A theatrical release of the first several episodes will premiere in Japan on January 17th, 2025. There is no premiere date announced for the regular run of episodes. The new PV is here. Check out the ANN article for additional information. Synopsis from AniList:
Amate Yuzuriha is a high-school student living peacefully in a space colony floating in outer space.
When she meets a war refugee named Nyaan, Amate is drawn into the illegal mobile suit dueling sport known as Clan Battle.
Under the entry name “Machu,” she throws herself into fierce battle day after day, piloting the GQuuuuuuX. Then an unidentified Gundam mobile suit pursued by both the space force and the police appears before her, along with its pilot, a boy named Shuji.
Now their world is about to enter a new era.
Apparently GQuuuuuuX is pronounced g-quacks. Also apparently, Hideaki Anno is cowriting the series.
As far as I can tell, this seems to be a more or less standalone Gundam property rather than fitting into some timeline of one of the Gundam-verses.
Anno co-writing Gundam? I don’t know what to think of this.
He came up with Evangelion because he was bored with anime at the time being to homogeneous, Gundam specifically. I wonder why he took this job, being the perfectionist he is, knowing he would not have total control like he did on Eva?
EDIT: A boy pilot named Shuji - This is satire, right?
Gundam has come a long way in the past ~30 years. There’s plenty of room in the franchise for experimentation. I’m intrigued.
I figured it was the Gundam brand they sold on Amazon. I was very satisfied with my GQUUUUUUX brand Space Battleship Bismarck. 30% cheaper than better known space battleships.
Okay, that got my attention!
And here I thought a cat stepped on the keyboard. Nope, duck.
This could be delicious.
The mobile suit aesthetics definitely support that conclusion. I haven’t watched the PV yet to confirm, but that’s definitely the way things have been leaning.
Edit: definitely its own universe. Interesting that they’re going with the dueling angle again. Not sold on the character designs at the moment but I’m sure I’ll get over it. Curious to see where this goes.
Interesting piece here is that the character designs are being done by Take. It seems pretty much in line with her other works including Pokemon (2019) and Katanagatari.
Mechanical design is being led by Ikuto Yamashita who has done quite a bit of mech work. Most notably, given Anno’s involvement, is that he did the mechanical design for Evangelion and its subsequent movies.
It really shows! One of my first thoughts when I saw the trailer was that the characters looked like they could’ve stepped out of some modern Pokemon thing.
Now that you’ve pointed it out, I can’t unsee the torso resemblance. Good catch.