This was one of the low points. But Gundam 00 wasn't designed as any sort of savior, it just happened to be the next obligatory Gundam series and it just happened to be one of the best ones. The series begins in 2307 AD (props for not making it two decades away like most sci-fi), and the world is covered by geopolitical animosity and border skirmishes that are certainly informed by real worldwide tensions in response to various Eastern terrorism and nationalism. Center character is Setsuna F. Seiei, a child soldier encouraged to fight for religious causes in the war-torn nation of Krugis, one of Gundam 00's many fictional counterparts to real world locations, in this obvious case the “middle east”. Flash forward to modern day and Setsuna is a “Gundam Meister”, one of four people piloting a unique new mobile suit type. His organization Celestial Being aims to stop armed conflicts from around the world through violent deterrence: wherever there is a war, Celestial Being will appear and overpower both sides with the superior force of the Gundams.
Of course, the world's various armies threatened by Celestial Being won't just take this vigilantism. Disparate worldwide government factions have little choice but to try and band together against their common enemy, and with Celestial Being isolated from all sides you have a tense set up for one of the most innately gripping Gundam premises. Indeed, the simplest way to describe Gundam 00 would be that it's Gundam as in the thriller genre rather than a space drama with concentrated action segments. This makes it most similar to the well-known Gundam Wing series, with a focus on action, a fast-paced and frequently changing narrative, and less of a focus on character relationships or melodrama. Unlike Gundam Wing, however, Gundam 00 is considerably more clever and a significant upgrade in all aspects.
The four Gundam Meisters and the rest of the small group of Celestial Being may have advanced technology, but they're still in trouble up against the combined strength of the world's militaries and their always improving technology. The series initially indulges in its vigilante fantasy of preventing war through force, as many people have wondered about before, but gets away from that before it gets old. The entire series is utterly fantastic when it comes to creating hot suspenseful action setpieces and scenarios. About each episode follows the construction of plot and character focus in the beginning and then beginning the mission of the day, which is just challenging enough or intriguing in concept that the progression is entertaining on its own for wondering how Celestial Being will overcome the odds or respond.
The cast of characters in Gundam 00 are generally likable, but there's so many more than what's necessary for the plot that even the main characters can get caught under the weight of the story's fast paced momentum. No one gets enough attention dedicated to them to become any measure of a complex character because with such a large cast scenes have to be routinely swapped in to show where they're acting in the story without much downtime room for them to develop their personality. Changes in characters are linear and obvious, and internal conflict is dealt with quickly in specific scenes and then not carried with that character. In other words, it's all very simple and straightforward characterization. Whether this light approach is preferable to the convoluted existential angst of other series such as Zeta Gundam is up to the viewer.
Gundam 00 also does a great job of keeping the pacing strong by avoiding dialogue exposition and dropping the viewer right into the series's environment where they'll infer a lot of what they need to know about the world and its technology through context. An immediate example is the crew of Celestial Being constantly referring to the name “Veda” with no one around to just explain who that is. Because why would they? They already know and also know everyone else does. The viewer has appropriate time to figure this out themselves through context because it seems like whoever this Veda is they're not on-screen yet. Then as you keep watching you eventually realize everyone's referring to some computer master system, and then the only remaining question is if Veda has some sort of AI, and it doesn't take much longer to realize that's not a part of it. It's great to see any anime that doesn't rely on redundant, ill-fitting dialogue to explain things that can be inferred logically by the audience. This removes the need for slowing down the plot's pacing to accommodate the often unnecessary explanation.
Along with Setsuna, the Gundam Meisters are made up of other codenamed pilots. Lockon Statos, Allelujah Haptism, and Tieria Erde join him in battle, and they're call commanded by Celestial Being captain Sumeragi Lee Noriega. Lockon is an instantly understandable type, the least eccentric guy and a cool-headed confident sniper who's understanding of everybody else's emotional problems and reaches out to them. He's practically the role model of the whole series, although he doesn't get that level of credit. Easily the most agreeable person in Gundam 00. Allelujuah is also relatively normal but more reserved, but he has a split psychotic personality. The split personality concept is a fine unique trait, but his alter-ego's insane behavior is typically over-the-top to the point of being downright lame, and they never really resolve the fact that each personality as practically portrayed as its own consciousness, so this split personality gimmick just kind of tapers off. Tieria Erde is the most mysterious member of Celestial Being for several of his unique abilities, and his archetype is that of the cold and logical type who's frustrated by the emotional decisions of the rest of the team. Sumeragi is one of the franchise's best captains in terms of ability, constantly seen giving new commands to the team through the entirety of every mission and almost always being the one behind every winning strategy.
Going back to Setsuna, he's one of the most wooden Gundam protagonists ever. He speaks in short repetitive idiosyncratic phrases a lot of the time and has little personal motivation to fight beyond his own philosophy. There's more than one occasion in the show where the crew will be talking in complete sentences about complex situations and subjects, and then Setsuna will interject with his always deadpan monotone delivery with a line like “...This world... is twisted.” or “...I... am a Gundam...” and instead of everyone looking at him like he has some kind of social disorder for butting into a conversation talking about things that only mean something to him, they give an impression like he just said something profound. His character development is obscured through these odd behaviors that imply complexity that isn't actually there. At the end of the day Setsuna, who joins Celestial Being to stop war through fighting, decides he is a part of Celestial Being to stop war through fighting. Not a very riveting guy, and his past trauma as a child soldier being the cause of his stoic personality is the only interesting thing about him.
Of particular annoyance are the characters which are thoroughly unnecessary and not particularly important to even the actual plot events. Characters like Wang Liu Mei and Hong Long are difficult to care about because they practically operate as living plot devices to just move around and catalyze more directly important characters to act, but they themselves have almost no explored personal stake in the events that unfold. They basically don't need to exist and take screen time away from the characters who do have a personal investment and involvement with what's going on, and the story could easily be rewritten almost exactly as is without them and find new open space to further develop even the shunned main characters. What little moments actually do need a proxy to go around and instigate plot development could have that role filled by the still generously large remaining cast or a one-off character we don't need to dwell on as anyone important, as it eventually turned out Liu Mei and Hong Log weren't anyway.
But even this implementation isn't as poor as the two worst characters, Saji and Louise. Their main purpose for existing is showing how civilians can get caught up in a war they want no involvement in, but this is such an obvious element of any war story that it doesn't need to be addressed for the sake of it. If you want to take this perspective on and have it be meaningful, you need to really hunker down on why it's ever done in the first place: to add pathological weight to the conflicts and violence. These characters have to have a genuine heart for the audience to connect with and feel for them. But because Saji and Louise have a completely, unrealistically, cringe-worthy relationship for two grown adults they're impossible to relate to a real environment of loss and death. Saji is a college student in a defined relationship with Louise and has a meltdown over kissing like a 5 year old, and Louise is equally immature with her selfish actions and egging her mother on about Saji as if it's an elementary school girl in her first pretend relationship. They have no chemistry with each other or common interests to allow us to perceive their bond as anything other than superficial, and these embarrassing scenes in season 1 of them screwing around are completely worthless to the ongoing plot and difficult to sit through. On top of this, all of these pointless scenes are to set up empathy (again, they failed at this) for their more direct involvement in season 2. If the grand idea is to spend half of a series's precious time on useless scenes just so bad characters can be more important in the second half, then you can probably take a step back and realize why this idea is just bad all around and that it's not even important for anything.
Many other minor characters don't get in the way of things and are likable enough. Brash idiot pilot Patrick Colasaur is a little funny and entertaining, and his silly outbursts are spread out through his rare short appearances unlike the above mentioned characters to not be bothersome. But it's still a wonder why a character like this ever was given a distinct identity when he ends up doing literally nothing of importance through the entire series. Marina Ismail is another civilian perspective but this time of the middle eastern nations. She's the princess of some country that's divided through political turmoil and war, and like a nearly 1:1 copy of Relena Peacecraft from Gundam Wing she's a complete pacifist and doesn't understand peace through fighting out of hopes one day everyone in the world will see everything the exact same way she does and won't need to fight. Good luck sister, but that aside Marina is a very milquetoast nice girl who is just pleasant and quiet at all times, and while she isn't offensively annoying like Saji and Louise she adds nearly as little to the show. She connects Setsuna back to his past again, which is good, but they don't actually have any previous relationship and they forge an inexplicable bond that's just as minor. She informs Setsuna's character development (which as covered above almost doesn't exist anyway), but why she has a particular interest in the lifeless Setsuna is a mystery and although she is sometimes another thing for Setsuna to personally fight for (again, why in particular, she is just another civilian?) their relationship doesn't amount to anything and he doesn't willingly pay attention to her. Marina could be written out of the story even easier than some of the above.
But you would lose Setsuna's connection back to the middle east, right? Not exactly, and that's a good segue into one of the positive aspects of Gundam 00 which is that it has one of the franchise's best casts of antagonists. Frankly, none of them stand out as amazing, but many are entertaining and threatening rather than being dimwitted enemy commanders who aren't even Newtypes. Another good thing is that Gundam 00 has a decent sense of neutrality with both sides which many Gundam series attempt but fail to deliver on thanks to the antagonist side focusing on clearly evil people. In Gundam 00 Celestial Being are arguably not on the right side to begin with due to their tyrannical threat of force towards any dissentation, and naturally many decent people who are easy to root for in their own right oppose them. Graham Baker is one such character, an ace pilot whose confidence in beating the Gundams is called into question after repeated failures due to inferior technology, and his best friend and mechanical engineer Billy Katagiri. On the darker side of things we have Ali Al-Saachez, a sadistic terrorist who loves causing strife for the sake of it and is the very same person who made Setsuna into a soldier. While it's disappointing that this implied former teacher-student relationship is never made into anything in the present as Setsuna and Ali just hate each other, it's nonetheless bringing Setsuna back to his past more directly in a more interesting way than Marina's character accomplishes. There's nothing complicated about Ali's motivations – he's literally just an evil guy, but it's fun to watch this manipulative slimeball just do as he pleases while playing all sides of the conflict just so he can make more money and get more power.
It's disappointing then that with Gundam 00 already struggling to have deep characterization it struggles to even resolve its innately likable characters and relationships in ways they deserve. Season 2 met with a lot of complaints, and many of them are deserved. The first problem with season 2 is that it undoes many of the impacting permanent moments of season 1's finale. Characters who were shown as dead basically come back to life, and the status quo is almost reset. A lot of this feels extremely cheap and lazy (especially you-know-who), and like they weren't creative enough to have to write the show in a different direction without the same characters. With most characters being brought back, the already too large cast is increased even further so the problem of distributing character focus evenly gets even worse. In season 2 we have deaths of new characters framed as extremely important and meaningful for other characters, but the audience has only seen this character for a grand total of five minutes so they can't relate. Celestial Being's new enemy are the A-Laws, who are kind of boring because unlike before these antagonists actually are bad people. They're an autonomous force that threatens conflicts with the destruction of both sides, but while they are a lot less discriminatory and involve civilians there's very little attention paid to how this is a similar philosophy to Celestial Being and probably the natural end result of a world where Celestial Being ever grew to a large scale. This hypocrisy could introduce some interesting conflict among CB, but instead it's just acknowledged at best because I guess it was too complicated for the writing staff to want to take on.
The other Gundam Meisters are pushed to the background as season 2 becomes the Setsuna Show. He gets far, far more fights and screen time than the rest of the cast despite not having gotten any more interesting, and his upgraded Gundam is now unequivocally the most powerful instead of being on par with the others like before. Allelujuah is especially screwed in season 2, his subplot being resolved not even halfway through and then getting no scenes after where he gets to show off or get any glory. It's Setsuna all the way, folks. New villains called the Innovators are also introduced, but their whole gimmick is being boring and near emotionless so that's not very fun. Old, better antagonists are brought back and are as cool or cooler than ever, but Graham Baker and Ali get almost nothing to do. Their final showdowns are hyped up and then the final series of fights at the end of the series are incredibly short and anti-climactic. A very disappointing and satisfying end to some of the most enjoyable elements of the story. Season 2 is also obsessed with sudden twists that have no meaning to them because nothing in hindsight set them up, and a lot of the shock value of these betrayals and deaths out of nowhere are ruined further when it's shown at the start of the next episode that it didn't actually happen or something. Nena's role in season 2 can also be chalked up as another character who didn't need to be added to the story. Saji and Louise are as annoying and childish as ever, but at least they're annoying and childish in scenes that are important this time.
Yet, despite all of this out-of-control absurdity and ridiculous resolutions, season 2's good qualities it inherits from the first season manage to mostly overcome its downward stumbling. The pacing is still top-notch, many new action scenarios are captivating and memorable, and because of that fast pacing the absurdity and mistakes of the plot are moved on from quickly. This is unlike older Gundam series which were slower paced and could really dwell on their nonsensical character development, making them a lot less tolerable the more they stayed on screen.
The production job of Gundam 00 is phenomenal. I can't think of any series of a comparable length I've seen with such incredible animation, and I'm curious what the budget had to have been to accomplish this. Gundam 00 uses digital and CG animation, something I tend to dislike, and through both genuine effort and carefulness avoids the typical problems of both. The conveniences of digital animation are never visibly used to cut corners. Stock footage is unnoticeable throughout the whole series, and the things in digital that usually look poor like the background details or things outside of the frame's focus aren't a problem. There's very little poorly drawn faces and figures in the backgrounds. Though this is evidently not high budget OVA or movie quality due to the simple shading, the show's art in general is still pleasant to look at due to the bright colors and realistically-proportioned characters and objects. A thoroughly very professional and stunning job. The CG is most noticeable on Celestial Being's flagship, the Ptolemaios, but even there it's used tastefully to just give the ship depth as it turns and such, and it looks like they somehow wrapped actual cels over a 3D model so it fits into its 2Dimensional surroundings.
Keeping with the trend of quality, the frame rate is damn good and only lets up in areas where movement is not necessary to convey what's going on, such as characters simply walking around the ship. Even there you kind of have to look for the frame rate to notice the drop. The action scenes in Gundam 00 are simply incredible. The battle of the day trope in Gundam could often be one of the absolute worst parts about a series, but here it's the exact opposite. Any action in Gundam 00 is a highlight, which is good because as a thriller there's a lot of it this time. All action scenes are dynamically choreographed. No more stock footage of a Gundam rotating in place in space and shooting a rifle. These battles contain constant, fast movements that aren't repeated and make the battles feel realistically lively. Visual flair to accompany the clashing machines is generous. Floating multicolored particles as the machines fly through the air, flashes of light as blades connect, beams that actually glow as they're firing, and a consistent double-image effect when the Gundams enter their Trans-Am mode and improve their speeds. Battles are very exciting and a complete joy to watch, which makes the aforementioned short-lived final battles all the more frustrating. There are occasions where the speed of the fights is so fast it's hard to get a grasp on what just happened because frames move so quickly, but I never minded rewinding to see parts of fights again. There's no doubt a very, very uncommon amount of care and money went into Gundam 00's production.
As for the mech designs, I think they're overall solid for the Gundam franchise, but I don't feel particularly strong about many. The grunt machines look great and more contemporary than usual, where before they could have cartoonish cyclops eyes (you heard me) and the like. There's a real lack of distinct enemy mechs, which is unfortunate. Most are just lightly modified previous models, and the ones that aren't such as the Susano-O and Arche Gundam are my favorite mechs from the series for that reason. I'm pretty sick of the blue/white/red color design for the main Gundam and it's a tradition holding design creativity back at this point, and the season 2 upgrades are pretty boring, basically being the same Gundams as before just with more geometry slapped on.
The music quality isn't something to write home about like the animation, but it's still well done. It's a typical mix of rock, electronic, and orchestral usually leaning on the latter. Not many songs from the score stand out, but I quite like “Fight”, the brassy combat song with uplifting deep choral vocals. It's almost ludicrously epic compared to the rest of the soundtrack, but for a thriller over-the-top intensity is what the series should be going for. It was a mistake to almost never use this song in season 2. Sometime in the mid 2000s nearly every anime decided it was going to have every theme song sound almost identical, and I don't find Gundam 00's exceptions. Though I do find “Past the Tears” by Stereopony (great name) to be pretty catchy. The ending themes weren't anything special either.
And now for that recommendation. If you're already a fan of any Gundam (preferably of something 90s or later) or mecha in general, then yes, absolutely watch Gundam 00. It's one of the better Gundam series in general and relative to the genre at large as well. For those still ambivalent on those two things or the series itself, then I'd still recommend it so long as its not necessarily a deal-breaker that the show excels at suspense and action while its characters are mostly just satisfactory. You may need to keep that idea in mind so you don't become so invested in the plot and characters only for season 2 to throw a pie in your face. Still, the action and animation remain very impressive and in the realm of stupid writing in Gundam series, most don't even have that much to fall back in when the going gets rough. And the going can get a lot rougher than this. You can mostly safely consider Gundam 00 as your entry point into the franchise.
