Well, I've now completed Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ.
This marks, for me, the completion of the original three Gundam TV series.
And, well, I'm still not sure how I feel about Gundam as a whole...

My favorite in the series thus far I still think is the original 1979 TV series. It had just the right blend of action and drama, and the pacing was on point. Animation was certainly a bit dated, but the soundtrack made up for a lot of that.

Zeta Gundam started out promising with some good opening episodes, much improved animation, and some interesting characters, but eventually it led down a path of rote repetition, with a lot of bland action sequences taking place on black space backgrounds. This had me feeling very bored up until the end, when the dramatic moments really began to kick into high gear. Overall, it just felt extremely uneven to me.

Now, as for my thoughts on Double Zeta, I feel like it is more consistently good. People may dislike the first half, with it's silly characters, feeling a bit more like one of Tomino's other works, Blue Gale Xabungle. However, in the second half, we get a lot more of a serious storyline being told, and I think this format works wonderfully. In the first half, the comedic moments allows us to get some great characterization, which in turn makes the more serious moments later on have more impact. I was a bit let down by the impactfulness of the final episodes, but they were still good, nonetheless. This series gets second place on my list.

Anyway, after viewing all three, as well as a bit of Xabungle, and a bit of Space Runaway Ideon... part of me is a bit unsure if I actually enjoy Tomino's specific style of storytelling. There's a lot of peaks and valleys to the pace of his storytelling, and I think that makes it come off as more realistic, but I'm also not sure if that makes for a good, cohesive narrative, or if it just detracts from what would otherwise be a good narrative told in a more straightforward way. A good example of something more straightforward would be Armored Trooper Votoms, a 1983 mecha series directed by Ryosuke Takahashi (which I honestly prefer over all of Tomino's works that I've seen thus far).