The year is After Colony 195. The inhabitants of Earth has been expanding into space creating colonies but as the United Earth Sphere Alliance's military might grows, it uses that to conquer the new found five colonies. To rebel against their invasion, each of the colonies build their own giant humanoid "mobile suit" fighting machines using a rare powerful alloy that could only be refined in space, Gundanium, thus giving them the nickname "Gundam". Each of them are sent to Earth as part of Operation Meteor in an effort to stop the masterminds behind the invasions, the OZ organisation who supplies the alliance with mobile suits.

When Heero Yuy one of the five pilots gets caught and gets dragged down into the sea, Relena, daughter of the Vice Foreign Affairs Minister who pushes for peace between the Alliance and Colonies, happens to find him drifted ashore. Captivated by his mysterious background and the kind look in his eyes, she finds herself caught up in the manipulative Colonel Treize Khushrendada of OZ's ruthless schemes.

As the five pilots who were completely unaware of each other discover they have similar objectives, they find themselves playing straight into OZ's hands, throwing Earth into war. Now they must unite their efforts against OZ and the Romefeller Foundation that backs them.

Never watched a Gundam show before but I've seen enough screenshots and hear enough of the mechas to know when it's a Gundam show... Despite that, I went along to see the giant 1:1 Gundam statue while I was in Odaiba anyway since you don't see it anywhere else (well, Shanghai's getting its own Gundam statue too now). I also see this meme of Heero tearing up an invitation a lot on Twitter too so I thought, why not start with this one which is the 6th show in the franchise.

I've seen Sunrise mecha shows before but they've the millenial shows such as Valvrave, Code Geass, Cross Ange which were all filled with giant mecha battles, drama, romance and friendship. It's a power struggle show along with a bit of coming of age as you watch the young characters grow though the conflict and their fight. While their personalities are quite close to your modern day show of cliche characters, hot-headed, nice, easy-going, quiet etc but they're not quite as pronounced.

Sunrise is best known for their mecha action shows and the animation quality was already very high here. Battle scenes are fluid and plenty of attention to detail as you can see parts shatter when mechas are destroyed, even though you notice a number of blatant repeated animations. "To be continued" episode screens are framed well too which is better than the cliff hangers you get in most modern day shows that just cut off quite abruptedly.

Over the top action, romance, drama like their other mecha shows. Only differences it isn't heavy in sexual fan service  like their modern day and more recent shows I mentioned earlier. It's also not perfect of course like Relena's obssession with Heero just feels silly. Some of the assassination attempts feel taken too lightly.

Endless Waltz movie takes place after the TV series. Just as the team were about to rid the universe of the Gundam weapons, the flames of war are stoked again when a relative of Treize's appears. It's good to see the characters again and you get short glimpses of each Gundam pilot's past along with the goal behind Operation Meteor. It's a pretty good sequel apart from your silly bossy little girl enemy that's so common in modern day shows. On the whole it's a good wrap up to the story though.

There's also a 4 part OVA series called "Operation Meteor" but it's just a recap of the TV series with part about an hour long. The very last part has a few extra minutes of new scenes towards the very end that the last episode of the TV series didn't have. Then there's also "Frozen Teardrop" which was a serialized novel that feature everyone as grown adults.

If you enjoy sci-fi then you should like this. See if you can spot the random Adobe Photoshop text in it... Oh, and Intel processors too. Not many shows have 2 recap episodes.