Ahhh..... NuRID and Gundam AGE; both entries in their respective franchise that aren't well-liked by the majority of their fanbase.




When looking at both of these, there are actually quite a few similarities:

• Targeted towards a younger target audience than their predecessors.
• Both are not well-liked by the older fans and treated as a disgrace for their brand among the majority of the fanbase
• Both also use a base-breaking art style that is completely different aesthetic-wise than their predecessor shows.
• Toyline-wise, both aren't doing all that great when it comes to sales; There are some few good toys, but not enough to redeem the perception that most fans have towards their respective series.
• Also toyline-wise, the sales are underperforming, forcing both HasTak and Bandai to shelves releases of brand-new toy molds or phoning it in with the final waves to reduce losses.
• Both have antagonists that have a more animalistic aesthetic and design cues that was distinct from the protagonist's side (The Vagan mobile suits from AGE, and the more bestial-looking Decepticon prisoners in NuRID)
• Those who do like them are deemed to be the minority in their respective fanbase.

I do like both of these shows to a certain degree, but I'm a bit curious...... which one of these do you guys think was worse?

 

I cannot speak for Gundam AGE, since I haven't seen it, but NuRID wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be. Was it bad? Yes. But it wasn't terrible.

 

They're both certainly not terrible shows (Especially when there are shows out there that are even worse); But it's hard to deny that both shows are considered the dark spot within their respective franchise; so much so with Gundam AGE that Bandai just straight-up cancelled 2-3 MG AGE kits (The Gafran, AGE-3 Normal and AGE-FX) that was announced and has a lot of R&D money been spent on, only due to how unpopular Gundam AGE as a show (Hell, 2 of them even shows up as unpainted grey prototypes in conventions)

 

My impression of Gundam is that there's very high expectations, so maybe that?

In terms of sales, I'm certain Transformers Prime was straight up a massive loss for Hasbro compared to Robots in Disguise, which probably at most broke even.

 

Well.... kinda. Gundam AGE is the next show premiered after Gundam 00 ended (One of the most well-regarded entry within the Gundam franchise) so expectations won't be low for the next show.

Hmm...



I do forget that the Prime toyline also didn't do all that well (With the final wave of toys being nothing but Cyberverse-legion scale toys upscaled).

 

I didn't care for RID 2015 (the half season I saw, anyway. I'll give it another chance at some point). But I was more or less prepared for it, because every long-running cartoon franchise seems to reach that point where they do the ultra-serious, "mature" show, and then do a hard 180 to get the really young audience back. I saw it when the DC Animated Universe gave way to "The Batman", and I think Ben 10 and Thundercats had similar transformations recently too. None of it really upsets me anymore, I just shrug and wait to see if the next version is a better fit for me.

 

Well, I haven't seen Gundam AGE and I actually like nuRID....

 

Since I'm also a Gundam fan, I've seen both and as such, I say NuRID is worse. AGE has some semblance of structure and continuity, NuRID was just a bunch of stuff that happened. AGE had characters I actually liked, NuRID did not. AGE got an actual ending, NuRID sputtered towards the finish line.

AGE was still a hot mess, though.

Now for the real challenge, let's try to compare Reconguista in G with Energon!

 

Ehh.... I'll say that Energon is more of the Gundam SEED Destiny of Transformers:

• Both SEED Destiny and Energon/Superlink starts out perfectly fine with potentially interesting setups and world-building.
• Both of their predecessors (Gundam SEED and Armada/Micron Legend) starts out rough but improves as both shows go on.
  
• Both eventually falls victim to behind-the-scenes drama, rushed production and gets even more contrived, the writing gets worse as it goes on.
• Both end up being regarded as worse than their already flawed predecessors.
  
• Both shows also like to bring characters who dies in the previous shows back, for some reason. (Neo Roanoke/Mu La Flaga, Starscream)
• The casts who returned from the previous shows only ended up as a bland caricature of themselves.
• Both SEED Destiny and Superlink/Energon also loves to reuse transformation and combining stock footages (The Energon Autobots superlinking, Impulse Gundam docking sequence, Strike Freedom or Freedom Gundam beam spams, etc)
• Having potentially interesting character arcs that went nowhere or ended in a completely unsatisfying way.

 

I haven’t seen that gundam show but rid15 has some good stuff scattered throughout the series. The first season was alright, it was nice when they made references to TFP and brought back some of the old characters, some of the characters were good, and the starscream arc was fucking amazing, it’s a shame that I can’t say the same for the rest of the show

 

I know people were disappointed by RID15 but I wasn’t aware it was considered despised in any way?

 

It is mostly by TFP fans

 

The perceptions that the majority of fans on NuRID was.... not good, to say the least; Just take a look at how NuRID is received by the fans on Facebook or YouTube and you'll know what I mean.

 

Didn't expect Gundam to be brought up here.

I personally don't consider both of these shows to be that bad, I like Gundam Age it has some nice moments. RID2015 I manage to sit through the first season and enjoyed it for what it was.

 

What is gundam?

 

This.

 

I would say the main difference between AGE and NuRID was the audience break. While TFs have always had some semblance of "for kids", Gundam is very much a teen and adult franchise; therefore, breaking to a younger audience made more sense for NuRID than AGE, which struggled in that regard.

 

Its not really a fair comparison simply because of what the two series were intended to be.

Basically, AGE is in fact half the UC timeline compressed into one series. AGE-1 is the RX-78-2, AGE-2 is Zeta Gundam, AGE-3 is ZZ Gundam, and AGE-FX is Nu Gundam, running the whole timeline between UC 0079 (Mobile Suit Gundam) through UC 0093 (Char's Counterattack). The reason AGE isn't well liked largely has to do with the pacing, which appropriately ends up mirroring the actual original series each segment comes from, IE what with AGE-3/ZZ getting basically squished out in time for the AGE-FX/Nu showing up because Char's Counterattack is still very popular. It also was trying to aim for a younger audience and arguably only did so-so, which is why Bandai has instead doubled down with the "toy-angle" Build Fighters/Divers stuff which, with the exception of the utter garbage that was Build Divers, is overall quite better than one would expect (especially Re:Rise being unironically good because it does all the stuff Divers did not)

RID is kind of something cobbled together as a result of Hasbro's whole 'Aligned' plan imploding...largely thanks in part due to the failure of Prime and how that show was a complete and utter disaster inside and out. It wasn't really meant to be a heavy hitter so much as something simply put out to fill the toy shelves and a quick cartoon crapped out for show support because the HUB also basically failed and Hasbro had to crawl back to Cartoon Network.

 

It's another giant robot show from Japan, though unlike our familiar Transformers or even Macross, the robots don't transform into anything; they're just giant, piloted mecha. So effectively more similar to Evangelion in that sense. If you've seen it, they're more like the mech suits from Pacific Rim.

The biggest difference is their toys are almost entirely comprised of model kits, and the mecha themselves can have huge suits of armor and equally gigantic weapons strapped onto them.