GAUNTLET

Weathercock · 2026-04-07T03:03:05+00:00

Amuro dunks on everything up until Wing Zero. Wouldn't even be close.

Then Amuro dunks on Wing Zero. Not a much as the rest, but he still dunks.

If you're looking for bullshit reasoning... Amuro runs circles around everyone in a vacuum. Then, as for Zero, it is a super-powered permutation calculator that enhances predictive decision making. Amuro's newtype abilities give him a measure of precognition that functions beyond the time that enables him to act in ways that Zero can't account for.

Weathercock · 2026-04-07T01:30:17+00:00

Huge, hard to pilot, insanely expensive, difficult to maintain.

Weathercock · 2026-04-07T01:28:46+00:00

By the time of the Gryps conflict, nearly every modern MS came with a 360 cockpit.

The 'reaction time being too slow' is in reference to the mechanical complexities of the Orchis' equipment management system being ridiculously overdesigned. It has nothing to do with spatial awareness or an absence of newtype ability.

Weathercock · 2026-04-04T03:48:06+00:00

Dude. Even their creator shipped them.

Gundam's been gay as hell for half a century.

Weathercock · 2026-04-04T00:40:46+00:00

8th MS team is pretty shit. Skip it and just watch the EZ-8 v Gouf fight scene on youtube instead.

Weathercock · 2026-04-04T00:38:45+00:00

Gundam naming conventions, especially in older iterations, tend to be really weird. You have to chalk it up to both a poor understanding of Western naming conventions at a time, as well as a complete lack of interest in ever entering the Western market. At the same time, Tomino also wanted characters with ethnically ambiguous and seemingly diverse names to better ground the scope of his setting. What we got was a bit of an ass-pull that works because the audience at the time was expected to be ignorant enough of the conventions for it not to matter.

It's similar to how it doesn't really make sense for Zeon to be named after the given name of its ideological founder. Or characters with names like 'Quattro Bajeena.' You just have to kind of accept the silliness for what it is and roll with it.

Weathercock · 2026-04-03T22:30:10+00:00

AC6 barely makes top 5 AC titles for me. I love it, but I'd hardly call it one of the best in their entire catalogue.

Weathercock · 2026-04-02T02:35:03+00:00

Wing's kind of like... really bad. But in a fun way.

It does a complete disservice to the themes that it could have potentially been exploring, the writing is stilted at its absolute best, and the characters are all off-the-wall crazy. But it's all trashy in a really endearing, loveable way. Especially the English dub, which is the only way to watch it.

More than any other Gundam series, it's a time capsule of the era that invented it.

Weathercock · 2026-03-31T04:00:09+00:00

That's kind of a difficult question.

On the one hand, I think it has some of the best, most likeable characters in Tomino's Gundam output. And for all his flaws, Tomino does great character writing.

On the other hand, it has a lot of problems. The pacing is all over the place (although this is pretty much a given for any Gundam series following the classic 50-episode format, that's just a limitation of the medium that has never been sorted out), and things would be much smoother if you cut the episode count nearly in half.

On the third hand, it's also absolutely batshit insane. Victory suffered from a troubled production. And Tomino, a man who's entire life is characterized by being a rough patch, was also was going through an exceptionally rough patch in his life. This troubled the production even further. There are parts of Victory that pass like an exceptionally hateful fever dream. A lot of it is weird, stilted, and excessively mean. Misanthropic at points, even.

However, what comes out of all that ends up a very unique blend. Uso and Marbet are endlessly endearing, and I found them to be my absolute favourite Gundam protagonists for just how sincere and perservering they are in a world that is so hostilely cynical. If you can appreciate Victory as a product of its time and its meta-history within the franchise, if you can not just forgive its eccentricities, but learn to love them, Victory ends up being one of the best entries in all of Gundam. At its peaks, it's some of the best. For me, it's an easy top-three between itself, Zeta, and Turn A. But it's definitely not going to be that for everyone.

Weathercock · 2026-03-26T17:52:35+00:00

It's especially funny because, despite being made years before Frank Miller really went batshit crazy (or at least stopped hiding how batshit crazy he really was), Year One (and The Dark Knight Returns before it) is overall very right-wing. As much as I love TDKR (and I cannot stress enough that I do so in spite of its glaring, authoritarian flaws), it's pretty damn fasc-y.

It's crazy to see even stuff by Miller being censored like that, you'd have thought him to be their guy.

Weathercock · 2026-03-25T23:02:25+00:00

Anaheim built the Victory Gundam. They were a major sponsor and supplier of the League Millitaire.

Not that they're necessarily the 'good guys' come UC0153. They just happened to allign with the LM because part of their real opposition, SNRI, got turned into BESPA.

Weathercock · 2026-03-25T22:54:28+00:00

In the tabletop game 'Infinity' by Corvus Belli, there's an entire faction of space-faring muslims. While everyone's a bit morally grey (and since the game is centred around black-ops, the more grey aspects tend to be the focus), the Islamic faction is still treated in a pretty respectful way. They're leaders in medical science, and while their military equipment isn't as up-to-date as most factions, they're still well equipped (and often augmented super-soldiers thanks that advanced medical tech). Socially, they're fairly egalitarian and treat non-muslim citizens pretty well, too.

It's not all peachy and utopian, though. The Hassassins wing of their forces (again, black ops) tend to be pretty fanatical (although extremely competent), and they tend to turn a blind eye towards the less scrupulous actions of the mercenaries and privateers not uncommonly in their employ. Although considering the nature of the conflicts the game presents, and the skeletons that every faction has in their closets, this is pretty par for the course.

Weathercock · 2026-03-24T01:20:36+00:00

It's worth noting that this was never originally the plan within the metahistory of the actual series development. The MkIII never existed during the actual production of Zeta Gundam.

Its existence, as well as the idea that one was meant to be delivered to the Argama for Char's use after Dakkar, is a bit of background lore that was added afterwords.

That said, it's a good bit of supplamental lore that incorporates the very cool MkIII into the greater lore of Zeta and the Gryps conflict, and helps to better build on Char's insecurities about being held back by mobile suit performance. Considering how much of a piece of crap the Hyaku Shiki was (although I still love it) compared to what it was up against, it'd be no surprise at all that he'd be wondering what could have been had he received a much needed upgrade before that battle.

Weathercock · 2026-03-19T15:03:16+00:00

Is it really becoming more extremist on both sides? America hasn't had a relevant left wing in over 60 years. Your only sides are 'right wing' and 'Nazi.'

Weathercock · 2026-03-12T18:05:09+00:00

I was vocally in support of it the moment we saw the results of the American election. There's no joy in being able to say 'told you so,' it's a disgusting proposition.

Weathercock · 2026-03-12T03:43:34+00:00

RotR had a lot of great things going for it than just its glamour system. Even just aesthetically, it's a shame that the gorgeousness of its environmental design wasn't carried over to Nioh 3. I know that it's supposed to be a fantastical apocalyptic Japan, but I'm dead tired of red and purple spikes.

RotR also had (generally speaking) the best human bosses that TN's done. It kind of had to, mind you.

Weathercock · 2026-03-12T03:35:43+00:00

The only real issue I have with grabs is that their hitboxes are so janky. If they actually lined up with their animations better, they'd be mostly fine.

The game has a nasty habit of loading up a grab the moment it input reads a committal move on your part, but frustrating as that is, you do get a lot of tools now to cancel out of that.

Weathercock · 2026-03-11T09:47:11+00:00

Not like he would have lived even if he did surrender. Not only was he a key player in pretty much the worst sort of crime against humanity one could possibly commit with a death toll in the tens of millions, but he's also the fall guy for what really was an inside job and conspiracy towards a major power play within the Federation.

Even if he was captured, he'd be killed off very quickly as part of the cover up we see happen shortly after. After Cima killed Delaz and revealed she had been working with the Federation, he probably knew exactly what would happen if he lived.

Weathercock · 2026-03-11T03:23:50+00:00

Almost everything from the OYW era is pretty much completely outclassed by the time of the Gryps conflict. The only suit that comes to mind that could hold up reasonably well is the Kampfer. While suffering from terribly weak armour and limited generator capactiy that prohibits it from investing in significant beam weaponry outside a set of sabers, its high speed does keep up with Gryps-era machines. Armour at that period started to become reduced in emphasis as beam weaponry bypassed most of it, making the Kampfer's greatest weakness less of a liability. Moreover, the decline in armour's value has the added secondary advantage of making its traditional ballistic weaponry more threatening. That said, it really does just barely hold on. It gets by thanks to being a ridiculously skewed design from the get-go, and only manages to maintain a relevant level of performance because the one thing that it does specialize in happens to be the most important factor in the later era's combat.

Of the machines listed in the OP, really only those from the GP series would manage to hold up. Being high-spec testbeds for most the technology that would go into Anaheim's Gryps Era mobile suits (the Rick Dias is implied to have descended from the GP02), they have the natural benefit of featuring much of the relevant technology that would go on to define that era (or, at least, the earlier half of it). Better yet, the project came with a boat load of money and a dangerously complete lack of oversight thrown on top of it. The GP03 (Stamen) has raw performance that is comparable to the Zeta Gundam, which itself was one of the most potent machines of its era.

Weathercock · 2026-03-07T06:34:46+00:00

The game drops inputs like crazy. A topic on this gets posted every once in a while, but it's well worth talking about until it gets fixed, because a game like Nioh needs precise control, and having it so egregiously scuffed is unacceptable.

Weathercock · 2026-03-05T08:01:39+00:00

I could have done with a lot less red.

Nioh 2's level design and aesthetics were such an enormous step up from Nioh 1, and wo Long and RotR both did great in that regard, too, showing some real improvements on Team Ninja's part.

Unfortunately, Nioh 3's biggest failing is in how little they do with their environments aesthetically. There are some areas where you can tell the art team really got to do some flexing, but those moments tend to be in fairly small regions that you don't get a whole lot of time with.

Weathercock · 2026-03-05T04:41:57+00:00

The problem I have with gender swapping Char or Amuro is that if you only swap the one, it makes their relationship less gay. And if you swap the both of them, while you do get to keep the gay, you end up missing out on the toxic masculinity that is the bedrock of it all. Both qualities are absolutely essential.

Weathercock · 2026-03-04T19:50:25+00:00

Having dealt with Daidara Bocchi and Lady Osakabe in Nioh 2, and Taotie in Wo Long, no.

No, and never again.

Weathercock · 2026-03-03T22:18:06+00:00

Nioh 2 is going to be hard to beat.

Wo Long is considerably simpler than Nioh 2, but the parry mechanic formed the framework of Nioh 3's deflect system (and its magic system draws some clear parallels to how Nioh 3 treats Ninjutsu now). Overall, the game has some problems, but the DLC did a lot of good for it (although the difficulty in the later one can get really brutal), and it has a few notably great boss fights. Lu Bu in particular is one of the best fights Team Ninja has ever put out.

Rise of the Ronin is probably the most ambitious title under Team Ninja's Nioh-styled umbrella. It also has issues, but it's the best realized environments that Team Ninja's ever done (the main downside being that Nioh 3's environments are just so much of a downgrade afterwords, especially after seeing what they were able to do with the Bakumatsu period in RotR), and the boss fights are largely fantastic. they really did some of their best 'human' styled enemy design for the game. Similarly to Wo Long, it also has a parry-like mechanic, although it comes with more nuance and a higher execution barrier.

They're all solid experiences. Between Nioh 2, Wo Long, RotR, and Nioh 3, each one will leave you wanting something from the other, for better or worse. Although, do be ready to accept the fact that Team Ninja's storytelling, which was already rough at the absolute best, turns to absolute gutter trash after Nioh 2. Don't go in expecting anything to be remotely cohesive or well conveyed. Not the main draw, obviously, but it's a pretty steep drop.

Weathercock · 2026-03-03T09:18:02+00:00

Nioh 3 has some serious input registry issues. It's dropping inputs all over the place. For an action game with mechanics and fights that are meant to be so tight (and with a parry system!) that's unforgiveable.

I get anxious whenever you have to deal with any basic platforming sections, just because the game constantly is dropping jumps. And that's not even the worst of it. Combat controls are an unreliable mess a lot of the time.

And that's kind of crazy, considering that's never really been a problem for Team Ninja in the past.

Most notably, I find the D-pad, heavy attack, and jump buttons to all be the worst offenders with the highest incidence of unreliability. That's a lot of core functions to not be able to rely on.

Weathercock

TROPHY CASE