off for the ones it spends the most time on. It also repeats a lot of plot elements from earlier Gundam shows, though that doesn't have too much of a negative impact. The non-stop face slaps also continue, which never cease to be entertaining.
Overall, ZZ feels like two shows fighting against each other, but fortunately all its better parts win out in the end. I'd give the first half 7/10 and the second half 8/10, but due to how internally conflicted the whole thing feels, I'll even that out to:
7/10
