Apr 15, 2024
Despair Memory Gundam is not what I thought I would get out of a Gundam spin-off.
Set in who knows what continuity of Gundam, a group of prisoners are sent to explore a 700 year old colony that, after being made to drift in space, recently got back into the earth's orbit.
Entering it, they realise the colony has not been abandoned and the inhabitants, thought killed by a gas poisoning, were alive and kicking, having 3 major factions all of them continously in a cold war with one another.
The cold war becomes hotter with each chapters as the different factions move and we follow not only
...
the alien prisoners, but the main girl Kaoris, pilot of the Gundam Minerva.
The series takes its time in setting up the plot, with the telling of the melting of the Gundams and the genocide of the Newtypes, to the point that it could have been a completely separate story for all I knew up until chapter 11, where suddenly Mobile Suits appear; it feels kind of wrong, for a series that started about single people doing crime work to suddenly show these titanic machines.
The character designs are ok, with the better one being Kaoris; the mobile suits are well drawn, especially the different Gundams, but some panels do feel a bit iffy.
The story moves at its own pace with Kaoris discovering things about her past practically every chapter, seeming like she cares and then next chapter reverting back to her "i'm a killer gun for hire asshole" vibe; I love the vibe, but they break it up so much with moment like the one with her "father" that the characters stops working for me.
Chapter 18 is where things got a turn I didn't really like, with Gundam Minerva rejecting Kaoris and one of the prisoners sent to the colony jumping into the Gundam and piloting it like he was the chosen one; Gundam has so many few female-centric pilots (that's one of the things that attracted me to both this series and the anime With from Mercury) that having Kaoris as the pilot ripped from me felt anger-inducing.
I'll keep on reading, but with a plot that is basically "and then this happens", the only character I like being the MC not even getting to pilot the Minerva and Gundam designs that aren't really that hot I can't say this is on par with the level of quality I expected from Gundam
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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