‘Gundam: Requiem For Vengeance’ Review: A Flawed, Ersatz ‘Gundam’ Show

After a long wait, Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance has arrived on Netflix, and it’s a disappointing and flawed attempt at a Gundam series.

Set in the final stretch of the One Year War, Requiem for Vengeance takes the viewpoint of the Zeon forces as they are pushed back into space over the course of Operation Odessa. This is a nice shift and is reminiscent of the excellent PlayStation 2 game Zeonic Front, where you see the conflict solely through the eyes of Zeon soldiers.

However, there’s a lot here that is pretty awkward, jarring and just weirdly wrong.

To clarify, the classic Gundam lore hasn’t really been messed with here. Not really. There are lots of solid and consistent nods to earlier Gundam anime, with a nice appearance of Yuri Kellerne from 08th MS Team being notable.

The way Newtypes are dealt with is also interesting, not to mention the introduction of Federation mobile suits like the new Gundam EX, with most Zeon soldiers still unaware the Federation has mobile suits of its own.

It’s also refreshing to have the Gundam portrayed as some kind of relentless, inhuman monster, as you don’t really have any interactions with its pilot for the majority of the series. It gives a fresh take on how Gundams are generally perceived outside of the Federation and that’s interesting.

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That said, the general quality of the writing, story and direction are all over the place. Although, I’ll get to that in a bit, as the CG side of things should be highlighted first.

For a CG Gundam anime, the environments, particle effects and general hard surface work are very nicely done. If this was to show what Unreal Engine can do for CG animation, those aspects are a solid technical demonstration of the middleware at work.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the characters, Requiem for Vengeance is just thoroughly terrible. The facial modeling and animation look very out of place, and the overall body animation looks like something out of classic Thunderbirds. It’s genuinely bad, wooden and just looks very out of place compared to everything else.

Following that the mobile suit and vehicle animation is really off as well. The floaty mobile suit physics lacks any real weight and just looks wrong, even compared to other CG Gundam anime, such as MS Igloo and the Gundam Evolve shorts.

The smaller vehicles such as cars and tanks also don’t move like they should and I’m not sure what happened here and whether this was a poor implementation of Unreal’s physics setup or just something else entirely.

This all feeds into the overall direction and camera work. Most of the action isn’t shown properly, and never properly commits on what point of view to take, either from humans on the ground or from above. You also have a strange tilt shift-esque effect on the camera framing a lot of the time, which makes it all look rather toy-like.

The problem here is that the core execution of the story and how it is shown feels very off most of the time. The dialogue never flows properly and the poor character animation and designs undermine the storytelling even further.

The mecha designs by Kimitoshi Yamane also feel overly detailed and weirdly out of place with prior Gundam shows during the same point in the timeline.

In that, the aforementioned Gundam EX just looks wrong in terms of the overall design. Even compared to the designs Yamane did for the 08th MS Team, such as the Gundam Ez8, it just looks strange and doesn’t follow the same design language, let alone mobile suit lineage, of classic One Year War mecha.

Overall, Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is a jarring and awkward series to watch, mainly due to the terrible character CG and animation but also because of the story, camera work, and its general direction.

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance is now available to watch on Netflix.

If you are also curious about my other Gundam anime reviews, as well as general anime reviews, you can find a compiled list of links to them here.