Mobile Suit Gundam: Twilight Axis

Pro: Well the gunpla is a fun remould job... Con: Darn near everything else. While we could delve into the specifics of how everything went wrong in Twilight Axis, they all ultimately come back to one point: the runtime. The director has 21 minutes to use across 6 episodes. He opted to go for a non-chronological order, of short clips of miscellaneous events. There is nothing for the viewer to grab onto here. The story is both hard to perceive and meager, the art is tightly budgeted and presumably Sunrise's inexperienced artists, I have no idea who was even in this show a few days after watchingit, and I could derive absolutely no pleasure out of it. The 1/10 review makes me sound like I hate this show, but it's not right. It's that this show's existence genuinely confuses me. I can't perceive how this could have possibly benefited either Gundam fans, Sunrise, Bandai, or a general audience. Not just in practice, it makes no sense on paper either.

I don't get it. What was even the point of this? This is supposed to take place after unicorn but I don't feel the connection. Nothing of value was added to the UC timeline and while the same can be said for shows like 0080, it at least had a story it wanted to tell. Twilight axis has nothing. It is just a collection of disjointed shots with no connection between them packed in short 3 minute packages. The closest thing to a "scene" is a fight at the final and by far the longest episode that fails to keep the viewer engaged. Sorry forthe short review but this thing was really short and it had no plot, not even sakuga like NT, the other craptastic offshoot of unicorn. In fact this review is so short due to the sheer nothingness that is Mobile Suit Gundam: Twilight Axis that I'm writting this sentence just to reach the minimum word count.

"I came here to laugh at you" - Char Aznable Years ago I reviewed SD Gundam and called it the very worst of the Gundam franchise. I was wrong! I actually need to apologize to SD Gundam! Twilight Axis has a set a new low bar. Twilight Axis is a 6 episode mini-series where each episode is 3 minutes. The episodes don't have time to tell a cohesive story and they don't try to! Sunrise basically just remade Chargeman Ken with Gundams! I know that Japan LOVES their Chargeman Ken memes, but this is just something else. Why would they do that to such a belovedfranchise? Who the fuck greenlit this atrocity?! Apparently this project was led by some random South Korean guy named Se-Jun Kim who has never directed anything else. Sunrise: "We have a couple hundred dollars left from Unicorn's budget. You said you're a fan and would like to make your own Gundam project? That sounds really fun! Mr. Kim: "Oh yes, don't worry. I'll treat your franchise as delicately as your soldiers treated our women in WW2." So where does Twilight Axis fit into the Gundam Universe? Gather round kids, this is going to be a long story! Twilight Axis is the direct sequel to My Little Gundam: Unicorn Stampede. Despite Unicorn's moronic name the 3 dozen people that watched it mostly seemed to enjoy it. I say a few dozen because in order for Unicorn to make any sense, you have to sit through all of Double Zeta Gundam and Char's Counter-Attack, which are 2 of the worst entries in the franchise. I don't care how much you want Haman Karn to sit on your face, there is NO reason to suffer 47 episodes of a series that even Tomino himself admits was dog shit! Even if you somehow loved Double Zeta, Counter Attack and Unicorn, Twilight Axis is STILL the drizzling shits! Does Twilight Axis at least lead into something good? NOPE! The sequel to Twilight Axis is F-91, which is another piece of shit and that leads to Victory Gundam! Even if you've never seen a Gundam series, you probably know Victory Gundam by reputation. Victory is ASS. This is perfect! Twilight Axis actually ties together all the worst entries in the franchise. It is the new nucleus of ALL that is wrong with Gundam! I'm not even sure how the Gundam franchise survived Twilight Axis. This makes Rise of Skywalker look like a masterpiece. This is the kind of blow a franchise doesn't just get back up from. Oh and the best part is that it's canon. Forever! Tomino should have just ended Zeta Gundam the way he ended Ideon and had the robot spaz out and blow up the entire universe! At least it would have prevented everything after Zeta Gundam in the UC timeline, which I think we can all agree is for the best.

There's a popular thing I've heard.. If you are standing in an elevator and say Steven Spielberg for example walks in, you have about 30 seconds to pitch your movie idea to him to get him interested in making it. Twilight Axis plays out like it in this regard. So how do you tell a complex and character driven story, in less than 25 minutes ( 5 episodes, 3 min. Ep 6, 9 min )? The answer is that you bombard the viewer with visual feedback and only serve the key plots as if they were arriving on a conveyor belt. Twilight Axis feels very much likea show that couldn't afford a full 12+ episode run but they really wanted to push this important story out and as a result, the work suffers for it. I can respect them for what they were trying to do with this story, but that doesn't stop it from coming off as a very pretentious piece of art. The visual design of the show is rather good, but the sound feels distracting. I almost wonder if the show would had been better if they didn't use any voice actors at all but instead just focused on sound effects, visual design and music to convey the story. But changes are it may have gotten even more pretentious in that case. But then, there's the glaring plot-errors and stereotypical character personalities that bring it down, which is a shame. My favorite part was episode six, simply because I started to try and figure out just what the mobile suits were, and it becomes really apparent in hindsight when you think about it that the whole final fight is a very extremely condensed visualization of all the wars leading up to the Char's Counterattack. Overall, I recommend this show but only in the form of 'Make up your own story' to train your or a 'Enjoy the visuals' for other Gundam fans out there, but make no mistake: This was disappointing in the end.