The story provides an insight into the early days of the One Year War and, more importantly, the myriad events that preceded that war. Specifically, it's a story about the man who would become Char, his early days as the world's most competent shota, and how he managed to work his way up the rankings of a military whose top brass hated him and would kill him on sight, were it not for his impregnable disguise of sunglasses followed by sports goggles.
Gundam, from what I've managed to experience of the main series and this OVA, suffers from an issue that I find myself hard-pressed to really succinctly explain. The shortest explanation is this: the writing in Gundam is just a little bit too good. The long explanation is as follows:
The Gundam series tends to center around really high quality character studies. Every character in the show is clearly fleshed out and fully formed, and I generally find myself hard pressed to look at any one character and say "I don't like that one. The lore of the series is intricate, as war stories tend to be, but a very good job has been done in establishing what is happening, and why it is that I'm supposed to care. Let that be the main takeaway of this review: I really like the writing of this show, and frankly of this entire series. However, when the writing is of this sort of high quality, it has a tendency to make missteps and weirdness look all the more stark, in comparison. I tear things to shreds, when I like them, and boy howdy did the shredder come out in full force.
Having a really smart and really consistent plot throughout your OVA only makes it all the more asinine that a major part of it hinges on Char running into a boy his exact age who looks exactly like him, who was already set to be fast-tracked into officer position of the Zeon army and who manages to get in close with the Zabis despite looking LITERALLY EXACTLY like the kid they've wanted dead for years.
Having nuanced, fleshed out and genuinely likable characters in the middle of a terrible war only makes it feel more like a slap in the face when the man you give me to try and sell the horrors of Operation: British is Dozle. Fucking Dozle. The wacky woo-hoo screamy cry-boy who immediately proceeds to scream and cry about it the exact same way he's been screaming and crying about everything for the entire show, because he's the resident scenery chewer and his presence is supposed to be a joke. It also kind of makes it a double slap, when you consider that Dozle was probably one of the goodest eggs in this series, and yet you have him be the forefront of the Very Bad Thing What Zeon Did and he just suddenly is like "heck yeah. Unprecedented war-crimes, fam, let's go."
I reiterate, though. I'm mad, because this OVA made me give enough of a shit about it to get mad at it. I still would genuinely recommend this series to someone who's already into the Gundam series, and really would like to get that extra nugget of hot lore to bring the nugget tray to completion. Watch it with less of a critical eye than I do, for your own sake. It'll probably be one of the all time greats, that way.
