"It's better than SEED Freedom." - Hayley
"So is being punched in the face a few times." - Tokusatsu subtitler and friend of the show Makh
It goes without saying at this point that Bandai Namco will do everything in its power to fumble its myriad high profile works of fiction, but this release is at least funny.
See, Urdr Hunt was originally a series of sidestory missions in an Iron Blooded Orphans mobile phone game. With that particular digital casino shuttering its doors, the various animated cutscenes have been redrawn, re-edited and compiled together with new footage as a final definitive version. This results in a film which is a spiritual successor to F91 (an entire television show's worth of story rammed into 90 minutes; the final scene involves people rotating in space), those Gundam SEED Astray 5 minute shorts included on the Stargazer DVD (weird, irrelevant and mostly a highlight reel of select action setpieces) and Gundam Thunderbolt: Bandit Flower (is an incomplete story).
This is still more dignity than they gave Love Live: School Idol Festival 2.
It's so funny to treat Iron Blooded Orphans as a dumping ground to throw mobile game refuse out the door with because of the various Gundam settings it's the one with the most untapped potential for interesting stories. You can wind back the clock and put more names and faces to the events in the Calamity War and do all the fights with literal killer robots your soulless executive mind desires. Since the originial show is a tragedy about an aborted revolution, there are so many directions a direct sequel cantake. Even a distant sequel can work. Instead, Urdr Hunt is an interquel which commences during the late stages of season 1 and then kinda farts about in those 18 months between seasons. Only a reality where the world of prestige Japanese media writing is relegated to gambling games on your mobile phone can take this setting and make a story that's just It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Even funnier when it still manages a more compelling take on Gundam Unicorn's mystery box conceit.
Given that this is compiled footage from a mobile game, the Sunrise A team are obviously not drawing the robots this time. Even so, it's so rare to see hand drawn robot animation in 2026 that I'll take something which feels closer to that Victory through X run than how Narrative looked.
Unlike F91, each scene of the film is bookended with narration from a character to fill the viewer in on what's happened in between. This also includes overtly telling you every character's backstory and motivations because we simply do not have the footage to show such trivial matters. At last, Gundam is about the robots not the people. This also feels like the final rejection of Reconguista in G's warnings: we have achieved a perfect Secondary Screen production where you don't actually need to pay attention to know what's happened.
So, what happens? Well a mysterious figure has dished out some digital maps to a rogues gallery of characters with a promise of a gigantic prize pool if they're the first to visit every location and possibly find some old black box technology on the way. Naturally various participants start using their spaceships, robots and guns to try murdering their competition and so our plucky group of underdogs team up in pursuit of financially liberating a penal colony on Venus. Along the way romances presumably form and our hero Wistario Afam (Assigned Female At MobileSuit) abandons the big money dream to help out the people who really matter in his life. He can resume participating once that's settled and we will never actually know how it all goes because that's where the movie ends.
After the credits, a short film for Iron Blooded Orphans proper plays. It's set in between seasons and is mostly an excuse to see the boys hang out, Mikazuki to wreck some other robots while complaining about Teiwaz sending him yet more cool swords to break and for the audience to listen to Raise Your Flag one last time. In its most disgusting move, the film also provides an origin story for Season 2 Orga's horrible maroon suit: it was a gift from all the boys. This is a deeply offensive idea to both Hayley and I. We thought it said a lot about Orga's character that he would choose to wear a suit that looks tacky and doesn't quite bring out his complexion that well and how nobody brought it up with him because they either don't understand fashion or understand that Season 2 Orga is so hellbent on his misguided goals that he wouldn't listen anyway. It's a great example of a prequel or interquel filling in a gap which had no need to be filled. Imagination and interpretation are important parts of engaging with art.
That's really all there is to say. The state of this undead franchise in 2026 is the eternally slow march of waiting for the expensive mid-Universal Century prestige adaptations of Hathaway's Flash to wrap up while Mitsuo Fukuda is for some reason given resources to make a prequel to SEED Freedom. If any translators and hackers feel like doing all the Blue Destiny games on the Sega Saturn, I think this is a period we'd really appreciate the effort.
No comments:
Post a Comment