SD Gundam Force: All New Adventures

Title	SD Gundam Force Anime Legends: All New Adventures
Director	Yuuichi Abe
Actors
Release date	2008-05-20
Theatrical release date
List price	$49.98
ASIN	B001662FNC
Genre
Manufacturer	Bandai Entertainment
Running time	650minutes
Studio	Bandai Entertainment
Purchase	Buy it now!

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If you go to the Anime News Network website, they have a page that shows the worst rated anime of all time. Now most of these shows are absolutely awful and are downright painful to watch. Between shows like M.D. Geist, and Psychic Wars alone, this is a pretty potent list of shows that are pretty awful. However what’s rated the worst show on that list is SD Gundam Force, and I’m here to defend the crap out of this show.

SD Gundam Force marked one of the highest points in terms of the American popularity of Gundam. It was a Gundam show that was co-produced with Japan and the first 26 episodes of the show was aired on Cartoon Network even before the show aired in Japan. In that regard alone, the show is pretty remarkable. Unfortunately after the first 26 episodes, the rest of SD Gundam Force was never aired on television. In fact, it was years before we even heard anything about the show. For the longest time it was in a bizarre limbo and for the most part was entirely forgotten by the US Market except for being known as “That crappy CG kid Gundam”; A title that SD Gundam Force has unfortunately never managed to grow out of.

It wasn’t until several years later that Bandai Entertainment announced that they would be releasing the last 26 episodes of SD Gundam Force in a DVD pack in 2008. I’m of the opinion that Bandai must have been fighting incredibly hard to get this show on TV somehow, but wasn’t able to. In fact, the show even has bumpers in between the episode saying that “Superior Defender Gundam Force will be right back!”. The release isn’t perfect though. The DVD only features the dub of the show and that’s it. No Japanese audio, subtitles or extras to speak of. Although it’s definitely unfortunate, considering the demographic for this show is not the hardcore Gundam or anime fans, it’s understandable why those sorts of things are absent.

Now, a lot of people may remember this show as being stupid and childish. How it’s just another generic story about a boy and his friend robot, and how they use the power of friendship to defeat any obstacle that they come across. If you ask me, anyone who doesn’t like that premise and thinks it’s stupid is a jerk.

The second half of the show takes everything that was good in the first half of SD Gundam Force and amplifies it by ten. SD Gundam Force spends the second half of the series going to the two other worlds Arc and Lacroa, which are both previously popular SD Gundam settings: The samurai Gundam world and the medieval Gundam world.

SD Gundam Force did a particularly interesting bit of design choice by making each world a different Gundam universe. Lacroa, the medieval world has characters and mechanical designs all based on the Gundam Wing characters. Arc has characters from G Gundam, and Neotopia’s designs are all from the Universal Century timeline. It’s a neat little bit that the designers did and that is pretty frequent with SD Gundam whenever they get a little nuts with their properties.

One of the best things about the second half of SD Gundam Force is the characters, especially the bad guys that show up. Let me give just one example: Deathscythe. Deathscythe was one of the Gundam knights that defended Lacroa. He was in love with Princess Rele (Short for Relena. See, they did it again!). However, she already loved Zero, one of the main characters of the series. So what does Deathscythe do? Well he does the only sane option, which is to betray the entire kingdom of Lacroa, turn every person to stone, and smelt the rest of his Gundam comrades to help fuel and rebuild General Zeong, the multidimensional evil that is going to destroy all three worlds.

I don’t know about you guys, but I think that’s kind of awesome.

The Arc world is pretty similar in that regard. There are two warring factions, exciting games of shogi, family drama, ritual suicide (Well, at least in the Japanese version), and a giant robot in a show filled with slightly smaller robots!

All of this leads up to a pretty exciting last three episodes of SD Gundam Force where all three worlds are on the edge of destruction, with legions of Jagd Dogas with jetpacks attacking everything in sight, and a giant evil Zeong that’s literally tearing the world apart.

Also this show has an evil twin brother from the future that is based on the GP-04 from Gundam 0083, one of the coolest designs from that series. Seriously guys this show is AWESOME.

At the end of the day, I think a lot of people are way too harsh on this show and forget one of the biggest points of this show at the end of the day: It’s a kid’s show. It doesn’t try to be the epic space opera that so many Gundam series are, and it doesn’t try to have the dramatic fights or serious tone that a lot of Gundam series are known for. Instead it tries to have fun while delivering its own story that can be just as engaging and fun as any other Gundam series, even regardless of the absolutely awful dub. The show tries to be light hearted, optimistic, and fun. In those regards, I think that this show is a success at what it aimed to do. Do I think people are way too hard on this show? Absolutely, especially when they haven’t seen the second half of this show and how awesome it gets. Although at the same time, most people haven’t had the opportunity to watch the second half of the show in any way. Most people probably don’t even realize there is a second half of this show.

With that in mind, if people are reading this review right now and are thinking that this is something that they would watch to check out, go find the DVDs. They’re not too hard to find and it’s worth taking a look at. It’s a show that is childish, and doesn’t apologize for it either, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is have an ending song with a bunch of cute Zakus doing the samba.

Oh right one more thing: a man headbutts four missiles at once before throwing them back at the enemy in this show.