"Mobile Suit----Gundam 0080:War in the Pocket" in full.After realising the potential of Gundam series,Sunrise decided to use its name to tell the war story from a different perspective and besides the return of Mr.Okawara Kunio and Mr.Itsubachi Yutaka as the mechanical designers,they even hired Mr.Mikimoto Haruhiko,who is famous for designing the characters of the majority of Macross series,to add some soft touch onto the characters of this very first OVA[Original Video animation] series.Here's the story in summary:

U.C.0080,as Amuro Rey and White Base fighting feverishly against Zion,Anaheim Electronic had been developing a new Gundam,Gundam RX-78-NT1 Alex,designed specificly for Amuro Rey & New Type pilots and about to deliver it to a secret location for testing.Despite an attempt to foil the launch,Zion special force,Cyclops Team,still failed and left watching the rocket launched towards the secret location they had yet to learn.

Few days later,a minor clash between a small group of Zion soldiers against a group of GM's policing around a colony forced Bernard Wiseman landed his Zaku in a secluded area where he met Al,a boy with strong passion towards Zaku's and hoped to become a Zion MS pilot one day.Initially,Bernard intend to erase the content of Al's video camera until he recognised the content in a container caught by chance when Al was visiting his father who worked in the industrial area and always away from home.Al was reluctant to hand over his video camera until Bernard traded his pilot emblem in exchange since he recognised Al's strong interest,and this new lead to the secret Gundam RX-78-NT1 had Bernard promoted instantaneouly that assigned him to Cyclops Team,as they were planning on how to smuggle parts of the latest Kempher into the space colony.

Bernard ran into Al again after they successfully smuggled in the MS parts and on their way to an abandoned factory to assemble Kempher.Bernard was furious about Al pulling pranks on the police officers so they could locate Bernard before Al "lied' about pulling the prank to find his missing "brother",Bernard,but Commander Shuideiner decided to take advantage of Al's knowledge of the colony so Bernard could locate the base of Federal Miliatry during his reconnaissance,especially Al was extremely attached to Bernard.Despite being designed to take on an army alone,Kempher was no match to the far more advanced Gundam RX-78-NT1 with Bernard being the only surving member of Cyclops Team.

Before their mission began,Cyclops Team was given a deadline to complete the mission or they would launch nuclear missiles to get rid of everything around that Gundam.Bernard initially intend to escape but decided to try to finish the mission so nobody would be sacrificed for the mission they failed,by fixing his Zaku which was still remained unnoticed with Al lending some hands.Bernard managed to damged Gundam RX-78-NT1 seriously but he was badly injured during the process before his cockpit was slashed by the beam saber of Gundam RX-78-NT1,and the explosion killed him & left Gundam RX-78-NT1 beyond repair.What shocked Al even more was the fact that the pilot of Gundam RX-78-NT1 was the sweet girl,Christine McKenzie,living next to his home and these double blows had changed Al's way of viewing the war drastically.

With the inability to repair and deliver Gundam RX-78-NT1 on time,Christine was assigned back to Earth for other duties and Al told a white lie to assured that Bernard would be disappointed for his inability to send her off,when Christine asked about Bernard who she met by chance while Bernard was in the reconnaissance mission.

The Anime is certainly very slow with very few actions in between and can bored fans expecting lots of actions but it more or less given fans some times to look at things from different perspective.In the past,there's a clear distinctions between heroes & villains but in this OVA series,Zion soldiers had been portrayed as unsung heroes who happened to be on the wrong side of the war and had fans for the very first time showing sympathy towards Zion soldiers,with some even took their sides for once.Mr.Mikimoto's character designs added some soft touch to the otherwise hard edged Anime along with the soft lyrics & tunes over fast ones and the closing credits even showed drawn photographs of children playing around damaged MS's & abandoned or discarded weapons,to emphasized the innocence of the children against the harshness of the warfares.

In fact,the harshness changed Al so much that even his father noticed that he seemed to had matured a lot despite spending very little time with him.With the original Gundam RX-78 fought towards the end in "Mobile Suit----Gundam",Gundam RX-78-NT1 was destined to be destroyed eventually from the very beginning but this sidestory allowed designers to try something differently which added more MS's into the family of MSV's.With the success of this sidestory,Sunrise felt confident about developing more sidestories around that era but with the upcoming 12th anniversary,their first priority was to release a commemorative movie titled "Mobile Suit----Gundam F[Formula] 91".

Side Note: I thought of doing the story chronologically initially but decided to stick to the current format since in some extend,all these sequels,prequels & sidestories would not be possible without the introduction of "Mobile Suit----Z[Zeta] Gundam".Hopefully,nobody would feel confused over these time hopping and I probably would type up a timeline if there are too mcuh confusions.While I am at it,I will be moving the list of abbreviations,names & such to other journal to minimise the space occupation as the list grows with the series.