![]() ![]() Going back as far as 1963 and looking at Astro Boy, one could get a good idea of how anime on TV would look like for roughly the next 10 years. Overall Zanscare design is a bit of an acquired taste. Some designs are genuinely brilliant, but others are just strange, like the serpentine Doggorla, and the overall strange obsession with putting giant tires on everything, including mobile suits meant primarily for use in space. On the other hand, Zanscare’s mobile suit design is often very eccentric with mixed results - it’s another thing this series is pretty infamous for. There’s some excellent mechanical designs in here, especially the Victory and V2 Gundams that are in the starring roles - the V2 in particular is one of my favourite Gundams, and is probably the design that established Hajime Katoki as one of the masters of the mechanical design arts. Sound and music are pretty middle of the road, with nothing really standing out but nothing offensively bad either. Things do occasionally get rough when the budget clearly got tight, and you could probably find some better looking shows from the early 90s, but on the whole it’s quite good looking. As for the presentation, the level of quality wavers but on the whole it’s pretty good, at least compared to its predecessors. Still, ultimately I found more that I enjoyed than I didn’t in terms of the plot and tone, even if there was plenty that could have been done without. In fact, sometimes I’d say it goes to far in the opposite direction, with strange humour and a lighthearted tone in spots that doesn’t really fit the series’ narrative as a whole. I won’t deny that there is an air of cynicism and despair to Victory at times, apparently because Tomino was suffering especially badly with depression while he was making it, but I’ve seen a lot worse and I think its reputation has been exaggerated a bit. If you look at some of Tomino’s other works outside of Gundam you can find far worse - look no further than the endings of Dunbine or Zambot 3, or the cosmic nightmare ride that’s Ideon: Be Invoked. I felt like Iron-Blooded Orphans had a lot more senseless character death, and while it’s not hard to find tragedy in Victory there was nothing that felt as brutal as, say, Kamille’s cruel fate at the end of Zeta or the aftermath of colony gassings. Some of them are cruel and senseless, and they’re spread out fairly evenly across the series, meaning that it’s not afraid of delivering a gut punch to the viewer early on. Yes, there are a lot of character deaths in this show. These unmistakable similarities have earned Evangelion its status as a sort of spiritual successor to Ideon, though, given its continued longevity and the recent movie's performance, it's unmistakably a much more successful franchise.The overall tone is one of the things this series is most notorious for, with it being considered the darkest, most brutal and depressing entry in the franchise. One final message shared between the shows is the "Congratulations!" ending of Evangelion, which evokes the "Happy Birthday" heard in Ideon's rebirth ending. Though this doesn't quite match the universally destructive scope of Be Invoked, it's similar to how humans and the Buff Clan were both destroyed and remade in both of that series' endings. This is all part of the Instrumentality event that sees humanity reduced to nothing part of putting the species into a hive-minded, singular consciousness. The entire human race and the Earth itself are made a part of this. The rest literally implode into a violent miasma of primordial goo when the ending truly comes. In The End of Evangelion, many of the cast members from the show are killed via the violent events of this climax.
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