by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: Urdr-Hunt: $9.50, Wedge of Interposition: $13.00; Overall: $11.25
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Intro:
... a compilation film that condenses the game’s hours of story content into just one ...
Having new Iron-Blooded Orphans material making it to cinemas, especially here in the West, should be cause for celebration. The main series marked one of the most dramatically intense of the franchise’s many sprawling narratives, using a recurring narrative idea across many mecha shows where youths are made into pilots for giant battle suits… and turning it into a frequently-confronting look at child soldiers struggling under the boots of their elders. Bleak doesn’t even begin to describe it.
After the main series concluded back in 2017, there was a Japanese-exclusive spin-off mobile game called Urdr-Hunt which, while containing tactical gameplay, also told a story through both proper animated segments and visual novel text that made it stand out regardless of any interactive elements. Its discontinuation in 2024 hit a nerve for many Gundam fans, and this new cinematic release, compiling Urdr-Hunt’s story into a film format, will create a burst of hope. At first.
As is unfortunately typical, this is essentially a compilation film that condenses the game’s hours of story content into just one, and is therefore quite threadbare as its own narrative. Set in the gap between season one and two of the main show, Urdr-Hunt – Path of the Little Challenger is the side story of young Wistario Afam and his participation in the titular hunt to secure enough cash to purchase his home colony of Radonitsa, a glorified floating prison orbiting Venus, and make it a safe haven for all its citizens. The included clips combined with Coronal Xhosa’s narration (which basically serves as story paste to connect the footage) establish that there is a story to all this, but not enough of the emotional impetus behind why the characters are involved or for their actions within it. It doesn’t help that the mechanics behind the Urdr-Hunt itself are so vague that seemingly no-one knows what it actually involves, aside from being a fetch-quest. It comes across like isolating a game narrative that only exists to string together gameplay as its own bespoke story, and it’s not particularly effective.
Where the lack of cohesion becomes more suspect is in how, despite the patch-up attempts by the narrator, this isn’t all recycled material. No, there is animation exclusive to this iteration, expanding on some of the fight scenes and dialogue. But it does shockingly little to properly flesh all this out enough to stand on its own, to the point that it still feels like it’s relying on the narration to carry the story, seeing as it’s presented over a lot of the footage, new or otherwise. The leaning towards telling rather than showing, in an animated film, is quite bizarre, and it ends up feeling like a half-hearted attempt to put something, anything, to mark the show’s 10th anniversary.
Along with Urdr-Hunt, this release in cinemas also comes with the short Wedge of Interposition, which features the show’s main cast getting into mecha fights and showing where Orga got his season 2 fit from. After an hour of gesturing towards interesting characters and ideas, even something this brief and insubstantial is a breath of fresh air.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blood Orphans – Urdr-Hunt: Path of the Little Challenger‘s existence as film at least shows that the creators acknowledge the original game’s fanbase even after its closure (which puts them well ahead of most in the modern live-service-riddled gaming industry), but the attempts at recapping and bulking up its story are so haphazard as to feel rather pointless when all is said and done. Even more so since this is really the only chance that Western audiences will get to experience it, between the game’s closure and it never being localised into English (officially, at any rate).
Wedge of Interposition is fun and a good showing of the juvenile-yet-dark aesthetic that makes IBO so beloved, but it’d be a wild take to try and sell this whole package as worth spending cinema prices to check out for just the last ten minutes.
