![[HorribleSubs] Gundam Reconguista in G - 01 [480p].mkv_snapshot_15.24_[2014.10.03_17.36.11]](https://thecartdriver.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/162aa-horriblesubs-gundam-reconguista-in-g-01-480p.mkv_snapshot_15.24_2014.10.03_17.36.11.jpg)
I can feel my head spinning. Nothing in this world is making sense. Words and sentences swirl around in front of my eyes, completely disconnected from one another. I reach out and try to create patterns in these words but to no avail. Their meaning is a mystery to me. Each line flows into each other as smoothly as a river of bricks. My head is now starting to pound as I struggle to follow along but none of it is igniting the usual parts of my brain that follows dialogue. It’s made that part of my brain overload in frustration like an old hard drive clicking furiously as it overheats the rest of the machine.
This is what it’s like trying to follow the dialogue in Gundam Reconguista in G.
I was prepared for this coming in. Tomino is directing G-Reco and his anime have a tendency to have this sort of dialogue. In many ways G-Reco feels like the second coming of Overman King Gainer, one of his other anime from about a decade ago. The design and animation and screen composition feel like an early 80’s anime. There’s very specific ways of shooting and angles chosen that make it feel like something from that era. It’s a pretty cool feature of G-Reco, as is the burst of colour on screen. Certainly makes a nice change from the monochromatic Terra Formars.
But the dialogue. Oh the dialogue. I didn’t want to entirely blame Tomino for the writing in the other stuff by him I’ve seen but now that I’ve seen this style of writing appear across each of the anime of his I’ve seen, I can only conclude that Tomino has never spoken to another human being before. Characters will say a line from completely nowhere as though they’re responding to some otherwise unheard dialogue that leaves you utterly bamboozled as to what they’re on about. It’s like every seen has 2 lines of hidden dialogue between each line of spoken dialogue. They don’t speak like human beings. It reads like a bad Hong Kong fansub where you’re struggling to infer what they could have possibly meant to say because what was written was so incoherent.
Even the storyboarding gets in on the action. Scenes cut at extremely odd moments, leaving me confused as to what the point of the interaction showed was. The anime exclamation noise of someone going EEEHHHHHH at opportune moments is something I’m not terribly fond of, but at least you know why they’re shocked. Not so much in G-Reco. The character who spoke the most sense in the whole thing was the one girl who just said GEEEE over and over again. What’s worse is that from what little I could infer from trying to follow the story wasn’t that good anyway. Boys are pilots and girls are cheerleaders shows that it’s not just the directing style that’s stuck in the past. Some people have glowing eyes when looked at through a machine and that means they have special powers and can pilot giant robots. There are pirates fighting to…restore America? I don’t know. Gundam Build Fighters was better than this.
The Cart Driver 
The quality of the dialogue itself ain’t a turnoff for me. It’s the fact that it feels like unnecessary exposition that got badly fragmented that’s the real sticking point. They ask the main to recite some technobabble solely for the purpose of explaining it despite it having nothing to do with the story at the time, then suddenly a girl gets kicked in the undernut and we get some phallic imagery whilst someone flat-out tells you the girl got kicked as a result.
Or was it the reverse?
I liked both episodes. They have an old school feeling. We need to remember that this show is aimed to kids. The diallogues are weird, but that is cool, because this is a show that doesn´t take itself to serious. IT’S SO MUCH FUCKING FUN! IT’S ZZ GUNDAM ALL OVER AGAIN!
Actually, this is the opposite of ZZ. Tomino takes this very seriously. He’s basically planning on this to be a message to children and the younger generation, asking them what sort of world do they want to make the future into. And considering the future he’s presented that we presumedly want to avoid features caniablism and a single nation hoarding most of the world’s resources, and that alternative energy sources are mentioned right off the bat, I think this is pretty obvious from the get go. Hell, this might be the last message he’ll ever make, and I think he wants to go out with a bang.
http://pastebin.com/N4LhzhFY
This is relevant.
It’s still a terrible piece of garbage, just like the first half of ZZ. I swear Tomino wants to run Gundam into the ground.
Thank you very much! It was an excellent thing to help me understand what this whole project is about!
I think this is partially HS’s fault. At the very least, they didn’t have to translate the saying as is. If this is all Tomino, they could have tried to smooth this all out. But, of course, literal subs are quick and easy to make subs. There’d be an outrage if we couldn’t ride on the hype train as quickly as possible, no matter the cost.
Anyway, I highly recomend reading the manga, as more is explained.
I can’t make judgements about the show since it’s only two episodes in, but I’m optimisitic and I’ll continue watching it. I’m already a sucker for the setting, though, of course, a setting doesn’t make a show and Tomino and I already have a very love and hate relationship. Cue PTSD flashbacks of Victory Gundam.
HS? As in Horriblesubs? They don’t do the subtitling themselves ya know, they take the Crunchyroll subs.
I don’t think the issue is anything to do with the choice of subtitles either though. Even if you take the line as meaning the world is not as you think it is, it’s still an utterly bizarre thing to say at that moment in time.
There doesn’t seem to be G Reco subs ON Crunchy Roll, so I don’t understand how they could take subs from there. And from what I understand, it is a common Japanese phrase/metaphor. Probally works better in Japanese, so they could have just translated it so we get the meaning, instead of just giving us that phrase. Though, I meant more than just that one moment.
HorribleSubs are purely rippers, if G-Reco is not on CR then it’s on Funi or some other simulcasting service. HS do not have any translators, heck, I doubt they even have editors.
CR ripped it from AnimeLab, an Aus & NZ streaming site.
For G no Gundam Reconguista in G-Reco I half ignore the technobabble, silly names, and events happening at breakneck speed with little explanation. Having said that, I’m having a ton of fun so far! My head was spinning too but I was laughing along with the utter insanity.
Being a Eureka Seven lover, I was immediately drawn to the familiar style and rainbow colors flying about before my eyes. Speaking of E7, the Capital Army in G-Reco reminds me of the United Federation in E7. They have strikingly similar uniform colors, they seem to hold the majority of the power, and they look like they look like they’re going to become the antagonists. G-Reco is also giving me a Turn-A Gundam vibe, which I appreciate. Hopefully this rainbow show will be better then the last few rainbow shows I watched.
Also, the ED has people doing the can-can with “G” said at least 50 times. 🙂
Yeah same character designer as E7 and I rather like the designs myself too.
Waah, no girl pilots, misogyny, waah. Come on, that’s no reason to rag on a show, not to mention it’s not even an accurate complaint. Did you forget about the space pirate girl? And it’s stupid to blame Tomino for “the world is not square”, that’s just a crappy translation on CR’s part. The world is not square – i.e. it doesn’t have clearly-defined sides; it’s not just black and white. My only gripe was with the direction, the panning and zooming felt a little strange in the first episode, but I got used to it quickly, and now think it’s actually an interesting deviation from the norm. I didn’t have any trouble following the dialogue, maybe you were just sleepy while watching it or something.
At what point was misogyny ever mentioned? Are you aware of that word means compared to what was actually implied in the post?
It was faaaaaaaaaaaaar more than just that line about the world being square. It was every piece of dialogue that was badly written. And as I said to someone earlier, even if you take that line to mean what you said, it was still a bizarre thing to say in that situation.
I think it was the subtitles this time. I watched sage’s sub and the dialogue flowed pretty well.
Confused by the dialogue, I also thought that this wasn’t how humans spoke, but then I realized that just maybe, it wasn’t completely off base.
Ideal conversation is pretty linear, you know you talk about something, then someone else talks about something and you continue to talk about something until the group as a whole, collectively decides to stop talking about that something.
Depending on whom you talk to though, it doesn’t always work out like that. You sometimes end up with “talk about something” -> “talk about something” -> “comment on dog that walked by” -> “talk about something” -> “comment on cat that walked by” -> “talk about something”
I’d like to think that maybe Gundam Reconguista was going for that kind of natural human conversation with really, easily distracted characters, but even if it was, it didn’t really do a terribly good job of it. Mostly because the dialogue switches often happened when big things were happening, so it felt quite unnatural and unnecessary.
I liked the setting, but I didn’t think the show did a good job of introducing it at all. Like, it is okay to be thrown in with no explanation, but I’d rather not get some explanation that makes it even more confusing.
Anyway, I am hopeful it will slowly fix some of these quiffles with time. It would be nice to follow a Gundam from start to finish as it is airing for once… Well apart from Build Fighters, which by the way was absolutely awesome.
There’s a time and place write purposefully stilted dialogue & it’s called Genshiken S1. It neither makes sense in the context of this show, nor do I think that Tomino is really that smart or avant garde to even try. It’s bad writing, nothing more.
No it absolutely didn’t do a terrible job of that. If you want an example of an anime that did do a good job of that, Kurenai is a fantastic example with people interrupting each other and naturally flowing dialogue. This is not it. This is absolutely not it
“The world isn’t Square” clearly means “We’re dancing on Daryl’s grave”.
How rude.
By the way, my subs had “The world isn’t Black and White !”.
This isn’t really subtle, but that’s at least clear.
Now I’m starting to think this is yet another horrible translations rather than the show’s writing itself
Where did you get your subs/what group is it? That does sound better.
It is ‘square’, unless shikaku also means clear-cut in some capacity. Chalk it up to quality Gundam dialogue rather than a translation fuckup.
Having very little experience with Gundam or Tomino (other than a few of this terribad shows) I came into the series with roughly a clean slate. I think the most positive thing to say is that I still love Kenichi Yoshida’s character designs & that the homage to 80’s mecha anime during battles both stylistically & in cost-cutting was an interesting quirk. I especially liked how the image would get all blurry when focused on a close up of a character’s face, imitating old cell-drawn images. It’s a shame that like everything else in the first two episodes the battles seem so poorly edited that I constantly had difficulty following what was going on, even with the characters awkwardly blurting every action out loud.
I think even worse than Tomino’s bizarre non sequitur dialogue & the choppiness of the editing, was how rapid fire the directing seem to be. I can understand zany comedic scenes being framed that way but not the entire series. There are few static shots or breather scenes; everything just moves by at a frantic clip without any thought to allow exposition scenes to sink in or character deaths to have any impact. Either there’s an extra 5-10 minutes in footage cut out in both episodes, or Tomino seems to think pacing an action series like a 3 minute rapid-fire gag comedy is the way to go.
Ah well, as long as Yoshida gives me more awesome designs of attractive looking coloured girls I’ll have enough incentive to at least give the series a chance. FYI, Gidget for best girl.
Yeah there’s a lot going on it’s hard to digest all of it
Like that death of the captain for example. He just kinda died. The pirate girl just cried for like 30 seconds and that’s it. Who cares about his death? We can’t seem to feel the weight of things because everything happens all at once with no clear meaning
And that techno babble. Mahouka vibes incoming!
Mahouka’s technobabble actually made sense mind you (it is physically paining me to praise Mahouka for something). The stuff in G-Reco does not.
This is pretty much the Michael Bay’s Transformers of Gundam. Things sort of make a vague sense overall; just as long as you don’t pay attention and ignore the parts that don’t make sense that you accidentally paid attention to.
I think you have this confused with G Saviour or The War for Earth.
Shhhh, we don’t talk about those.
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Alright! I just can’t resist. “Enjoy”. Hahahaha!:
This show also has really horrible audio mastering. I’m not talking about volume levels going through the roof.
It’s the way everything is mixed and the way stereo sound is panned and the did we find this microphone in a garbage bin vibes.
“War in the Pocket is the best Gundam.”
Yes. Very much so.
No idea what the hell happened in the first episode, but at least the 2nd episode made more sense? I think? Kind of?
I’ll give this a few more episode, but I don’t know for how long. This season is packed.
She means that the world isn’t black and white. You can’t take sides on things.
And seriously, did you really give up that easily? Have you not seen ANY universal century show that he made, no less Turn A Gundam? If you’re saying you’ve seen his works then you should be familiar at this point, you damn fool.
This anime i such a f*cking mess. It’s terrible. I just finished ep 3 and nothing the characters do and say makes any sense.
If you need a Gundam show that’s not confusing or follows the “Colony gets attacked, kid joins army with giant robot” plot try Gundam X. It’s more character driven, and they don’t actually head into space till the final episodes.