I'm up to Eps. 23 of Age. I've stopped for now and will probably blow through some more of it over this weekend.
Can't say I like it. I really disliked the look and character designs, but I was willing to ignore that. I dislike the designs of Seed as well and find that to be a entertaining teen angst filled show. Likewise 0083 is pretty much one the best looking Gundam show out there. Sadly it's pretty terrible everywhere else.
But age is still pretty terrible. I found the first arc really boring. i really don't care for the premise. Sure it's not as bad as the 00 movie's aliens, but secret Mar's colonists aren't that interesting to me. I like Gundam when it has two sides filled with cool and sympathetic characters on both sides. So really the conflict didn't hold my attention. I also found Flit to be pretty non-engaging. A lot of anime and especially Gundam pro-tags recently have been pretty bland, but at least the supporting cast of the show may make up for it. 1st arc, I'm not even sure who the supporting cast was, I don't remember. Outside of the Captain they all were pretty unremarkable and I really hate Emily, who's entire point seemed to be to cry about Flit. Man the love interests characters so far in this show have got to be the worse. The chick(I'm not going to be bothered to remember that thing) is pretty terrible so far in Arc 2. Her character seems to be "I like the main dude because he's nice". It's just exremley unintersting.
The plot is also incredibly predictable and pace has not worked for this show.For example 2 characters are supposed to be friends so when they start fighting against each other its supposed to mean something, but the extent of their friendship was shown in a montage at a beginning of an episode. It's so poorly done. Another example is you have an episode that a potentially good about the main character mentally fighting his dad because you know he's trying to be himself, except this isn't given an episode to itself and this plot isn't really resolved because the show basically has to abruptly shift to it's next plot point. Gundam Age is pretty terrible. The idea of a Gundam show taking on themes of family and father son relationships sounds pretty decent and you can see that it's there in Age. It's the highlight honestly, and Flit is much more interesting as a workaholic obbssed dad. But It's just not handled as well as it could have and it's surrounded by crap. Episode 21 is probably the best episode of the series and it's pretty funny to see that Hino did not write it.
