Hogan Reviews

It’s been a little while but it’s time to cover the second half of the Cosmic Era Gundam shows with Destiny, once again the “HD Remaster” version though this time it doesn’t cut out the recap episodes so there seemed to be little point in it really, forced 16:9 aside, but you know… I like consistency! The original SEED anime followed the original Gundam series quite closely for a lot of its run and while not as blatant Destiny does also have several things in common with Zeta Gundam, mostly a new protagonist who a bit of a knob. Let’s take a look at the first 14 episodes!

Two years have passed since the original series and peace has sustained but just as Orb leader Cagalli and her bodyguard “Alex Dino” (actually previous series secondary protagonist Athrun) meet up with the head of the PLANTS (SEED’s version of Space Colonies) at their Earth-based military site the place is attacked by Earth Federation soldiers / cyber-Newtype-alikes (known as Extended in the C.E.) Stella, Auel and Sting, who take three prototype Gundam suits. Luckily for ZAFT (the PLANTS military) there’s a fourth Gundam and a newly minted soldier called Shinn Asuka takes control of the Impulse and fights them head-on. So classic “protagonist finds himself piloting a Gundam in the heat of battle and ends up the pilot for the rest of the series” story, though at least Shinn is actually a pilot beforehand! Anyway, Athrun takes control of a Zaku, (which is something odd about Destiny: ZAFT’s new suits are all Zeon suits from the original MSG series! It was to celebrate the original series’ anniversary, if memory serves. Still weird though…) and along with a new ship called the Minerva the three Earth pilots are driven back to their own ship, which is of course captained by a mysterious man in a mask (sigh, can’t wait to talk about THAT character’s backstory later…) I will quickly mention that the Impulse is a Gundam formed by three separate planes joining together, a classic image but I can’t help think how impractical that is during combat, especially seeing all the other mobile suits fly out already whole and head straight into combat!

The Impulse and a Zaku fly out into combat. No, this isn’t a crossover game!

Athrun, Cagalli, Shinn and his fellow rookie pilots Lunamaria and Ray are stuck on board the Minerva while it tracks down the culprits, then this dovetails into both ships finding out about some terrorists using the remains the of the destroyed colony Junius Seven as a weapon by sending it towards Earth. Together the two groups plus some other ZAFT pilots manage to break it in half (though they could’ve stopped it entirely had they not seen each other and assumed the other was responsible) so half the old colony falls to Earth in large chunks and causes a major disaster. After the PLANTS try and help the people of Earth (and Cagalli and co. head back to Orb) the super-racist group of Logos, secretly in charge of the nations of Earth, see this as the perfect time to frame the Coordinators of the PLANTS as evil and immediately try to fire nukes at the entire network of space colonies. Jesus, there’s an escalation! A new canon developed by ZAFT manages to destroy them before they reach the colonies but it goes without saying: the war is back on. I would like to point out though that the massive devastation across the whole Earth is barely mentioned only one or two episodes after it happens and for the rest of the series all shown Earth locations show no sign of damage, so… the amazing moment is kind of undercut in the long run, sadly.

As for the characters of the show, it’s a mixed bag. Head of Logos, Djibril, is a straight up Bond villain with zero character, complete with stroking a cat on his lap while scheming, while the head of the PLANTS Gilbert Durandal has a lot more layers to him, wanting peace rather than war but was clearly over-prepared for a war anyway with a clear goal of wiping out the opposition now the war has started. As mentioned Shinn is a bit of a Kamile in that he’s not really likeable to start with, though a lot of his immature brattiness comes from seeing his Mum, Dad and little sister all blown to bits in front of his eyes during the fight in Orb during the previous war, a country he was told growing up would never get involved in the fighting, so you know… fair enough, that’d screw anyone up! Being a coordinator who was moved to Earth he joined ZAFT to take out those responsible even though those responsible for that particular conflict are long gone. Classic childish error, he even holds a grudge with Orb and Cagalli’s family for not holding to the pacifist ideal they preached, even though it wasn’t their fault really… He shows lots of room to grow into an interesting character though, much like Kamile, but sadly I remember thinking that the first time I watched this show and, well, yeah. Let’s enjoy these early episodes with him while we can, eh? Neo and his Extended trio are perfectly fine by the way but feel like a retread of Rau and his trio of cyber-enhanced Gundam pilots from SEED.

“Hey Neo Roanok, Char Aznable much?” “… What?”

The only major gripe with these episodes comes in the form of Athrun. His whole journey in SEED was discovering that war was pointless and killing people on one side will just make others on that side want to kill you and therefore war will go on for eternity. That’s why at the start of the series he, SEED protagonist Kira and his love interest Lacus are all living in Orb, free from conflict. Once Earth tries to nuke the PLANTS though Athrun has a chat with Durandal and eventually decides to sign back up to ZAFT and fight on the Minerva in his new Gundam Saviour. So one side attacking his old side means he’s now going to kill others who will have people wanting to avenge them and so on. He immediately snapped back to his old self, undoing all the character development from the original series. The rest of the regulars don’t stand out yet, Minerva Captain Talia Gladys is literally a copy and paste of Archangel Captain Murrue Ramius from the first series, and Lunamaria and Rey have yet to evolve personalities beyond “Shinn’s female and male friend” respectively. Early days, though…

Overall Thoughts:

The trio of stolen Gundam suits. Say what you want about the C.E. timeline but it certainly gave us no end of Gundams…

Gundam SEED Destiny gets off to a strong start, Athrun’s personality shift aside. Some strong present and future antagonists are set up and the action is good, plus some major society-shaking moments even if they’re pretty quickly never mentioned again. Sadly this is my second time watching and I know full well that a lot of stuff I enjoyed here will eventually go to waste, BUT I’m just reviewing these 14 episodes and on that I’m happy to give it a strong rating.

In order to up ZAFT morale Durandal hires Meer Campbell, a Lucas Clyne look-alike and starts drumming up support using her as if she’s the actual Lacus, something Athrun rightfully feels awkward about but, no, he still doesn’t do anything about it. Meanwhile Orb out-votes Cagalli and joins the Earth Alliance, going against everything they’ve stood for, and to make matters worse it’s Cagalli’s forced arranged husband Yuna Roma Seiran that’s at the head, and he’s written to be one of the least likeable people in the whole series, and written to be that way very well indeed.

This all puts pressure on the Minerva, who was being repaired at Orb, but thanks to Shinn going all “SEED Mode” they manage to escape. The same can’t be immediately said to Kira’s group, made up of himself, Lucus, Andrew Waltfeld and Murrue Ramius. Lacus is attacked by Coordinator assassins, clearly sent by Durandal to eliminate the real one so he can keep his fake, but everyone manages to escape via a gunfight followed by Kira once again boarding the Freedom Gundam and immediately wiping all foes out with one multi-blast session (but not killing any of them, naturally) while they relaunch the Archangel. They’re not done yet though as before going off into hiding Kira finds out the Cagalli is being forced to marry Seiran as soon as possible to cement his position so he interrupts the wedding in the Freedom and literally kidnaps Cagalli against her will. The Archangel then submerges underwater, allowed to do so by the veteran Orb generals who know them of old knowing they’ll do right by their true ruler. Although we don’t see it until the next episode it doesn’t take Cagalli long to realise she made a mistake allowing Seiran to essentially take over her country…

The Freedom flies, um, free. With Cagalli in its hands, rather dangerously!

The wedding was a fun moment, and while it becomes more obnoxious as the series goes on Kira and his Superman-esque OTT power and insanely naïve kindness is at least kept to a minimum here…