This is the one that makes you sit up when the psychoframe goes green and the NT-D kicks in, because Sunrise poured OVA-budget animation into every frame and the TV recut doesn't sand it down. Banagher Links is not a hero, he's a kid who keeps refusing to let anyone stay a monster, and the show keeps punishing him for it: Loni in the cockpit, Marida Cruz cut down while she's still trying to be someone's daughter. Full Frontal is the smartest villain the franchise ever built, a hollow man wearing Char's mask who argues that humanity should just be steered, and Banagher's answer to him is the whole point of the Universal Century. Hiroyuki Sawano's score does not accompany these fights, it detonates them. And when Laplace's Box finally opens and it turns out to be a sentence, one clause somebody buried for a century, you understand why people still fight over this timeline.

A chance meeting between Banagher Links and a mysterious girl named Audrey Burne thrusts the young colonist into a conflict far bigger than himself. Audrey hopes to prevent a new war by stopping the Vist Foundation from handing a dangerous object called Laplace's Box to the Neo Zeon remnants known as the Sleeves, and Banagher chooses to help her. When Federation troops sent to halt the same handover clash with the Sleeves, the manufacturing colony of Industrial 7 becomes a battlefield, leaving Banagher searching for Audrey through the fighting. Amid the chaos he finds the Unicorn Gundam, a pale white mobile suit that is the key to Laplace's Box. Questions multiply faster than answers. What does the Box actually contain, and what secrets of the Universal Century has it kept hidden for a hundred years? What unfolds is an action-heavy mecha drama in which Banagher's convictions are put to the test.