Hogan Reviews

After a brief break to cover the recently-aired shows we have one last visit to the Cosmic Era of Gundam to go before moving on to our next older anime review chunk and it’s Stargazer, the three 15-minute episode OVA series, or ONA I should say, it was an early example of Original Net Animations! This is my first time watching the “series” as it wasn’t released on DVD here with the rest of SEED so its inclusion with the rest of the SEED Destiny box is my first chance to sit down with it. Turns out it’s pretty good, for a 45 minute story anyway. Let’s take a look!

Like a few of the UC OVAs / specials the story here is split between two lead characters on either side of the central conflict: Selene McGriff is a Coordinator who works as an engineer though not on military projects but instead deep space exploration for a group called the DSSD, creating the Stargazer Gundam for that purpose. She starts the story stationed on Earth but flees during the Earth disaster when the colony pieces dropped, shown here is far more horrific detail than we got during SEED Destiny itself. She is helped off Earth by retired tank platoon commander Edmond Du Clos, who takes on an invading GINN with a tank in a rather by-the-books example of “old disgruntled veteran goes out in one final blaze of glory” storytelling.

Selene and Edmond ask politely to get the hell off Earth before they drown.

On the other side of the war is Sven Cal Bayang, who grew up on Earth dreaming of the stars but was orphaned during a conflict in his home town and ended up in a Blue Cosmos training camp, being indoctrinated to hate Coordinators and view them as inhuman, though unlike his two squad mates Shams and Mudie he doesn’t seem to be as convinced about the whole racism thing. That being said he still slaughters a whole bunch of civilians for no other reason than he was told to, so… he’s not exactly a saint. The three of them form the Phantom Pain unit, with Sven piloting a version of the Strike Gundam called the Strike Noir. After a few missions see Mudie killed he and Shams are redirected to space.

The Strike Noir is a fun redesign. Wonder why they didn’t mass produce it, or at least make more than the one…

As you can imagine this is where the two stories meet as Selene and her friend Sol Lyne L’ange (ah, there’s the weird Gundam name…) are working on the Stargazer at a DSSD space facility, giving it’s A.I. a test run when Phantom Pain attacks the station. Selene and Sol show that the Stargazer is capable of being manually piloted by jumping into it and taking out a bunch of people with it (oh and Shams is shot down while spouting racist stuff, so… hooray!) This leads to a confrontation between the two protagonist/antagonists, which I’ll get to in the spoilers.

It’s a decent enough story, though obviously due to the runtime only Selene and Sven get any character to work with, and even then its barely developed, and given it’s a online mini-series the animation isn’t high budget by any stretch. Still, go into it knowing these limitations and its’ not bad at all, really. At least I now know who these characters and suits are the next time I boot up a Gundam VS. game…

Overall Thoughts:

The Stargazer … gazes into the stars. Always wondered what was up with the massive ring on its back, now I’ve seen it … still don’t really know. Something to do with capturing the sun’s energy? *shrugs*

Gundam SEED: Stargazer is a good way to spend 45 minutes so long as you go into it with the right expectations: the fact it’s a webseries means the animation is of lower quality, and the runtime limits character development heavily (plus there’s no dub, if that’s how you enjoy your anime). Now we’re done with the Cosmic Era timeline! … until the film comes out next year. It’ll be a little while now before the next older Gundam reviews, but when we get there it will be the 00 series and film.

In the final moments then the Stargazer and the Strike Noir are at a stand-still but Selene leaves Sol behind and fights it head on by herself, winning the duel but at the cost of most of Stargazer’s power. Selene flies across to Sven and pulls him out of the Noir and into the Stargazer’s cockpit with her, while tying him up of course. He wakes up and the two have a bit of a chat and see despite being on opposite sides they’re not so different before Selene says they have about 27 days of oxygen left and the odds of them being found are very low, so she puts a blanket over the two of them and puts them into a deep sleep to conserve as much powers and oxygen as she can, Sven no longer complaining about the situation.

Awww, what a sweet picture… of two people who just moments ago were trying to kill each other. Awwww…

That’s how it ends, but a post credit scene sees Sol finding the Stargazer a week or two later, and although their respective fates aren’t directly shown it would be a rather pointless post credit scene if it was supposed to imply that he found their corpses. The official manga adaptation has extra scenes not only showing the two being alive but that Sven joins the DSSD as well. Makes sense, he was a stargazer himself as a kid, before the whole horrible indoctrination thing…