It's Mecha Month once more at the Manga Test Drive, and naturally I have to start with the franchise I know and like the best...even if this is not one of its best outings.
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: BLUE DESTINY (Kidou Senshi Gundam Gaiden: THE BLUE DESTINY), based on the franchise created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yadate, written and illustrated by MIzuho Takayama. First published in 1996 and first published in North America in 1999.
PLOT:
Yu Kajima is just one of the many Federation GM pilots fighting to repel the last remaining Zeon pilots in the closing weeks of the One Year War. His skills have brought him to the attention of Captain Alf Chamra, who believes that Yu is the perfect test pilot for his latest project: an experimental suit called The Blue Destiny, controlled by the equally experimental EXAM system. Now Yu is being pursued by notorious Zeon ace pilot Nimbus Schatzen, all while experiencing strange visions of a mysterious young woman and piloting a mobile suit that struggles to distingush friend from foe in the heat of battle.
STORY:
Who is this manga for? That's a question I kept asking myself as I read this.
It couldn't have been for the American Gundam fans of the time. It's based on a Sega Saturn game set in the Universal Century, but released at at time when the only Gundam that Americans cared about was Gundam Wing. It's a single volume book from a short-lived, no-name manga magazine by a mangaka with no other published manga to his name (and not much more afterwards) so there's no prestige or familiarity attached to it. Was it licensed as an experiment? Was it bundled with one of those Gundam Wing titles Tokyopop put out? We may never know.
Even if we just look at the work itself, it's not terribly appealing or welcoming. It's a very cut-and-dry military drama, with lots of exposition and technobabble but very little time to establish anything about our cast beyond their (occasionally goofy) names. I'd be hard-pressed to tell you anything about Yu beyond being a generic hero boy and being rightfully skeptical about Captain Chamra's enthusiasm for the Blue Destiny. That doesn't stop him from getting not just one but two women to fridge for the sake of motivation! The first is a vivacious blonde colleague who is killed almost as soon as she's introduced. The other is your traditional Tragic Newtype Waif, a ripoff of Zeta Gundam's Four Muramase whose brain is used to power Zeon's equivalent of the EXAM system, which in turn leads her to have Lalah Sune-esque psychic encounters with Yu. Shockingly, you cannot in fact replace a personality with a bunch of dead women. That's not even getting into the EXAM system itself, which feels like someone trying to insert the Zero System from Gundam Wing into the Universal Century.
Blue Destiny is truly the worst of both worlds. Those new to the fandom or the Universal Century won't have the context needed for much of this to make sense. Those who are already fans can find far, far better variations of this kind of story in both anime and manga form. The writing is so boring that there's no emotion, nothing remotely human to appeal to either camp. Which just brings me back to my original question: who is this manga for?
ART:
At the very least, Blue Destiny looks pretty good for a Gundam manga of its age. The character designs are decidedly dated (and more than a little derivative of Toshihiro Kawamoto's work on both the 0083 and MS 08th Team OVAs), but have aged fairly gracefully. He's definitely good at drawing mecha and mecha action, even if the translated/redrawn sound effects and ridiculous amount of speed lines often threaten to obscure his work. His paneling is doing the best it can to add a sort of cinematic energy to the character interactions and occasionally it succeeds.
PRESENTATION:
Like most Tokyopop titles of this era, this book is published in a slightly oversized volume which helps to keep the art from getting too murky. Too bad this dates from the era when all Tokyopop books were flipped. It's also from the era when Stu "DJ Milky" Levy himself did most of the translations, and as loathe as I am to admit it his work here is pretty solid. The only place he fails is with some of the suit names - in particular, how he turned the Ifrit into "Iflyte." Even then, this made before Bandai standardized the localization of a lot of mobile suit names so I'm willing to handwave it to a degree.
RATING:
This book was published by Tokyopop. It is currently out of print.
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