SD Gundam Sangokuden Brave Battle Warriors

This is my first review in My Anime, so I am a little bit excited.
Overall, this one was a great series. Maybe it could have been a little better at the ending, maybe not. However it had lovely and beautiful art, absolutely amazing characters - especially Lu Bu, the feared general warrior - and a fascinating story, which I understand is based on a classic Chinese novel. I know that the concept of chibi gundams acting as people might be weird for many, but I found it similar to Bionicles and more compelling.
My final rating is 9.5 out of 10.

I left SD Gundam stuff as the final entries in my Gundam completionist journey because I always had low expectations of them. For the most part I think they have been passable up until now (minus Gundam Force. That one should not even exist). And now I finally got to Brave Battle Warriors, an SD Gundam retelling of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I'm not sure why barely anyone has watched this as I was pleasantly surprised by it.

Now, my knowledge of the source material isn't good. I've never actually read or played through any kinds of other various adaptations of it so take ... what I say here with a grain of salt. However, even while talking to a friend who knows the source material and it became apparent they definitely changed many things around (it IS a retelling after all), I still very much enjoyed my time with the series.

My biggest gripe is probably the pacing though. The series is 51 episodes long but the episodes themselves are only around 10 minutes each. This made some episodes feel completely stale while others were entirely tense, important plot points. And because the source material is also a huge story, them trying to do it with effectively a 2-cour runtime meant that things had to progress fast. As far as I know they didn't cover the full thing, rather ended the series on a good point of the story. But even then, sadly because of the overall fast pacing, many things had to take a backseat, most notably characterization.

On that note, despite the characters not getting enough development in my eyes, I still liked the main cast at the very least. The main trio of Liu Bei, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu all get a pass in my book. Notable other examples were Cao Cao and Lu Bu, who was my personal favorite character of the series.

Aesthetically, I'm also pretty pleased. Coming from the hideous looking early 2000s fully CGI Gundam Force I had my expectations at a zero but this series already looks infinitely better. First of all it's not full CGI per se. Most of the mechas are CGI yes, but occasionally we see them hand drawn as well, not to mention basically everything else is always 2d too. The CGI doesn't look bad either and the transitions from 2d to 3d never felt jarring to me, rather good even.

Overall, I think this series is heavily overlooked. Is it a great adaptation of the source material? Probably not. Is it a good alternative for Gundam fans? Yes! If you can somehow find this to watch, I'd at least recommend checking it out, you might be surprised.