1st Impressions: "Mobile Suit Gundam AGE"

Breaking my normal routine once more, I'm introducing a new post called 1st Impressions: mainly to give a POV regarding a newly launched title. To start, I'll use the premiered anime Mobile Suit Gundam AGE.

For the most part, people have blasted this, mainly because it involves a young boy as the protagonist and pilot. Not to restate what others have said before me, but this isn't the first Gundam piece to do so, if people even bothered to look at Mobile Suit Victory Gundam (which was surprisingly darker than expected.) Even so, released still footage and trailers have received what I would like to call pre-release criticism by most of the Gundam fanbase, granted that half of those haven't seen any other works aside from what was shown here, which I would list, but that's not my goal this time.

It isn't popular as of yet (positively popular, anyway), but little by little, we're seeing this anime kick off, mostly online thanks to Gundam.info and whoever streams the episodes. I checked it out, and frankly... I don't see what the huge deal is. The surmise is that it takes place in an entirely new century, in standard tradition, we'll call this the Advance Generation, or A.G. Era, the main story kicking off in the year A.G. 108. Thanks to an attack on the space colony Ovan by the UE (unknown enemy), young Flit Asuno loses his mother in the midst of the destruction, watching her as she is buried under the burning rubble. He is handed the AGE Device, and within it he finds the blueprints for the infamous robot that has quelled conflicts time and again - the mobile suit called Gundam. Using these blueprints, and the several years of his engineering studies, just as the UE attacks Nora, he completes it: Gundam AGE-1.

Oddly enough, this is perhaps the first Gundam title that has a storyline based on generations, with young Flit being the first to pilot AGE-1 Normal. In addition, another first is that this particular title was done in part with game developer Level-5, who worked on a game of the franchise prior to AGE's concept. The character design heavily differs from past titles, which is noticeable when compared to the previous titles that released, those being Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn and Mobile Suit Gundam 00. As of now, there are only 3 episodes, and being the newborn series that it is, there is no English cast, let alone any plans for US licensing as of yet. As a Gundam fan, I was kinda worried when this was announced, but I was pleased when I actually saw the episode, but kept hearing remarks about it possibly being kiddy, based mostly on the design. Hard to agree with, considering we see the demise of someone close to him in the first episode (which has been a common thing since the original Mobile Suit Gundam.)

Maybe I'm calling it too quick, but I don't see anything wrong with it for the most part. In fact, I'm waiting until they kick it to the second generation of the protagonist, that alone has me curious about the series. I can't say it's a hit, but as of now, I'm not disappointed. That's all for my first take.