Recently finished OG Gundam, Zeta Gundam, dropped ZZ, loved War in the pocket and I'm about to watch The 8th ms team.
Pretty good show, the Newtype bullshit might get old pretty fast but I love how the side stories like 0080 get away from that stuff and focus on smaller conflicts that affect citizens and the people who stayed on earth.
Also, they recently released a PS4 game called Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation 2, it's pretty good despite being F2P, it has a shit ton of suits and they all handle great
When I first saw War in the Pocket, I was a little skeptical of how good it would be because I thought it would center mainly around Alfred and possibly him piloting the Gundam Alex. Yoshiki Tomino's work with OG Gundam (I'm stealing your term), Zeta Gundam, and Char's Counterattack was exceptional, but I've always been more fond of the Gundam series with older protagonists like 8th MS Team, Gundam Thunderbolt, Stardust Memory, and Gundam 00 (though in 00 they have the Gundam Meisters age up after a time skip in between seasons) so I had reservations about how much I was going to like War in the Pocket.
After watching the first episode, I was pretty much sold on the rest of series. I appreciated how War in the Pocket differentiated itself from the preceding Gundam series by focusing on the effects of the One Year War on civilians, and those in a neutral colony at that, but also how deconstructed how some Gundam fans are attracted to franchise because of the "cool robot fights" and the mobile suits which are weapons of war through Alfred and his friends. When the first mobile suit battle breaks out in the colony, Alfred is ridiculously excited by it. By the end of the series, he is obviously in a different headspace. I feel like War in the Pocket codified the Gundam anti-war tradition better than Tomino's early work.
As for Newtypes in the Universal Century series, I prefer the series that eschew them altogether, like 8th MS Team, Stardust Memory, or War in the Pocket, but I liked how Gundam Thunderbolt had Newtypes, but didn't make them show-stealers. The one series I feel handled Newtypes well was Gundam Unicorn and if that series is what we can expect from UC Next 100, I'm psyched for it.
On an unrelated note, I've seen Gundam Zeta, which I'll probably have a longer post about soon, and Gundam AGE, which except Asemu, kind of sucked.
