Kidou Senshi Gundam: Twilight Axis

Gundam Twilight Axis is the physical manifestation of that slap Bright gave Amuro in the original 0079 series with Bright being Sunrise and Amuro being the UC Gundam fandom.
Not even my father ever hit me as hard as this piece of trash did!

OVERALL: 2/10 (barely at that)

Story: 1

Have you seen one of those ''*anime name* in 10 seconds'' videos? Apparently Sunrise has and decided to actually make their anime 10 seconds long as a joke.

I'm not laughing Sunrise. Neither does anyone that has seen it.
...
From what I was able to comprehend the story was about a girl that apparently is NOT a pilot but a mechanic despite being a newtype or something. It doesn't matter. No one likes Gundam for its interesting storitelling, amirite.
Even as I'm writing this, thinking of what to say about the plot, all I can recall are flashy lights, screaming and a brief shot of Char and Lalah that was repeated in every second episode as if to remind me that I was watching UC Gundam and not Aldnoah:Zero sped up.

Art: 4

I actually enjoyed the art, I thought that it was well-made for the most parts. The MS there too flashy for no reason and the candy coloured Normal Suits were a grit in the eye but it was still watchable, for that aspect at least.

Sound:1

What sound? I honestly don't remember anything.

Character: 1

What character? I honestly don't remember anyone. Seriously, I bet no one was able to remember anyone's name through watching it.

Enjoyment: 1

I felt as if I was watching a commercial for the new season of Gundam SEED.

Overall: 2

The animation saves this series from being 1/10 really.

GUNDAM FANS - Stay away!

AVERAGE ANIME VIEWERS - Stay away!

AUTISTIC PEOPLE THAT WATCH TOO MANY TV COMERCIALS - Be my guests and watch it, you might have a blast with it.

*This’ll be a quick one, also mild spoilers but this show isn't worth your time anyway so proceed regardless*
Gundam is an interesting franchise. It's huge, it's powerful, it's very marketable, and its shows can range from absolutely amazing to mediocre to god awful. It seems like for every Gundam Thunderbolt, there's a Gundam SEED and for every SEED, there's a Gundam Wing...respectively to the previous sentence. Widely heralded as the largest and best timeline in the franchise, it's unfortunate to know that the Universal Century timeline is no stranger to mediocrity or even being terrible with installments like ZZ Gundam, Char's Counterattack, and F91 ... ranging from awful to just mediocre. Yet, this goes one step beyond those since in all honesty, Twilight Axis might just be the worst Gundam anime to date, or at the very least, the worst since ZZ. I might not have seen all of what the franchise has to offer, but of all the Gundam anime to belong to a mainline timeline of the franchise, this is most certainly towards the bottom So, what happened for this to occur? Well, let's find out, shall we?

STORY AND CHARACTERS: 1/10

It's very rare that I have to say this, but there is practically nothing to the plot or characters of this show. None of the characters have any real semblance of personality other than this one blue-haired feddie that suddenly turns out to be a generic evil villain bad guy dude mother fucker in episode 5 (does he even have a name?). Arlette is the only one here that I know the name of it that tells you anything about this nothing cast, and we only know that she has this bullshit deus ex machina cross necklace and that she was raised in a lab before meeting Char. Given his uniform and the fact that Lalah was there, this could've only happened sometime during the One Year War of 0079, but how did he find the time? The only other thing is that she and this one guy on her side care for each other deeply but that's it.

This show is nothing but a vapid puzzle that amounts to nothing because we hardly have any of the pieces. It's just a bunch of nothing. From the incomprehensible first episode to the finale, there is almost no semblance of coherent plot. In fact, even with this, there are a few major plot holes. Why is Sazabi just laying on what is presumably Axis, especially after 3 years and the fact that it was destroyed and not even there anymore in Char’s Counterattack? Where’s Nu Gundam? How come when Arlette goes to find Sazabi she ends up taking our a brand new mobile armor (is that even a mobile armor? I dunno, it's anime original, it isn't even the Nightingale)? How come she doesn't look to Axis? Why does this show end on a cliffhanger sequel bait? This clearly isn't a successful or remotely worthwhile project. In fact, it's a disaster. It is nothingness, sometimes worse than that, which is a horrible thought to have. Heck, apparently it sucks from an adaptational standpoint. I'll bet. Apparently the final episodes were anime original. I'll bet! Moving on before I lose my mind!

ART: 6/10

Well, let’s get the elephant or of the room: the editing in episode 1 is abysmal! No transitions, music cuts off, and overall, episode 1 is a disaster that really set a precedent for this show to Rollie in terms of being awful. The character designs look kinda bad, worse than any UC Gundam anime to date. I get this was a novel adaptation so you had to adapt character designs being described, but Gundam Unicorn had amazing designs both for its mechs and its characters, both of which are among the best in the franchise with my only other contenders for the award for having the best mobile suit designs being Zeta and Build Fighters. This? No. The Tristan looks generic and meh, and the new Mobile Suit/Armor/whatever looks vastly inferior to the Sazabi, Nightingale, and the Sinanju. The fights are terrible too, which is a shame since the director here worked as a key animator for a ton of Sunrise mecha shows like Code Geass and multiple Gundam entries. The art of everything barring the bleh character designs holds itself together well enough but it's still mediocrity all around for most part.

SOUND: 5/10

I swear, most of these episodes don't have music. If they do, I completely forgot since most of this OST is very, very forgettable with the only memorable track being this somber opera piece at the beginning of the show, and that got abruptly cut off in episode 1. There was also an emotional piece in episode 6 and that was ok but yeah, pretty weak music.

ENJOYMENT: 2/10

This was insanely boring. I had a ton more fun writing this rant of a review than I did watching a single episode of this show. I'm torn between disliking this one heavily and outright hating it but it wasn't pleasant, and it only got worse over time. Even the fights sucked, how whack is that?! Let’s just wrap this up already!

OVERALL: 2/10 RAW SCORE: 19/100

Everything about this show is a disaster. The editing was awful, it's an embarrassing adaptation, the fights sucked, the reception is the worst in the franchise thus far on MAL (for damn good reason), and the Gundam Tristan model kit has been considered one of the worst Gunpla kits in existence. It’s a disgrace to Universal Century, and a disgrace to Gundam as a whole, making this one of the worst in the entire franchise. Good riddance, Twilight Axis, enjoy getting treated like a grunt suit in an AU show, getting wrecked to oblivion! As for my dear audience, thank you for listening, and I bid you adieu.

This is pretty laughable. Gundam Twilight Axis already looked to me like it was going to be boring to begin with but, each episode being a mere 3 minutes, it fails to tell any story properly. This is based on a novel, which is supposedly short but quite detailed (at the very least in comparison). I am a firm believer in "quality over quantity", but this has neither of them as it is condensed to the point where you know almost nothing. You don't know the characters. You can barely tell what they're doing or even why they're doing it. Unless you actually read the ... novel (which defeats the purpose of making a fucking adaptation to begin with) you learn nothing about them other than what can be made from inferences. It's like the PV for this (which, by the way, was more than half the length of the episode) was just a trailer for a trailer. This is Sunrise's biggest loss in years, it's little more than a lazy mess. It's like a school assignment rushed for the last minute except it actually took them over a month to put it out.

A short show only needs a short review so I'll write no more of this. The only good thing about Twilight Axis is that you will only waste 3 minutes of your time watching each episode. Except the last one, which is longer, but still not long enough.

I don't get it. What was even the point of this? This is supposed to take place after unicorn but I don't feel the connection. Nothing of value was added to the UC timeline and while the same can be said for shows like 0080, it at least had a story it wanted to tell. Twilight axis has nothing. It is just a collection of disjointed shots with no connection between them packed in short 3 minute packages. The closest thing to a "scene" is a fight at the final and by far the longest episode that fails to keep the viewer engaged. Sorry for ... the short review but this thing was really short and it had no plot, not even sakuga like NT, the other craptastic offshoot of unicorn. In fact this review is so short due to the sheer nothingness that is Mobile Suit Gundam: Twilight Axis that I'm writting this sentence just to reach the minimum word count.

"I came here to laugh at you" - Char Aznable

Years ago I reviewed SD Gundam and called it the very worst of the Gundam franchise. I was wrong! I actually need to apologize to SD Gundam! Twilight Axis has a set a new low bar.

Twilight Axis is a 6 episode mini-series where each episode is 3 minutes. The episodes don't have time to tell a cohesive story and they don't try to! Sunrise basically just remade Chargeman Ken with Gundams! I know that Japan LOVES their Chargeman Ken memes, but this is just something else. Why would they do that to such a beloved ... franchise? Who the fuck greenlit this atrocity?! Apparently this project was led by some random South Korean guy named Se-Jun Kim who has never directed anything else.

Sunrise: "We have a couple hundred dollars left from Unicorn's budget. You said you're a fan and would like to make your own Gundam project? That sounds really fun!

Mr. Kim: "Oh yes, don't worry. I'll treat your franchise as delicately as your soldiers treated our women in WW2."

So where does Twilight Axis fit into the Gundam Universe? Gather round kids, this is going to be a long story! Twilight Axis is the direct sequel to My Little Gundam: Unicorn Stampede. Despite Unicorn's moronic name the 3 dozen people that watched it mostly seemed to enjoy it. I say a few dozen because in order for Unicorn to make any sense, you have to sit through all of Double Zeta Gundam and Char's Counter-Attack, which are 2 of the worst entries in the franchise. I don't care how much you want Haman Karn to sit on your face, there is NO reason to suffer 47 episodes of a series that even Tomino himself admits was dog shit! Even if you somehow loved Double Zeta, Counter Attack and Unicorn, Twilight Axis is STILL the drizzling shits!

Does Twilight Axis at least lead into something good? NOPE! The sequel to Twilight Axis is F-91, which is another piece of shit and that leads to Victory Gundam! Even if you've never seen a Gundam series, you probably know Victory Gundam by reputation. Victory is ASS. This is perfect! Twilight Axis actually ties together all the worst entries in the franchise. It is the new nucleus of ALL that is wrong with Gundam!

I'm not even sure how the Gundam franchise survived Twilight Axis. This makes Rise of Skywalker look like a masterpiece. This is the kind of blow a franchise doesn't just get back up from. Oh and the best part is that it's canon. Forever! Tomino should have just ended Zeta Gundam the way he ended Ideon and had the robot spaz out and blow up the entire universe! At least it would have prevented everything after Zeta Gundam in the UC timeline, which I think we can all agree is for the best.

Pro: Well the gunpla is a fun remould job...
Con: Darn near everything else.

While we could delve into the specifics of how everything went wrong in Twilight Axis, they all ultimately come back to one point: the runtime. The director has 21 minutes to use across 6 episodes. He opted to go for a non-chronological order, of short clips of miscellaneous events. There is nothing for the viewer to grab onto here. The story is both hard to perceive and meager, the art is tightly budgeted and presumably Sunrise's inexperienced artists, I have no idea who was even in this show a few days after watching ... it, and I could derive absolutely no pleasure out of it.

The 1/10 review makes me sound like I hate this show, but it's not right. It's that this show's existence genuinely confuses me. I can't perceive how this could have possibly benefited either Gundam fans, Sunrise, Bandai, or a general audience. Not just in practice, it makes no sense on paper either.

What Gundam: Twilight Axis has to offer in its whopping 30-minute total runtime is quite the list. If you thought that this is another Gundam series that has a thought-provoking storyline and thrilling mobile suit action, then this is not the anime you thought it was.

The storyline is disjointed, scenes and music cut abruptly, the characters ain't fleshed out in the slightest and there's too little dialogue. Every episode leaves me dumbstruck because I had simply no clue what the heck is going on. Each episode is about four minutes in length, and because of the sheer amount of flaws in each, the whole series ... seems exactly like 6 poorly made fanmade summaries stitched together.

At least the music is decent, and the art is still fine. If you don't think too much about the fact that many scenes have static models or are static themselves with SFX to cover for it, maybe you can even have an inkling of appreciation for the series.

I'm disappointed, but I'm also surprised that Sunrise decided quite arbitrarily that they were going to make 3-minute episodes, since series with episodes that length are usually long-running and comedic in nature. However, if the studio is just going to release a half-assed series like this that might tarnish the good record of the Gundam franchise thus far, maybe they were better off not creating Twilight Axis at all.

Twilight Axis is a skippable trainwreck that isn't worth watching, simply because the faults of this series far outweigh its merits. Rather than waste your time on this, maybe watering your plants or catching up on some work will be a good way to spend this half an hour that you have just saved by not watching this series.

when i heard about a new gundam show for this year i was excited but after watching the first ep(kinda dropped it cuz it sucks) i really want to burn the writters and the director for this messterpiece

soundtrack is fairly ok but it stopped without a warning

run time is cancerous cuz WHY 3 MIN OF EPISODE RUN! ITS BULLSHIT

the mobiile suits are the least of my problems

everything about this shit is way worst than sao alfheim arc combined with a crappy story (cant understand the story of this mess)

... overall=FUCK THIS SHIT
FUCK THIS SHIT
FUCK THIS SHIT

DONT WATCH IT IT CAN CAUSE CANCER FOR YOU

(p.s. the only redeeming quality of this crap is the cameo of the sazabi)

There's a popular thing I've heard..

If you are standing in an elevator and say Steven Spielberg for example walks in, you have about 30 seconds to pitch your movie idea to him to get him interested in making it. Twilight Axis plays out like it in this regard.

So how do you tell a complex and character driven story, in less than 25 minutes ( 5 episodes, 3 min. Ep 6, 9 min )? The answer is that you bombard the viewer with visual feedback and only serve the key plots as if they were arriving on a conveyor belt. Twilight Axis feels very much like ... a show that couldn't afford a full 12+ episode run but they really wanted to push this important story out and as a result, the work suffers for it.

I can respect them for what they were trying to do with this story, but that doesn't stop it from coming off as a very pretentious piece of art. The visual design of the show is rather good, but the sound feels distracting. I almost wonder if the show would had been better if they didn't use any voice actors at all but instead just focused on sound effects, visual design and music to convey the story. But changes are it may have gotten even more pretentious in that case.

But then, there's the glaring plot-errors and stereotypical character personalities that bring it down, which is a shame. My favorite part was episode six, simply because I started to try and figure out just what the mobile suits were, and it becomes really apparent in hindsight when you think about it that the whole final fight is a very extremely condensed visualization of all the wars leading up to the Char's Counterattack.

Overall, I recommend this show but only in the form of 'Make up your own story' to train your or a 'Enjoy the visuals' for other Gundam fans out there, but make no mistake: This was disappointing in the end.

The most unfortunate thing about this particular series is that it is short. Much like most modern Gundam series following Char's Counterattack, a lot of it is about how these characters, in the subsequent years, deal with the void left by Char, Amuro or even Lalah. And much like that void, we as an audience are meant to fill the space between the lines, especially for such a short series.

Anyone who watches this should keep in mind that there are 6 cuts of 3 short minutes, if you watch it with the idea that it's simply one single video, then you're really going to ... have a bad time. Especially if you downloaded it as one single file.

With that said, it is a short story much like the ones we read in school where we wish there was more to it, but that simply means the story is hyperfocused. It is focused between the two leads about how they found each other, filled that void with each other and found closure with each other.

Char is gone. The Captain is gone. However Arlette and Danton are not.

It's not a masterpiece, but I think people give it worse rap than it deserves.

Its actually pretty good for what it is, a nice little short story in the UC timeline. What killed it mostly was the amount of hype that surrounded the series when it was announced and people expecting it to be another main entry in the gundam franchise.

That being said, i do feel that this one is pretty much just for fans of the gundam franchise. Still you dont have to know much about the series to enjoy it, if you know who char and lala are and what a newtype is then you are good.

People are just upset because several story elements arent explained like ... the reason for conflict, who the enemy is etc. In my opinion though, this was never what the story was about, so its fine that these elements are never explained.

What the story is about, is the relationship between Arlette and Dalton, mostly Arlette though as she struggles with her inner demons. Without spoiling much, the story become clearer as the show goes on and things wrap up nicely.

In my opinion if you are a gundam fan this series is worth checking out, its only 20 min. of your time and a nice little short story.

I don't know who thought this was a good idea to put together or even air, but they should hang up their hat in the animation industry. This is a rushed, under cooked mess. Calling it an ONA is really a compliment.

I wont spend much time reviewing this, since it was so brief, so in a nutshell, if you are a gundam fan, you will miss NOTHING by skipping this. Don't bother watching it, because you will walk away confused and wondering what even happened.

Regardless, the only saving grace was that the animation wasn't drawn by children with crayons and orchestrated by tone deaf ... high schoolers - which is honestly surprising given the level of development that they put in.

Sadly, Sunrise vomited this out as one of the most shameful and worst series to ever come out. This isn't just for the Gundam franchise, but for anime in general. Even if this is just an ad, it's still a terrible one that deserves to be criticized. There's no easy pass out of it. This is an Original Net Animation with 6 episodes to it. Each one is 3 minutes long except the last which goes on for 9 minutes. Consequently, every episode makes little to no sense. I thought NT was terrible, and yet this one comes to make that look decent. This was ... supposed to be a direct sequel to Gundam Unicorn, and yet feels nothing like it. In fact, is leeches off of the original Gundam more with random screenshots of Char. There is some sort of story here about Newtypes and Char, a dry cleaner, a girl, her father figure, and their love for each other. It comes full circle though nothing really happens to build it up or to make it meaningful.

The first episode is the worst offender. From the usual tellings of lazy slideshow and still shot presentations, to some of the most awkwardly timed scene transitions I have ever seen. At one point there is dramatic music playing during a mobile suit battle, and then it suddenly cuts the music off to the character working at a dry cleaner it feels terribly executed. Sometimes I just laughed.

And yet, what puzzles me about this is that there are people out there trying to defend this. It's one thing to be subjective. It's another when something starts failing everywhere on a technical level. It's fine to not like a series; one doesn't have to see the best in trash. Outright say it. It isn't being "nice," but cowardice to not want to point out something is terrible just because one doesn't want to be "negative." Criticizing something doesn't make someone negative.

The battles are laughable. Instead of properly animating them, it looks like the usual poorly made gacha animation. They take a drawing of the Gundam, and move it's lifeless frame around the screen. To make matters worse, there's previews at the end of the episode. Why bother with a preview when the next episode is 3 minutes long? It doesn't feel necessary and takes time away from putting more content in the episode. There are also comical cliffhangers. Viewers had to wait weeks for each episode; that's just laughable and irritating. The antagonist, who's name I don't care to remember, is essentially the atrocity that was Zoltan from Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative all over again.

Of course, at the end it's green glitter and rainbows all over again as something happens that leads to the characters opening up a dry cleaner business. What a strange entry.

This felt like an absolute waste of time to watch.

Story: (1) There is no semblance of understanding what is going on. There isn't much to say about an anime with a total run time of 21 minutes spanned over 6 episodes. How do you create a decent plot/story with little to no time to develop anything?

Art/Animation: (6) This is definitely the best part of the ONA. The gundams stand out, as well as the character Arlette. All pretty, no substance though unfortunately. Not much else to say besides the fact that it would look even better will full length episodes with ... a better budget. The choppiness is totally bad though.

Sound: (5) Meh... painfully average. Background music isn't too bad I guess. Voice acting not bad.

Character: (1) There is literally no form of character development to be found. Cardboard characters with no substance, no real identities, lacking everything that other gundams such as MSG 0079/MSZG had.

Enjoyment/Overall: (2) This was not an enjoyable watch. With such a short run time, it's not possible to make a good story or develop characters in a well done way. The only positive is that the art/animation is decent. That is literally it. If you're a gundam fan, stay away. Save yourself 21 minutes to do something else instead of watching this.