It's just bad. Now I don't have the confidence to say if it's bad by general /m/ standards, or even overall Gundam standards, but it's definitely bad by UC standards. Not only is it worse than ZZ, it's worse than just ZZ's first half. You could say it's like ZZ in reverse, so it starts mediocre then gets bad, but it's not even that. Victory starts bad, ascends to mediocrity when they get to space, then plunges back into the abyss. And the culprit is not the tires, it's Victory's terrible writing. The turning point for me was around episode 25, where Uso shows up to rescue Shahkti from the palace, and she's clearly distressed and not on board with being there, but then HE tells her to stay because her momma is there, and even tells her he's fine with becoming enemies. Then, after they escape from Ameria and before the episode is even over, he suddenly does a 180 and says he needs to go back and rescue Shahkti. It's not like Shahkti had doubts about leaving, or there was some kind of misunderstanding, Uso MADE her stay to Shahkti's obvious suprise and shock, then an hour later changed his mind. The show lost me after that.

In general, Victory is either repetitive and stupid (Shahkti needs to be rescued every 5 episodes, mommy themes that are so overused and surface-level they turn into noise), or goes nowhere. I was waiting the entire time for Cronicle to pull a Glemy, and not only does he not pull a Glemy, a different person does and half-jokingly invites Cronicle to join up with him. Uso says his dad thinks Shahkti is the enemy...nothing comes of it. Nothing comes of his dad and the old general talking about fatherhood either because he never talks to Uso again before he just vanishes (dies?). V2's technology-disabling wings are only used once against a filler enemy because I guess Tomino thought the idea was too good for this shitshow and saved it up for Turn A.