The Mobile Suit Gundam series has created a lot of spin-offs and retellings.  Many of the spin-offs use the Gundam name to slide a decent amount of mediocrity across the audience’s noses.  A great number of these shows offer very little in terms of innovation, originality, or even character.  Specific shows use Gundam’s original chonology to basically tell the same story over again.  Other shows use the word Gundam to be tacked on to ridiculously stereotypical, banal, and, in the case of a certain show, borderline racist mobile suits.

However successful monetary-wise the Gundam franchise is, it is nice to know that some shows of true quality can come from the well-known and well-loved universe.  Surprisingly enough, the creators did not have to search far to find new life in the war stories of the Earth Federation against the Principality of Zion.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08^th MS Team is a fine combination of peace versus war, militaristic virtues versus humanitarian principles, and following orders versus doing what needs to be done.  The 08^th MS Team tells the ground battles of the mobile suit squadron of the same name, and how their commander, Shiro Armada, inadvertently and purposefully, changed the lives and natures of his fellow soldiers, on both sides of the battlefield.

Starting during the final few months of conflict, The 08^th MS Team depicts some of the final major conflicts between the two opposing forces.  Before Shiro can land planet side, his transport falls upon battle between the Federation Forces and a new prototype of a Zion Zaku.  Shiro, the upstart newbie to battle, sees no better time to start helping his fellow comrades in battle.  Going out in the epitome of pathetic weaponry, Shiro tries his best to help his fellow Fed pilot.

This action, and the concepts is presents, I believe, is crucial to understanding both Shiro’s almost self-destructive mode of unrealistic combat choices and where the show wants to go.  Shiro’s training as a Federation soldier, I am sure, is no doubt a physically challenging and psychologically workout.  However, during the final parts of the One-Year-War, like in, let us say, World War II, the war would not be being fought by hardened veterans, but by the volunteers and draftees pressed into service.  Shiro is not a trained, hardened military machine.  He is a soldier who knows his duty and is willing to fight to help the Federation’s needs.  When Shiro first sees his opportunity to fight, he blindly follows his instincts and moves out in order to fight.  He is willing to die to fight in what he believes in, and his enlisting seems to have been triggered by an event that happened at his home with the Zion army, but when he meets up with the Zion pilot, what he believes in starts to change.

When his blundering succeeds on the battlefield, Shiro and the enemy pilot is left stranded among the wreckage of destroyed spacecraft.  Finally, after some confrontation, Shiro helps the Zion pilot by sealing her spacesuit.  Her name is Aina Sakhaline, and soon the two place their brains together in order to survive the complications they are in.

This sets up the love story that raises this show above the others series with Gundam in their name.  Sure, other Gundam series have their love stories, but they lack interest.  Other shows are too busy elsewhere to really care for emotions not related to war.

Shiro and Aina’s love for each other is where The 08^th MS Team’s heart lies, and the conflict it generates is great.  Shiro slowly changes his belief system, and soon is trying to fight a war without killing anyone.  If he kills any one Zion soldier, it might be the one woman he loves lying dead on the battlefield.  His commanding style changes, but he still acts as himself.  His actions also become unrealistic, idealistic, and hinge too much on chance, but they also pull the audience back from the war, to look at the big picture.  A fighter not willing to kill drives many war-fans mad, but for a storyteller, this allows for the subject of war to be analyzed in a way rarely seen.  Slowly, but surely, we the audience begin to care for both sides of the war.  The audience would not care about a love story if the female enemy was just that; an enemy.  This mutual concern for both parties builds to a fantastic crescendo at the series’ end, where the two lovers meet for the third and final time, but now there are guns pointed at each other.

This addition of a love story the audience cares about steps out into the realm many Gundam shows dare not to tread, and that is what makes The 08^th MS Team so fascinating.  This is not normal Gundam, but still has the One-Year-War being as action-packed and as bloody as ever.

Shiro’s anti-war fighting style leaves its impression on his fellow soldiers and fellow enemies.  The show is uncanny in making villains not a group of people opposed to another group of people, but makes individuals and their actions the antagonism in the show.  What is more surprising is that the show does not push the audience to feel this way.  The show’s story provides the proper nudges, allowing the character’s individual acts to be the true determiner for good and evil, not the organization that one is attached to.  It is the sullen fates of everyone involved which causes this series’ drama, and some people fight and kill each other when in another time they might be sharing a laugh or two together.

The 08^th MS Team is great anime, and a show that argues that love can survive in the most bloodiest of times, and that a person’s qualities extend past what they are labeled as and what they are ordered to do.  Shiro believed he needed to help his fellow pilot, and found out that the enemy is as reasonable, complex, and confused as he is.  The 08^th MS Team’s heroes are on both sides, and each person can be seen as an allegory for any soldier that has fought for what they believed in, because that is who they are, not what they are told to be.  The 08^th MS Team can be seen as the best of the spin-offs from the show that started it all, because it placed new life and ideas into a war that is as complex and detailed as any war in anime.  The 08^th MS Team shows its love for the Gundam series by giving us a fantastic love story that cares for both sides of the warring states, and the show gives us a reason to honor those whose individual actions and beliefs truly deserve honor.