Gundam GQuuuuuuux

Gundam GQuuuuuuX is a 12 episode original mecha series in the Gundam franchise.  It originally aired during the Spring 2025 season. 

Click HERE for a discussion about this series on The Otaku Network Podcast. 

    Set in an alternative version of the Universal Century, through the help of Char capturing the Gundam RX-78-2, the Principality of Zeon wins the One Year War.  Unfortunately for them, they lose Char in an incident where his Red Gundam disappears in an event called a zeknova.  A few years later his partner Chalia Bull finds himself at the Side 6 colony in his search of Char's Red Gundam.  As luck would have it, the Gundam appears and his team sends out the experimental GQuuuuuuX Gundam to capture it.  The battle doesn't go as planned and both are lost in the colony as security steps in to tamp down on the incursion.

    After becoming entangled with a refugee girl working as a black market courier, Nyaan, a disaffected upper middle class high school student, rebels hard.  After stumbling upon the GQuuuuux and syncing with it easily, she decides to participate in illegal mecha fighting called Clan Battle.  She find a partner in a weird boy names Shuji who happens to pilot a Red Gundam and share a love for the emotional release of piloting  Together they begin to achieve victory after victory in the Clan Battles but not without notice.  Chalia wants to reclaim both the GQuuuuuuX and the Red Gundam, hoping it will lead him closer to Char.  But unknown to all of them a dangerous plot is unfolding that will absorb all of them as the head of Zeon attempt to punish Earth once and for all. 

     I have not watched as much Gundam as I should have over the years but I have a general understanding of the world building.  This series however is a deep dive into the core story and nods at every chance it can to under served characters from the original.  While it is not set in the Universal Century it relies heavily on the viewer having watched and original series at the very least, demanding it for all of the context.  Since I have yet neglected to watch the original and its direct follow up stories, I spent a lot of time on the Gundam Fan Wiki...recognizing that there was a lot of context I was unaware of.  That missing intimacy lead to less than ideal viewing experience.  The story shifts about 2/3s of the way through to a a complex plot that becomes engaging.  The first 8 episodes had little resonance with me partially due to me not being familiar with the legacy characters that appeared.  But is that my fault or the stories?  A problem I have had with some Gundam stories is the heavy reliance on a deep understanding of the franchise its self, pushing out more casual viewers or people new to the fandom.  Reconguista in G is a prime example of this problem.  GQX suffers from that to less of a degree but after talking with die hard Gundam fans about the show, a viewer with intimate deep lore will get more out of GQX than casuals.

     That said, the last third of the story when everything culminated and the disparate threads started to connect grabbed my attention but its sadly was a bit late for me to fully appreciate what was going on.  The creative team behind this series really did it as a love letter to Gundam its self, as a whole, pulling references from a long line of UC stories, spinning them into a newer narrative.  GQX is in many ways, fan fiction and a love letter to Gundam in general.  They did a good job with it, especially once I understood the references and nuances of what they were showing.  But that under-serves the casual viewer and its only strong point from there is its short length and tight story telling.  It does do a good job of character development and narration to get its core point across, sans all of the references and homages.  That said...I really disliked the character designs for the unique cast.  Most of the characters who appear that exist in legacy Gundam titles retain a design philosophy closer to their original versions, but the brand new characters have a strange and out of place design.  This does serve as a gateway into Gundam fandom though as its easy to access, short and teases you with a far deeper lore than you could imagine...luring you further into the woods if you so choose.  You can enjoy it as a stand alone story without any of the context, but it plays differently and more emotionally when you do know the context. 

The series is available on Amazon Prime.