Review: MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM WING: ENDLESS WALTZ

 It's time for yet another Mecha Month, which means once again I find myself staring down yet another Gundam Wing manga.

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM WING: ENDLESS WALTZ (Shin Kido Senki Gandamu Uingu Endoresu Warutsu), based on the franchise created by Hajime Yadate and Yoshiyuki Tomino with art by Koichi Tokita.  First published in 1998 and first published in North America in 2002.

PLOT:

The struggle between the Earth and the space colonies may have ended, but the war is not yet over.  A year later, a new rebel faction has emerged led by Marimeia Khushrenada, who wants to finish the conquest her father failed to complete.  Her forces take the Earth government hostage by capturing its deputy minister: Relena Darlian.  It is up to the Gundam pilots to take back the mobile suits they cast away, rescue Relena, and fight back against the rebels even if it means fighting against former allies.

STORY:

I'm going to begin this review with a confession, as well as the spiciest Gundam take I have: I hate Endless Waltz.

I've certainly made no secret of the fact that I find Gundam Wing to be a frustrating mess of a show.  Indeed, part of the reason I don't like Endless Waltz is that I feel it suffers from a lot of the same issues as the second half of the series: endless monologues about muddled politics, the glorification of Heero at the expense of the other Gundam boys, shoving Relena and the other notable ladies of the cast to the sidelines, and adding yet another evil yet nebulous political faction whose big plan is just a ripoff of Char's Counterattack.  Of course, there are plenty of ideas original to Endless Waltz that I don't like, the chief one being that the main villain is a literal child who could literally be pushed down or put into time-out.  I don't care if she's basically the puppet of a paramilitary group, Relena could have easily saved herself by putting Mariameia in time-out and taking away her snack privileges!  Anyway, I've ranted about this elsewhere so I won't belabor it here.

I've also made no secret that I've found most of the Gundam Wing manga featured on this site to be disappointing, be they retellings of the original story, what-if interludes, or midquels filling in the blanks between the original series and Endless Waltz.  On top of that, it's yet another Gundam manga by Koichi Tokita, who has shat out numerous Gundam manga adaptations over the years for both Gundam Ace and various childrens' magazines and not a single one of them was good.

So yeah, it's safe to say that the odds were always against me finding any enjoyment in this book.

Even if you are someone who does enjoy Endless Waltz, it's highly unlikely you'd get much enjoyment out of this adaptation.  For the most part it's accurate to the anime, even if it's somewhat condensed.  Hell, he even includes the random flashbacks for the Gundam boys and Dorothy's pointless cameo!  It's just that it's all presented in the most boring fashion possible.  You would think that it would be impossible to make a story with multiple mobile suit fights boring, but Tokita found a way by speeding through every single one.  After all, why focus on that when there can be even more scenes of talking heads monologuing?  At the very least, the localization tries to punch up the dialogue a little.  Most of the credit goes to Jake Forbes' adaptation.  Sometimes it's a little hokey and the choice to have characters refer to Wufei as "Chang" is odd, but it's more effort than the mangaka could manage.

ART:

Another thing I don't like about Koichi Tokita is that he's a pretty lousy artist.  This was especially true early in his career, when he was churning out Gundam Wing adaptations like this one.  Again, the characters and mobile suits are mostly on-model but the paneling and faces alike are stiff as boards and just as lifeless.  The same goes for those half-hearted speedrun mobile suit battles, as I've seen literal Gunpla with more dynamic poses.  Admittedly, I'm not a fan of the Endless Waltz redesigns of said Gundams (don't get me started on the Wing Zero and its now literal wings), but this manga does them no more favors than anything else in this book.

RATING:

Regardless of how you feel about Endless Waltz, I think we can all agree that this manga adaptation is a lousy, lifeless adaptation, a shameless cash-in, and absolutely not worth the time it takes to read or the cheap paper it's printed on.

This book was published by Tokyopop.  It is currently out of print.