Name: GUNDAM SENTINEL ALICEの懺悔
Rating: 3.55 (4 reviews)

111 reviews

January 1, 2019

No, I do not read, speak or understand Japanese particularly well. Or... at all, for that matter. That one semester I took in Japanese is starting to feel very distant right now, let me tell you!

So it's a good thing someone out there translated this thing for us so we could read it. Read it and weep because this... was a horrid pile of nothing. In fairness to the book itself, this review will mainly concern and be based on the broad strokes of the story rather than the quality of the writing. Considering this text was translated by a private individual for no monetary gain, it wouldn't be fair to punish the text and author for their mistakes. I will discuss the translation a bit but that's only for those curious.

If you haven't ever involved yourself with Gundam, it's essentially a Japanese franchise about the horror of war and what it does to us as individuals and as a society. At least, it started out with a pretty damn strong "anti war"-sentiment but not all series got the memo. And, having continued now for the better part of 40 years, many installments have come and gone with varying connections with the themes and ideas of the original back in the seventies.
What does connect them all is that of giant robots typically fighting it out in some manner of way. Be it in war or tournaments or even as children's toys, mechas are there. So also here, in Gundam Sentinel Alice, which follows the story of a young pilot who is tasked with piloting the newest and bestest Gundam ever!

It's not a good story. Ultimately it's cliche, dull and pretty standard paint-by-numbers-affair that tries to lecture the reader about how the old shouldn't dictate how the young should live their lives. There's also a spiel at the end about loneliness but it's not exactly well integrated into the plot, sort of coming out of nowhere.
The main problem here is that the characters aren't particularly approachable or likable. Villains or heroes, they all suffer from a distinct lack of personality and while honor and respect are played up hard, as they normally are in Japanese media, even there they manage to be inconsistent and undecided. The text is more concerned with telling us how to feel about characters rather than attempting to guide us on the right path, as it were. Even through the filter of a translator, my many years of absorbing Japanese media tells me that this is exactly as it was intended.
No doubt stuff was lost in the process of translation, stuff always is, but permeating the entire text was a very dry, stoic mentality. Not only in terms of the plot itself but also in how the text was written. If you're not familiar with the Gundam aesthetics, either through anime or manga, it's hard to conjure up any kind of imagery in your head that makes sense. Only through my pre-conceived notion of what a Gundam anime would look like did the scenery appear in front of me and I could interpret correctly the very anime-specific descriptions laid down. There's little personality to the text, there's no individual sense of authorship anywhere which is quite common in western authors.

So it's a text for the sake of having a text exist rather than some grand idea taking form. But it's not really helped by the quality of the translation or whatever the hell happened when I brough it over to my Kindle. I've seen this happen before in texts taken from online where some digital process (I assume) leaves the words mangled and barely readable. Letters are regularly changed into other letters; 1s and Is and some others are regularly switched, 'rn' typically becomes 'm' and I noticed multiple times where the apostrophe changed letters entirely.
But while that's a technical issue, the frequent garbage words aren't. No doubt the translation was revised on multiple occasions but it doesn't seem like an editor was allowed to their work entirely. Some sentence structures are mangled beyond readability and sometimes the grammar just doesn't make sense.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful that someone translated this, they have my unending gratitude. I'm just saying caution is warranted if you were thinking about grabbing the translation from online.
Of course, my recommendation is to simply stay away from the text in general. Even as a Gundam fan, I found little of worth in this text that read like a script for an unproduced anime series or manga. I sated my curiosity and established that so called "light novels" from Japan straight up aren't my cup of tea. The ones that I've read tend to be dull and unimaginative and this is no different. From now on, I think I'll stick to Gundam animes and leave it at that.

action sci-fi

Youvinte

1 review

December 12, 2018

This Gundam Sentinel took on a much more realistic, technical style of thinking and look at the Gundam universe, where mobile suits were seen more like fighter jets or military weapons. They were larger, had weapons more powerful than their predecessors', the characters were older, and the plot was on a smaller scale than what is usually found in other Gundam series. Below is the plot that I wrote briefly.

Earth Federation Space Force (EFSF) officers stationed at the asteroid fortress Pezun rebel against the Federation leadership, which has allied with the Anti-Earth Union Group (AEUG). Swearing to uphold the Titans' ideology of Earthnoid supremacy. The Federation assembles Task Force Alpha, a small force of EFSF, AEUG, and Karaba veterans equipped with the most advanced mobile suits, and sends them to Pezun to suppress the rebellion before it gets out of hand. Task Force Alpha, consisting of four Salamis Kai cruisers ships and the flagship Pegasus III, arrives at Pezun and prepares to attack. A week after the encounter, the Earth Federation sends the Tenth Divisional Fleet to reinforce TF Alpha. In the end, the Pegasus III is deployed to pursue the New Desides at Penta. Arriving at the station, the Pegasus III and its remaining mobile suits confront Cray and the Zodiac. Realizing the desperate situation, ALICE (Advanced Logistic and Inconsequence Cognizing Equipment), the S Gundam's AI, ejects its Core Fighter with Ryu, Crypt, and West inside. The now-self-aware mobile suit chases and destroys the New Desides survivors during the orbital descent, but breaks up under the blistering heat.

This series was never animated (although a short animated television commercial for a model kit was made) or released as a manga, but the mecha have been featured in various SD Gundam video games, such as SD Gundam G Generation F. This novel was produced by Bandai. Bandai itself originally proposed to Graphix the idea of having the first "non-visual" Gundam, that is, a series totally devoid of animation production and manga as its source material. The Graphix model liked the proposal since there was a model release between the Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ and the next animated Gundam series, and it would be perfect to release their first model kit for the series, the FA-010A FAZZ. However, after few meetings, Bandai began to lose interest in the project due to the anticipated release of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack, and claiming that the simultaneous release of two Gundam stories would confuse fans. As a result, Bandai abandoned the project with Graphix, putting it on "pending" status. At last, this book was quite good for mecha action. But, I feel dissatisfied because this anime is not serialized in anime.