"The endless waltz of war begins again."

Alright, enough with the quoting. For those who don't know what Endless Waltz is, it's a three part OVA movie which is basically a sequel to Gundam Wing. For those who don't know, an OVA is a straight-to-video release, sort of like the Disney made-for-TV movies that nobody watches, except that OVAs often have higher production values than normal TV series and are basically a step up in quality instead of a step down.

Endless Waltz is no exception to this. The animation is MUCH better than the TV series, raising it from above average to exellent. The new style is generally darker and more bullet-riddled, bringing a sort of dark side to the fights. Bullets have also been altered, so as to look much, much cooler. No longer does Heavyarms destroy enemies by waving around it's bullet-spray in their general direction.

Speaking of firepower, we come to the biggest advantage of Waltz over Wing. Each of the Gundams have more of it. Much more. All of them have been redesigned, in some cases rather drastically, to look more like the godly weapons of destruction they really are. Zero sports a pair of "angel wings" to replace it's old dual thrusters, while Altron is green and with a far more bulky, Heavyarms-ish look about it. Speaking of which, Heavyarms is now blue, and with exactly double it's previous firepower (four chest guns, TWO dual gattlings, a megaton of missles, and a partrige in a pear tree). Deathscythe and Sandrock have the least significant changes, with Sandrock now having some blue edging and Deathscythe just looking, um, more Deathscythe-ish. The only real problem is that the gundams don't appear until the third and last part of the OVA, making for two parts of old Leos and Tauruses. The only other new suits are the Serpents, which are basically just stripped-down versions of Heavyarms, and the Tallgeese 3, with it's ultra-slick Zero-ish beam cannon.

Now that I've finished talking about the pretty colors, I should probably get back to the plot. This was the biggest weak point of Wing, and it's no surprise that it's also the biggest weak point of Waltz. Some evil people are trying to take over Earth from the colonies, Wufei is fighting with them for no particular reason, Trowa is captured and also works with them for no particular reason, and it goes downhill from there. The only improvement is that the "true peace" speeches are almost... tolerale, which is a huge improvement from the "tear my ears off" speeches of Wing.

One big thing about the plot is that there are a huge number of flashbacks, detailing the original operation meteor and background information on the pilots. Escpecially Heero (although his story was hideously cliched. You could see the ending about 10 seconds after it started).

None of this is to say that Waltz is bad. It isn't. It's a great step up from Wing, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes as good as something like Eva.

Overall: For free, definately. If you're a big GW fanatic, definately. If not, don't pay too much.

SCORE: 7