Do you remember when you discovered your favorite things? Did you know it'd become something intrinsic to your being? Did you know it'd be a phase?

I think it was in late 1997 or early 1998 that my Dad invited over a friend from his latest job named Isaac a few times. The guy was cool, around my brother's age. He wore a cool hat and listened to loud electronic music. He got me into that stuff by introducing me to Quake, which had a heavy soundtrack unlike anything I'd ever heard before. Ultimately I'd end up going with Unreal over Quake, but that's not what this is about.

One day, Isaac shows me this cool model he picked up from an import shop in the corner of the county, it was for a big robot called Gundam. It was so cool to me, and I wished I could get one, but my Dad didn't think I could take care of a complex model kit. He was probably right.

Still, I never forgot about it. Isaac mentioned it was very popular in Japan but pretty much unknown in the states. It felt like a place with all kinds of exotic properties that you'd probably never have a chance to glimpse here.

A couple years later, I catch on Cartoon Network one day that Gundam Wing was going to start airing in March of 2000. I remembered the name and was excited that I was finally going to get a chance to see what the fuss was all about.

And being an attention deficit middle schooler I promptly forgot it was starting. Then one day while surfing channels I thought I heard someone say the word "sex" so I backed up and it was "Zechs" a character's name. I realized immediately what it was supposed to be when I saw a giant robot and I was almost immediately hooked.

Not too strange of a story. Most of the kids in this country got caught up in Gundam fever around the same time. Being one of the kids who knew how to surf the web, I read up everything I could about it on the internet.

A lot of the older fans online were very hostile to the newer fans. The gatekeeping elitism that anyone who goes into a fandom is no doubt familiar with was in full swing. I became fascinated with the entire franchise, absorbing all the info I could. I acquired roms for a lot of SNES gundam games that were not translated and learned to play them.

My favorites became the SD Gundam strategy games, especially GNext (1995). I appreciate the adorable representation of the mechs but also the wide range of units available.

Around this time I got into Super Robot Wars 4 (1995), which featured not only Gundam but also an entire slough of classic mecha anime that had not been brought over to the US, like Mazinger Z, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, and too many others to remember easily.

At some point, I learned of the existence of the G Generation series, a series of SD Gundam strategy games that existed mostly on the PlayStation at the time, and were entirely Japanese exclusive.

The games featured a staggering number of mecha from all the series, with the latest in the series, G Generation F, featuring side storylines that only existed in manga and novelization format, not merely the animated fodder.

I did want it of course, but it would have been a huge hassle. Firstly, I never bought games at full price back then because I was a broke teenager. Secondly, importing it from Japan would have attached even more costs to it. Thirdly, American PSXs can't run Japanese games without a pricey mod chip that needs to be installed with a soldering iron.

Being the child of an electronics technician meant that I wasn't afraid of a little soldering, but the entire venture was entirely too expensive for a kid who struggled to afford a comic book every now and again.

So I put it aside, and depended on the older SNES games to sate my obsession. Now and again my Dad or my girlfriend would get me a Gundam model for my birthday or Christmas. Steph picked up a 1/100 Master Gundam for me when she went to visit some family in Japan one summer. It was a definite step up in complexity and difficulty than the ones I had built before and I remember feeling pretty frustrated with it while working on it on a warm summer day.

Though in hindsight, a lot of that frustration came from not having the right tools or workspace for it. My folks often didn't notice things like that, and most of our furniture was pretty close to the floor. A big part of my adult life being easier in many ways is the abundance of proper sitting areas and tables.

Sometime in late high school, I learned that the father of one of my closest friends, Ed, had a large collection of bootleg PSX games from Japan that he picked up on his frequent trips to Singapore. One of them was G Generation Zero, the precursor game to G Generation F. It turned out that you could use a special "boot disk" to overcome the region check in the PSX, and I found out later that my GameShark disc could serve the same purpose.

So I borrowed it and was able to play to my heart's content. Soon after, Ed's father passed away suddenly from a heart condition interacting with some muscle relaxers he was taking for a back injury. That's an entirely different story that I'll tell another day.

Ed bequeathed to me his dad's collection before leaving California to live with his family in Nebraska. It was a wonderful gift, but all these years later I regret accepting it. They're still in storage, and I hope to return them to Ed someday. Though with the ups and downs of his life, perhaps they were safer in my care for a while.

So yeah, the games ended up in storage along with all the other stuff we owned when we lost the house around the time I finished high school. I still had my emulated SNES games, and now a few additional games with the advent of GBA emulation that was becoming a thing at the time, though the only SD Gundam game was G Generation Advance (2003) which wasn't nearly as good as the PSX titles.

Soon after moving to Arizona, I spent a few hot depressed summer nights watching Gundam SeeD Destiny (I somehow never caught SeeD) and it left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. By the end I didn't like it.

This was a bit of an existential crisis for me. I enjoyed every bit of Gundam media I ever managed to consume. When the original Gundam series aired on Toonami, I was one of I guess a few dozen people who watched every episode. My Dad had just lost his job and so he watched a lot of it with me and he appreciated the anti-war themes and the relatively accurate depiction of a military environment. I was very disappointed when a pesky little terrorist attack in September of 2001 caused the series to be cancelled with only a couple episodes left to go.

We couldn't afford cable too long after that, so I was unable to keep up with the other shows that aired on Cartoon Network at the time, like 08th MS Team, 0080, and 0083, though I watched them all later and adored them. My high school girlfriend recorded every episode of G Gundam for me though, and it became a comforting memory. I would often watch those VHS tapes late at night in the summer of 2004 while waiting for us to inevitably lose the house.

But watching Gundam SeeD Destiny in Arizona just felt like a shallow experience. The characters pissed me off, the writing felt disconnected, and I was too depressed to notice but apparently a common complaint of the series is it has comparatively very little in terms of giant robot content.

Around that time I guess I started to fall out of love with Gundam. I was working a few jobs at the local mall in Chandler and so I could probably acquire any Gundam stuff that struck my fancy, but I was getting pretty into Warhammer Fantasy at the time and didn't find myself really interested in Gundam stuff anymore.

I dipped a bit further into other mecha anime now and then over the years, finding an appreciation for the Super Robot genre that I had snubbed as a Real Robot fan. I fell in love with Big O and Gun X Sword. I ultimately gave Evangelion a try, but came away from it considering it kinda pretentious and depressing. Which I guess is the point. But it never could get me that high that I got from Gundam.

I tried watching a few Gundam series that never received English dubs, but as my attention span disintegrated in the late 2000s so did my ability to watch long subtitled series.

So one Christmas night in 2010, while my life was going nowhere in particular and I was pretty unsatisfied by everything, I discovered that PlayStation emulation had made great strides, and not only could it work on my computer, but they had G Generation F. It was just after midnight that I got it working, and my Dad didn't understand why I was so happy, but he seemed happy that I was having a good Christmas after a string of disappointments over the past few years.

To say that I played it a lot would be an understatement. It was everything I hoped it would be; it truly was.

Every few years I revisit Gundam. Not very often, mind. Most Gundam series made after SeeD Destiny didn't manage to grip me. They seemed to miss the memo on the antiwar themes that make it so enticing, though that pattern had started with the watering down that G Gundam had brought to the table in 1994 (even though G is one of my all time faves).

Having gone to college to explore the world of war and politics, Gundam felt very much like kid stuff for a long time. After all, what could an anime creator know of the real world?

Ultimately I would say that my studies in politics and war and seeing a bit of how the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket actually makes me appreciate Gundam more, now.

During the pandemic I discovered Iron Blooded Orphans which definitely gave itself to the War is Hell trope, and last year I checked out Witch from Mercury which decided to throw anarcho-capitalism into the mix. Definitely a return to and even an improvement on the core themes. Plus Witch from Mercury is gay (which the original creator of Gundam criticized for being needlessly "political" when he originally created the series as a mere comment on World War 2. Yeah.).

So lately I found myself thinking about late 2001 after catching the musical American Idiot on stage during a first date with a really lovely person. And one of my big 2001 regrets was not finishing the original Mobile Suit Gundam.

I did love the series, don't get me wrong, but it is definitely slow and I could never bring myself to finish it. And the time lapse had been so long that I'd need to rewatch the entire series. It's been languishing on my list of things to watch for a very long time.

Well, I found myself gushing about it to my date at some point, and this reignited my interest. So I watched it while I was at my job over about a week or so. It was darker than I remembered, and I could appreciate the animation a lot more too. I found it sobering, and was glad to finally be able to finish it.

That inspired me to give G Generation Zero another try, to actually get all the way through it. I fired up my emulator and went through, even though after playing a lot of G Generation F, Zero feels like an unfinished beta in many ways.

Last night I pushed through the last set of levels, frustrating as they were, and felt very strange as I watched the ending credits. Incidentally, importing the save to G Generation F netted me some pretty cool bonuses, so it seems I'm starting on another playthrough of that too, maybe even finish it this time, though it is a much longer game than its predecessor.

I think I might even give some of the subtitle only series another try. I really enjoyed Gundam X when I tried watching it the first time. I tried Turn A Gundam during the lockdowns but I was too drunk to follow the subtitles. Maybe a couple of Tomino's other mecha anime, even though I hear they can get exceptionally dark.

I even ordered an old Gundam model of the GP02A in 1/100 scale. I always loved how bulky it looked. And it is not a small model, it is bigger than I remember seeing in the import stores. It's been a while though. I even got some specialized tools to help it come out as good as it can be.

Ultimately, it's odd to revisit a big favorite that hasn't been dusted off in a while. It's definitely different than when I was a kid.

It certainly cannot be the same since I'm not the same.