Kidou Senshi Gundam: Tekketsu no Orphans

I have seen Gundam Seed, Gundam Seed Destiny and 00 S1 and S2, all twice.

I just finished season 1 of Iron Blooded Orphans and I can safely say that if this didn't have the Gundam branding on it, it wouldn't have a season 2, and would likely be rated somewhere on MAL within the 5-6 range.

This is a terrible mecha show, and it's quite clear how this was an original anime with no manga, light novel, game or even previous anime to base this off - it never would have been published. To say that the story is, uhhhh, confusing, is putting it mildly.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I ... won't be using the characters' names unless I can remember them. This is my first review on MAL, and I'm writing this because, well, this show sucks. Star Driver is better, and hoo boy, that show ain't great. This makes Code Geass look like FMAB - that's how low the bar for writing is.

Dialogue - I honestly had a hard time telling whether main character's lines were poorly translated or just written strangely, but you find out that he's a mid level functioning autist with almost certainly missing brain tissue/it's not connected in the same way. However, the show doesn't tell you this until episode 20, where main character says to leader guy "Who do we kill? How many do we kill?", when leader guy should've been getting laid by the blonde short haired advisor lady at the time, but was instead sulking.

In typical Gundam fashion, whenever there's a flashback or an old man talking or a new character being introduced, you get about 2-5 minutes of clumsy exposition, except unlike in Gundam Seed or 00, you just get told about "corruption" or "influence" or "politics", which I will call "white people bullshit" from here on out.

Characters -

Forgettable at best, nobody gets laid, apparently the creator hates women so you spend most of the time watching women get beat up/killed in battle, preparing food, fretting over things, hating other women, used as prostitutes, or wearing tank tops. Also you’re going to see kids get beat to the point where blood comes out of their mouths. A lot. Happens to malnourished main character crushing girl (who gets written into literally being in the kitchen) during a pointless filler sideplot, main leader guy, main character guy, every slave kid, etc.

I like quiet tomboys, and so when short white haired girl gets killed in episode 25 by bullshit big bad mech literally 1 shot bonking her mech on the head (when everyone else gets at least 4 hits+a stab wound), apparently someone else on the writers room must've revolted because it turns out she only fake died, and she was resting on a pillow later that episode and gets flirted with offscreen during episode 24ish..

I literally do not know the names of any of the Earth related people, and it didn't matter. I didn't realize there was Gjjalarhonk Mars and Gagdererureirhonkhonk Earth until episode 4, because nobody tells you anything about there being a political difference, the uniforms are just different but EVERYONE'S uniforms are different, so clearly the character designers had _no_ idea what people should look like for the first 5 episodes.

To everyone else's reviews mentioning character development, I don't know what they're smoking. Examples include, in no particular order:

1) Blonde earth dude that had an arc, and then disappears, comes back looking like the long haired ZAFT guy from Gundam Seed Destiny, and then once he kills some purple dude that turns out to be his half brother (episode 24ish, it's clumsily exposited) because his red eye makeup half sister was killed (that had a crush on him or something - the stair exposition blushing scene around ep 23 is weird).

Note - crazy lady with red eye makeup and wing short hair should've died on the island after Biscuit dies, she doesn't because the writers forgot to have the "Save me, [name]" thing make sense (he's not there on the island because they forgot to put him there).

2) Blonde dude has a purple haired bodyguard(?), half brother(?, I forget) that main character straight up nearly chokes to death (and should've) in the Gundam "chance encounter between enemies" bingo card meme that Gundam Seed, Destiny and 00 all have. And then purple guy has a lackey that gets magically revived into a Gundam WH40k dreadnought thing and becomes the series ending big baddie, and main character essentially forces himself to have a LITERAL stroke to beat.

3) Blonde guy from #1 has a purple haired 9 year old fiance, and her age, along with her appearance as a small 9 year old girl, is brought up MULTIPLE times, complete with about 20 minutes total of screentime for her. There is a scene where she _literally_ says to him "the other women want to dance with you, and they have things that I don't" - she's referring to boobs and ass, and the anime literally shows you the bodies of the women that want to dance with him, in tight dresses. Why was this scene in there? I'm gonna guess the creator has some kind of pedophilia grooming fetish. It's like 5 minutes of "content". It's disgusting.

4) Creators/character designers/somebody clearly noted that having a show full of dudes wasn't ideal, so to pad out the female soldiers, there's a dude with a literal harem of women that he's effectively adopted, if he likes them enough or they find him. Note: all of the women on this guy's ship are stereotypical anime pinup girls. No flat chests, no short girls, no fat girls, no glasses.

I mention the fat part because Biscuit is _clearly_ fat (his brother even calls him “big”), even though the show beats you over the head (like many of the children get visibly and repeatedly beaten in this show) that these orphans don't have enough to eat. Apparently Biscuit’s magical power was large fat cells.

5) First and second episode feature a hamfisted attempt at exposition to explain that the main characters are slaves owned by a corporation. Around episode 3, there's a rebellion that is caused to make the main characters have agency (which conveniently happens as the events of the show happen, and apparently have never happened before), and they end up killing only like 2 of the 20+ guys that beat the shit out of them for years as they get their freedom because otherwise it'd be 25 episodes of seeing children die in mobile suits and getting beaten when they're not dying.

6) An asshole with a literal Hitler mustache is part of the opening slavery group (that runs away and leaves the kids to die in eps 1+2) that lives after the rebellion and becomes blonde guy's "right hand man". No, I'm not making that up. Main character literally has the 20 or so slave masters in a room, with a loaded gun, only kills two of them.

7) Show has a _nasty_ tendency of making characters do 180 degree changes in their personality. Examples include the blonde with the ridiculous ankle length hair (no, she never cuts it, silly viewer, helmets have a hair compartment),

her maid (who I swear was from Gundam 00 as that show's princess' attendant),

the blonde advisor lady grows a conscious about children fighting in wars (after 20+ years of seeing and LITERALLY being around them),

Biscuit after his brother dies (until the writers realized he was the smartest person, and the main characters are so stupid that they couldn't deal with the island ambush around episode 23 without him),

Biscuit's brother finally grows a spine and kills himself after he sees that Gadgerhernia kills people in the street through a smoke screen. When other reviewers are talking about “character development”, they’re either including this or forgetting completely about it.

Pink hair in front of his eyes leader guy gets somewhat developed (he feels loss over Biscuit), nobody else “develops”, they just change abruptly.

8) Show has another nasty tendency - there are at least three examples of people with Stockholm Syndrome/Uncle Tom tropes that hurt the main characters - Biscuit's brother, the slave kids that panic during their freeing and shoot their liberators, and some random guy’s brother that was also a part of that gets smashed by a comically large hammer into an asteroid.

9) Considering the design of the slave boys and their abuser, who has probably the best designed suit in the show, with a Blastoise/underwater Gundam Seed mobile armor like design, the abuser blonde guy has piercings and all of the slave boys are malnourished, although there was NOT a scene where the blonde leader guy is raping the boys, but there are no women on board that ship, and the blonde guy’s boss has a literal pig face straight out of Spirited Away’s buffet scene.

Art -

I dunno who they hired as the art director, but he probably got work at Queen Bee after doing this, because this is probably right up there with Mobile Suit Gundam in terms of animation. When GoGoGargleHurk shoots people through the smoke screen on the colony during the uprising, there look to be at least 70 people in the crowd. After the shooting, maybe 15, and of course, main blonde character survives without a scratch.

Show has no CG. It should’ve had at least Gundam 00’s ship animations, and it certainly doesn’t have Unicorn’s fluidity or polish on the BD release.

Physics -

Unlike Gundam Seed’s explanations of sand particle size and water combat and space, physics goes out the window. Thrusters have the same effect in space as they do in atmosphere, whether it’s Mars’ created air (never explained), or Earths’ normal air. When the people that are _literally_ born in space or on Mars go to Earth, they have no trouble walking on Earth’s higher gravity, and there’s no ill effects like imbalance, muscle distrophy or spinal collapse.

Main character literally uses another mech to do the Gundam dangerous reentry meme, except the other mech is fine.

Ahab generators make about as much sense as Mobile Suit Gundam’s magnitoskiski particles. Apparently they stop LCD screens from working, along with all radio signals, which is explained why big bad mech rampages through downtown Edmonton. No radiation, though. Somehow. Also the mobile armors and Gundams are unaffected and people can literally stand around and watch them fight with no ill effects. Somehow.

The gundam pilots have literally superhuman reaction speeds, but even for the show, and assuming that the show is done in real time, the main character is routinely reacting with maybe like 1-10 frames of delay. When big bad shows up, there’s literally no lag, so main character causes himself to have a seizure and slashes an arm off with a random samurai sword that was left on the island 3 episodes before. No, I’m not kidding. Note that main character was previously using basically a large bat/hammer thing on said island fight from three episodes previously. Where Biscuit dies and main character lets red eye makeup lady get away.

When main character is going against the blonde pierced slavedriver guy and his tough mech, he shoots a cannon straight at him, and then says “that armor is tough”. Note: we’ve seen these cannons shoot through ship hulls and cause explosions, this doesn’t even leave a scratch, and apparently the animators and sound designers didn’t animate it to be a glancing shot or even a ricochet. It’s a 300mm smoothbore gun, BTW, according to the wiki. That’s like a battleship cannon, twice the diameter as the standard 155mm field artillery used today.

Also blonde pierced slavedriver guy spins around with his comically large hammer and uses his thrusters, and somehow does a perfect ice skating spin, despite that _not_ being how physics works in space.

Worldbuilding -

Why does Mars matter? Apparently because you can make money from farming. And exploiting labor. And half-metal. What labor? How many people are on Mars? What farming exports are there? You want answers? Like from episode 6 of Gundam Unicorn? Silly viewer, you can’t read, like most of the characters in this show, so you don’t get answers. Or something like that. But biofuel exists. That’s what the corn’s for. The martian corn. Also, apparently the writers had never heard of seaweed, anaerobic digestion, growing mushrooms or natural gas or wood engines.

Oh, and half-metal? Who knows what that stuff is.

Why don’t they use robots for stuff? Oh, because 300 years after the unexplained and unflashbacked “Calamity War”, robots or surgical implants were evil or something. Oh, and the Gundams work just fine after 300 years. And they have spare parts. A _lot_ of spare parts. And all of the Gundam parts from 300 years ago were interchangeable with each other.

Oh, but they have John Deere combines from 2010. And those don’t count as robots, apparently. Don’t look at me, I didn’t write this crap.

Surgery with putting in a nodule into the brain stem at the base of the neck and then 1-3 modules into the spine around the shoulder blades? Apparently that can be done by some illiterate people. With no knowledge of surgery, and no antiseptic mentioned.. And a needle, even though the spinal implants are like the size of a Bic lighter, each. And they’re implanted under the skin. Somehow.

The show ends with them moving an old man into Edmonton Canada from Anchorage Alaska (kinda wish the Cyclops system fried everyone), so that he can be voted on as prime minister. Apparently voting must be done in person, with all possible leaders in physical attendance in a particular room. To say that the plot point is white people bullshit is putting it mildly. Oh, and there’s a battle of the Volga river kinda thing going on literally 2 miles away, but they don’t cancel the vote. No, they’re in a normal judicial court building, not a bunker, in an active war zone, why do you ask?

3/10, the terrible writing, dialogue and characters reminds me of the later seasons of RWBY.

Not only is this the worst Gundam anime, it's one of the worst anime of all time. In this review I'll be talking about both seasons. There will be some spoilers. Im going to have to include some of them to truly prove how terrible this anime is.

So the very first reason why this anime is terrible, the characters. The only character I actually enjoyed was McGillis Fareed. I will say that he was an enjoyable character to watch since he was so mysterious. Other than that, all of the other charactets are bad. Since the moment I started this I knew the characters would ... be terrible. This anime has such a large cast of characters, and that is a problem. Since there are so many characters, barely any of them had character development at all. Almost every single character is one dimensional, and that is absolutely terrible. The thing is, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with the very minor characters not getting any character development. The problem is that the main character (Mikazuki) gets absolutely no significant character development throughout the entire series. Like seriously, he hasn't had a significant change in his character since episode 1. The other character, Orga Itsuka is just as bad. Now I'm going to have to include a spoiler, so if you arent caught up you might want to exit this review. There is a character that goes by the name of Shino. He sacrificed himself in an attempt to kill the enemy leader in episode 45. Once he fails, Orga Itsuka tells tells everyone to go back and rescue Shino. This is just one of the many examples of extremely bad writing. He has been leading all of the orphans for such a long time yet his leadership skills didn't develop at all. That was his moment to shine and actually develop as a character, but they fucked it up. He could've actually started acting more like a leader but he didn't. Once again ladies and gentleman, this is onle one of the many examples I have for this review. It's already bad enough that most characters don't get developed, but if the main two characters never had any significant character development, then that is an absolute problem for the story. My next point is that this many episodes in this anime have no story progression whatsoever, specifically the first season. All they fucking did was fight battle after battle until they escorted that one girl to earth. The plot of this anime is somewhat similar to the plot in Jojos Bizarre adventure part 3. The main cast of characters just had the goal of arriving to a destination. This was really bad in the case of this anime, since a shit ton of episodes had no story progression at all. What made Jojos Bizarre Adventure part 3 at least interesting was the battles. Each battle was a masterpiece in my eyes. It was so much of a pain to even get through part 1 of this shitty anime because it's extremely slow paced.

The animation and sound are really the only good things about this anime. The openings and some of the fight scenes are pretty damn good. I won't talk much about this anyways. The good animation and fight scenes wont redeem the bad writing that this show has.

This anime has many useless characters that contribute absolutely nothing for the story. An example of a useless character would be Atra Mixta. This character was absolutely useless. She was simply just a one dimensional character that did nothing but flirt with Mikazuki (which is very cringe since she appears to be an 8 year old). This also brings me to my next point, the romance in this anime is done horribly. It's extremely bad. It just turned somewhat into a harem with Kudelia and Atra (the worst characters in the story). It was so poorly done because there was so much build up between Mikazuki and Kudelia's relationship, but then he just ends up with the girl that appears to be 8 years old. Not only this, but the romance is just extremely cringey. It makes it even worse because the characters have minimal to none character development. The romance between Akihiro and Lafter was terrible. All of that build up just so she can get shot by a RANDOM person? That's extremely bad writing. This also brings me to my next point, the way the characters die in the end was EXTREMELY bad, especially in the case of Orga Itsuka. He just randomly gets shot by a random person! That's the absolute worst way to kill off a protagonist. If you're still reading this review, I want you to do something. Think of a long running anime that you really like. How the fuck would you feel if the main characters just gets killed by a random person that shot him. It's fucking pathetic isn't it? Instead of making him die in a badass way like Shino, the directors decide to get him killed like that. That's extremely bad writing. This anime pretty much did the same thing Akame Ga Kill did, killing of characters in the dumbest of ways. What makes it so bad is that the characters have zero depth to them, so us as the audience really couldn't care less if they die.

So here is an overall summary of my review

Animation: 8/10
Sound: 8/10
Characters: 0/10
Plot: 0/10
Writing: 0/10
Enjoyment: 2/10

Overall: 2/10

Mobile suit gundam iron blooded orphans takes place in another alternate universe of gundam. Where kids are mercenary's and shit and the story is they have toget this princess girl to earth. See the problem with this series is that it just isn't intriguing and that it literalsly shouts at you throughout the whole eries. When characters and children die WAR IS BAD CHILDREN SOLIDERS SEE HOW HORRIBLE IS THAT where l really did not care most of the characters feel like they came out of a michael bay film.

The art and sound are alright the show looks decent and the ... music isn't really amazing except for the opening and ending. The show can be pretty enjoyable if you want to lose brain cells its not the worst au gundam in the world but it certainly isn't a good gundam series.



P.s shitty review to do when l am hung over as fuck

Welcome to my first Shitty Review
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This anime has me a bit disappointed, I was in for something amazing given how massive the "Mobile Suit Gundam" industry is. (Maybe shouldn't have started with this one, that one's on me).

Honestly I found this anime's plot be to very weak , it doesn't draw you in at all or keep you grasping for more. It can be very predictable and cliche at times especially when it comes to the theme on 'family'.

The aesthetic is alright but the music during fight scenes lacks punch. I feel like this story has alot of potential. All in all the anime is ... " O K" I guess but its not the re-watching type for sure.

The first three episodes were engaging and interesting, so I had a lot of expectations with this one. I was left really disappointed.

First of all the art is nice with a lot of details on the technical side, and I think Mikazuki's character design really stands out. However when looking at others, like Atra and children characters, they look like their only appeal is that they're cute. Personality-wise, they are also annoying.

Second, the story seems interesting because there is some kind of worldbuilding around it but... how many chapters do you have to wait for it to actually advance?

Third, the thing I dislike the ... most in this anime: the treatment it has for its female characters. Yes, they may be pilots but they seem to only be here as romantic interests that don't contribute anything in the story (I think Kudelia might be the only interesting one) other than sexual comments or talk about love that start to get annoying because they make a LOT of them, do the characters have anything else to talk about? ah yes... family

I understand that one of the major plot points of IBO is family and personally I like how they make the characters interact in Tekkadan, especially when children are concerned about each other. But the scene that made me realize those little things weren't going to last forever (and I'm not talking about deaths because there are obvious deathflags) was that of a very minor character death. I get that they need to show how cruel the world is around there. They do it every single chapter. But there are other ways of doing it other than killing off some character's brother because he remembered about it last episode. It felt like a cheap trick to make the viewer feel sad, and it's really forced drama.

So to summarize this, I did like some aspects from this anime but some that I had hoped would stop or end in actual character development were unbeareable, because it made the experience worse.

Whilst IBO has had fantastic animation, the mech designs and plot are horrendous.

With too many overarching political subterfuge going on and with no answers being given for all of them. It's even worse with appalling characters and rushed sequences that make the plot fall apart.

It had a strong start, but the writer relies on too many of the same plot devices. Repeatedly saying "suffering = good" doesn't make for a good story.

The entire story lacks cohesion and without any logical nuance, I just can't support this anime.

The story is not unique, we've seen it before and we're seeing it again. If you're into a lot ... of chaos and little plot relevance, I guess this is the anime for you.

Never in my life have I found an anime so hyped and yet so boring to watch. This is probably the third time I've attempted to drag myself through this anime. I gave it the fair 3-episode try, and then some. But jesus, Mika is the most unlikeable character I've seen in a good while from ANY medium. HE'S supposed to be the protagonist? Give me a break; I'd empathize more with a salted snail. 86 did something right with the cold, jaded character. You know- growth, change, emotions... IBO, on the other hand, feels like a drawn-out filler side story with an isekai-level braindead ... protagonist in the middle. Aside from that, there just isn't much going on in the show and it's definitely the worst of all gundam series I've watched. This show was not worth my time- and it probably isn't worth yours. I'd recommend 86 instead, since it seems to have gotten right what IBO couldn't.