Gundam SEED Destiny

Gundam SEED Destiny:  C

So it took me a while to finish this series, as I started it a while ago and split the watching between the first 35 episodes and the last 15, but here it is, better late than never.

There's a lot of debate (or so I hear) between the original SEED and SEED Destiny as to which is the superior series.  I've wound up giving SEED Destiny a lower grade than I gave SEED for weird reasons, especially in that, for the most part, I found Destiny to be more engaging a story than SEED, so perhaps it's because I split my viewing in half.

To provide a little background, the series begins a year and a half after SEED lets off, and introduces us to a new protagonist, Shinn Asuka who immediately sets himself apart from his predecessor Kira Yamato by being gung-ho and unhesitating at jumping into combat to fight for his ideals and his people.  And I really liked Shinn, he was a refreshing alternate outlook on 'The Hero,' he's got a temper, falls in love easily and is generally a bit prickly but a good guy and someone I could relate to without Kira's constant hesitation and insistence that he doesn't want to fight.

SEED Destiny's plot is also more complicated, the characters do an intricate dance of friendship, love, duty and loss that remains interesting and quite fresh...

Up until, just like SEED, the last seven or eight episodes, when it seems as though the series goes "okay, that's enough of that, now one side has to win, so the other side goes ahead and does something heinously evil and then loses."  Just like SEED.  And that's ultimately why I had to grade it lower, because it was both a bigger disappointment than SEED was and because I would have thought they'd have known better than to do the exact same thing a second time.

I also need to bitch about Kira Yamato a little bit more.  I didn't mind him so much in SEED, he was a little self-righteous, but he made mistakes, suffered, got angry and emotional, lost occasionally, learned and grew as a person and I could appreciate all that.  In SEED Destiny, he is never wrong, learns nothing, the only evidence we have that he ever doubts anything is when he tells us after the fact that he wasn't sure what he was doing was the right thing, (it was) and is only so much as frightened once in the entire series, which he promptly recovers from.

Would I recommend SEED Destiny?  I... have to say yes, because the early series is really good, and I really do like the perspective that Shinn gives, because I really like watching sympathetic characters, even protagonists, fight each other, but the almost cop-out ending was disappointing and weakened SEED by association.

I begin to see why people say the Universal Century Gundam series are better... I mean, Zeta may have had the most singularly downer ending of any series I've ever seen (including Neon Genesis Evangelion but maybe not Bokurano), but at least the ending was satisfying, and didn't feel like the villains were being uncharacteristically incautious or vile.