Mobile Suit Gundam Seed: Grim Reality, Vol. 1

- Characters: The characters are likable; all of the primary characters have believable, fairly deep personalities, and even many of the secondary characters have received a fair amount of attention. No cookie-cutter characters or two-dimensional personalities here.

- Story: Admittedly, it's a lot like previous Gundam series in a lot of respects, but it's been done much better this time around than any previous Gundam series. You could perhaps say "same general concept, utterly superior execution." In addition to being interesting, multi-layered and complex, the pacing is excellent, being fast and action-packed enough to keep anyone's interest, but never overloading you with pointless action scenes and thus making it seem shallow.

- Visuals: The artwork and animation are incredible by absolutely any standard, spiced up with plenty of nice CG effects, and terrific character and mecha designs. Gundam Seed redefines the term "eye candy."

- Action scenes: If you enjoy a good space battle, you'll be hard pressed to find better intense mecha action than in Gundam Seed. Fast-paced, flashy, glitzy, smooth - all of these adjectives do a good job describing the action in this series. Each type of mobile suit or other combat weapon has distinctive attributes that come into play making the fights even more interesting.

- Audio: Not having seen the series airing on Cartoon Network (unfortunately), I couldn't comment on the quality of the English dub, but I have heard more positive remarks than negative regarding it from other people. The original Japanese voices are of course flawless (when are they not?), and the sound effects are all appropriate. The music really stands out; Gundam Seed has probably the best soundtrack I've heard of -any- anime, and I'm even including such terrific soundtracks as X in that assessment.

I could go on, but I think that covers the most important points. In a few words, as long as you enjoy sci-fi anime, I really could not conceive of someone not enjoying this series immensely. My personal favorite all time and highly recommended to all anime fans.

The story is mainly about two friends parted from each other just to end up fighting each other in a seemly meaningless war, although most of wars are meaningless. War is such a terrible thing, that is if you were in the shoes of Kira Yamato, the main character in the series, but to us it is just another war story, this time in color.

My summary on this is, yes, Gundam Seed is worth keeping. You might find most of the episodes quite short, this is perhaps to keep the series long. If you like sci-fi animes, you will probably like this series. It has a lot to offer, mentioning twisty storylines and excellent battle sequence. But I must say you should not expect much of this, especially if you are a Gundam fan. I would recommend this to someone who prefers an alternative theme of animes, or someone who has not seen any Gundam series.