Gundam fans are still reeling from the loss of the Walking Gundam in Japan, as the Yokohama Gundam Factory shuttered the anime marvel earlier this year. Luckily, Mobile Suit enthusiasts will have a new real-life statue to look forward to in 2025 as a major Gundam event shared a preview of the upcoming construction. While the upcoming statue seemingly won’t be walking under its own weight like the previous creation, the massive statue is set to once again honor the franchise in a way that many other anime stories rarely see. The future looks bright for the Gundam series both when it comes to anime and the real world.
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This year’s Gundam Conference Summer let quite a few mech cats out of the bag when it came to the franchise’s future. Aside from revealing new details about the upcoming statue that will arrive in Osaka next year, the event also shared a new poster for its upcoming forty-fifth anniversary celebration while also exploring a new side story that will focus on the world of G Gundam. The latter might not be a new anime series that many were hoping, but the return of the G Gundam universe via a side story will bring back series director Yasuhiro Imagawa in the driver’s seat. The side story, Mobile Fighter G Gundam Gaiden: Tenchi Tenkaku will land on July 5th this summer.
A New Gundam Approaches
The upcoming Gundam statue will arrive in time for the 2025 Gundam Next Future Pavilion in Osaka Japan, slated for April to October of next year. The mech itself is slated to stand around seventeen meters tall, which is especially impressive because it will be kneeling in front of the World Expo in Japan. Like the Walking Gundam before it, the new statue arriving in 2025 will be the original RX-78 model that kicked off the beloved anime franchise.
The future remains bright for the Gundam franchise as it doesn’t appear as though it is slowing down when it comes to anime adaptations. While the Walking Gundam might have shuttered, there are still two life-sized statues in Japan that anime fans can visit, even before the arrival of the new model landing next year, specifically the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam in Odaiba and the Nu Gundam in Fukuoka.
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