(Check my profile for a link to my personal site containing more up-to-date reviews and bonus media!) Written September 28, 2014 6:33 pm EST --- Mobile Suit Gundam F90 manga is the first chronological entry in the neglected/abandoned Mobile Suit Gundam F91 saga. Since the movie apparently blows over the new environment pretty quickly, as it's an abridged version of a canned TV series, I thought it would be best for me if I gave it some more supplemental build-up with this manga. Well, I'm unsure of how this could have possibly expounded on F91. I'm pretty sure if I watched F91 without reading this that I would havelost nothing. It's a pretty standalone story, and not a great one.

This is a one-shot manga. Its one-volume is larger than most manga volumes, but it's still short enough to impact the story. The main problem with F90 is that it doesn't give me any reason to care about what happens in it.

The new main character trio of Def, Stallion, and Navi are part of a team testing the new Gundam F90 models. That's it. You're dumped right in the middle of their testing operations for the new (bland) Gundam models, and Zeon remnants called Oldsmobiles (stupid) manage to steal one of the two Gundams. After taking it back to their base on Mars, the three then join a fleet en route to destroy the Zeon base.

You want backstory? Too bad. You want characters with memorable personalities? Boy, you've come to the wrong place. Def and Navi are a stock romance, going together like two peas in a pod. When they aren't plainly commentating on the situation, they're usually whining or nagging about something.

Def is a test pilot for military weapons but makes sure to let us know that he REALLY doesn't want to be a soldier (oops!), but he'll fight if it's to protect Navi, yadda yadda. Sid is the awkward third wheel here, a very relatively laidback and modest character who isn't any more interesting than the others, but is still the most likable for not being total milquetoast.

Well, as you'd expect, things go very wrong for the fleet once they reach Mars. Truth be told, there would be a very intense "how will they get out of this one" situation here if, again, there was any given reason to care about whether the heroes succeed or not. The fact this one-volume manga tries to shoehorn in an important betrayal is laughable. It's the manga trying to get a twist out of something that never existed.

The Mobile Suit designs are pretty stock. From what I noticed, the only new models are the F90 Gundams, which are mostly as typical as they come. The F90's main gimmick is that it can equip different armament packs, something that would later be more commonly associated with Gundam SEED's Strike Gundam. This gimmick is completely overshadowed by the fact there isn't enough time, a variety of situations, or fights to make use of these armament packs' different abilities. Their potential goes largely unused. As an aside, the art of the manga is average in all respects.

So yeah, I have trouble coming up with things to say about F90, because there's barely anything here to begin with. It's a generic Gundam side story with no significant relevance to anything in the overarching Universal Century storyline. The best thing I can say about it is that there's some decent concepts here that still aren't utilized well. I kind of regret spending time on it, but it's not terrible—just uninteresting.