Ah, Mobile Suit Gundam… it’s kind of a marvel that no entries in such a huge and venerable series had made it onto the review blog up until now. But, the very scope and scale of the affair is part of why: Gundam is huge, and that makes tackling it in more bite-sized sections a rather difficult. Of course, it’s not entirely a single continuity, and there are certainly entries that can be looked at in isolation, but if I’m really going to address Gundam I want to do it with some sort of semblance of purposeful direction.
The Gundam Build subseries, on the other hand, I feel no compunction taking on as it’s own thing, even if it’s still quite meaty in its own right. As if to make that last bit harder on myself, this review is going to be a double feature, covering both Gundam Build Fighters and its direct sequel, Gundam Build Fighters Try. They’re separate enough shows that they’ll get their own individual grades, but I’m still covering this in a single post.
So, briefly, what’s the pitch for Gundam Build? Well, it takes place in a universe where, much like our own, Mobile Suit Gundam is fiction and Gunpla models are reasonably popular. In Gundam Build Fighters in particular, the divergence from Earth as we know (well, the instantly recognizable one) it is that it has become possible to animate and control Gunpla models and have them actually fight like plastic battlebots. If you don’t think this would immediately catch on as something awesome, I don’t know what to tell you now any more than I did when I reviewed Angelic Layer.
And it’s a good thing I’ve mentioned that show, because the basic premise is exactly the same: model robots, special table, hologram battlefield, the works. I could honestly just say “This is Angelic Layer for boys” and that would get across quite a lot of the series: different tone and focus, and of course Gunpla instead of dolls, but the same major arc and personal stakes for the majority of the run time. But that would be a dereliction of my job as a reviewer, so the review goes on.
Gundam Build Fighters
So, what about those pesky plot and character elements? Our lead is Sei Iori. He’s a kid, but an excellent Gunpla builder, making the best-looking models you can imagine. However, when it comes to actually controlling Gundams in battle, he’s terrible, and is stuck looking up to his dad, who reached second place in the Gunpla Battle championship. We see a bully try to rope him into a partnership, building while said bully pilots, but Sei refuses on the grounds that said bully is a jerk.
Still, the concept is sound, which leads to our second main character, Reiji. He’s a weird foreigner sort of person who knows nothing about this and lives in a very carefree fashion. After befriending Reiji, Sei receives a magic rock that later summons Reiji to help out with another battle against the bully. Reiji wins, showing off the exact skills and style Sei dreamed of, setting up that they’ll be a team going forward.
It takes a little bit, as we need to meet the characters at school, such as Sei’s seat-neighbor and class rep China Kousaka, and the student council president and head of the modeling club (which Sei is not a member of for reason of helping his mom with their family hobby shop in his free time) Yuuki. The latter manages to get a win in over Reiji when Reiji comes to school just to see if it’s any fun, and this incenses Reiji enough to actually take up Gunpla battling with Sei, just to get back at Yuuki.
As they team up, we also learn that Reiji is some kind of magic teleporting dude, which he goes on to explain as being the prince from another world, using a magical relic to cross between dimensions. Just… go with it.
They get to the qualifying tournament and show off their stuff with Sei’s completed Gunpla and Reiji’s skill. Even Class Rep seems to be bitten by the Gunpla bug after seeing the artistry in motion, though that also might just be appreciation for Sei, seeing how she reacts when she notices him chatting with a pretty girl customer at the family shop. Said girl cozies up to Sei, but she’s really his next opponent in disguise (or out of costume; she participates in an idol persona), who takes the opportunity to sabotage his gunpla, leading to a quite hard fight. In effect, she acts as the first episodic antagonist outside the school bully, though she returns later as a TV host for the world tournament. Since this is a tournament arc, you know you’re going to need a fair share
We do get more long-running plots, though, starting with Student Council President having to withdraw from both the tournament and from school due to some evil corporate inheritance scheme, and gradually we’re introduced to more friends, rivals, and antagonists for the awaited world championship.
The most important added character, at least at first, is Mao Yasaka, a superb builder potentially beyond even Sei, who is something of a friendly rival. There’s also Aila, a frigid Finnish young lady with mysterious gundam-using powers who is backed by a different set of scary sinister corporate suits, and Nils Nielsen, a young boy who over in America is amazingly good because he’s trying to crack how the black box of how the plastic-animating magic particles actually work.
We also get more out of class rep China. Not only does Sei’s mom seem to ship her and Sei, but she gets a fair bit of focus, including an episode where she stars, going against her art rival (a rich girl who gets the help of Nils, since her father is sponsoring him) in a local girls-only tournament.
Of course, the World Tournament starts, and it’s got an oddball format where every day seems to have different kinds of exposition matches, with the winners scoring points towards a break to the finalists. Around this stage, we get some encounters and bonding between Reiji and Aila, with neither knowing the other’s role because Aila wears a face-concealing helmet in the tournament and also doesn’t really follow the news of the battles. Mostly their relationship seems to be comedic-antagonistic in the sort of way where you know they’re going to end up on good terms, especially if and when her baggage comes to light. In the mean time, they fight/bond over meat buns.
We also get the return of Yuuki, in the role of Meijin Kawaguchi, the corporate backer’s direct entry. As Meijin, he plays up being every smug self-assured douchey champion, but we do see that it’s at least something of an act.
After a round of 4-player free-for-alls, the second day is a battle royale with all 90 contestants, running until 1/3 are standing. Our main duo teams up with Mao, and ultimately goes to help the Italian champ, Fellini, who had previously helped Reiji train. When they deal with his pursuers (a vengeful group whose girlfriends Fellini stole in the past), a gigantic Zaku appears, on autopilot and seemingly with a grudge against the Sei-Reiji pair.
The reason for this seems to be that the chairman of the company running the show recognizes Reiji, including talking about another world (which hadn’t been done since it was introduced), and what’s more, fear him. The titanic mech is taken out by heavy teamwork, aid from afar, and Sei pulling one of their trump cards, which means that the hero team progresses into the next day with little damage.
Of course, our villain apparent, buffoon though he is, isn’t done trying to rig matches, as the next round is a random weapon draw that gets fixed to put Reiji and Sei in a match against a powerful veteran, equipped with a catcher’s glove and baseballs. This causes the show to become mecha baseball for a bit as their foe has a bat, and experience playing. This comes on top of Reiji having an injured wrist due to fighting some generic goons for Aila in their after-hours goofing around (I guess Sei and Class Rep are sewn up enough that we need a B-line romance). Naturally, he pulls a winning pitch at the last possible opportunity.
Eventually, a hit of interference does cause the pair to miss out on points in one match, putting them into a do-or-die position for the last qualifier round. That ends up being a one on one fight with Fellini, which ends in a brutal, glorious mutual-kill draw, granting enough points to put all involved into the finals, much to the CEO’s chagrin.
Though by this point Aila has figured out who Reiji is, she still keeps him in that dark about who she is. This is relevant because there comes a downtime episode where they’re both taught to build Gunpla by a weird guy who is none other than (though they don’t know it) Sei’s dad.
In the finals, Sei and Reiji take on Mao in a more fun fight, Yuuki deals with an episodic villain, hero team handles Nils, and then it’s Fellini versus Aila. In that battle, her handlers force some sort of evil system on her that makes her really good but also drives her berserk and, in the crash after, puts her in a critical condition. She wins, brutally, offending Reiji even as her identity gets revealed to him.
Their match is next. After learning more about Aila (namely she was a poor orphan, but could always see the flow of the gunpla-animating magic, which is what that system on her amplifies, allowing such cheating equipment to get into the tournament), we get a scene where, thanks to China slipping Aila that magic rock from Reiji, they get to talk telepathically during the match when she’s at her most agonized and dearly wishing to not have to do any of this. They come out of it minus her superpower, but they bring it back from real “hugging it out” style catharsis to have a tsundere fight on the battlefield, amusingly leaving the entire audience bewildered.
Also, she tells off the little kid, whose grandpa was her sponsor as a present for the kid, that if he wants a Gunpla trophy so bad he should win one himself. This is a little funny here and comes back in the sequel.
In Yuuki’s semifinal match, his unassuming episodic opponent is switched out at the last minute for a more meaningful one: his senpai in the (only now divulged) past when they both studied under the previous Meijin, who once quit to avoid the Meijin’s “win at all costs” philosophy. It’s a battle that Yuuki manages to win in both the philosophy end (he has his own reasons for being Meijin) and in plastic robots, leaving us three episodes for the final match as well as anything around it to answer that whole “people from another world” or “Evil CEO” or “Mystery of the magic gunpla particles” stuff. How’s it used?
Well the first is mostly fluff, with a big festival being held in the lag before the final round, but we do at least learn that the CEO is teaming up with Aila’s former handler for presumably evil schemes, and Nils (along with the blonde girl who wanted to rival China, who has gradually upgraded herself without asking from his sponsor to his girlfriend to his fiancee) tracks down the whole particle thing to a giant crystal hidden under the world tournament building, only to be set upon by corporate goons
The evil plan is a fairy obvious one: hooking up Yuuki with a revamped version of the evil system that made Aila powerful and berserk before the final match, thus forcing it to be against Psycho Yuuki instead of regular.
The fight is about what you’d think: long, awesome, and brutal. During it, we get an actual funny joke with the Evil CEO when his assistant declares that this power could let him take over the world and he declares that would be too much work and he just wants to be rich and not have to worry about things. For what’s obviously a kids show, I kind of respect that, especially with the delivery its given, especially with the background he offers of having been a petty thief in the other world who was teleported with and by the giant magic rock because of his wishes when he found it, which checks out with what the little ones did for Reiji.
Unfortunately for the scheme, since it uses the magic crystal wish deal, Aila is able to hear the CEO’s control of Yuuki and relay this information to Reiji, letting them form a plan of fighting back.
The battle ends, but then the CEO’s epic level freakout sends the big crystal into overdrive, turning the whole arena (and the area around it and airspace above it) into one mega-sized battlefield complete with a giant space fortress of doom. Thus, our real final episode. Everyone relevant and vaguely protagonistic gets out their Gunplas and fires them up to raid the space fortress and destroy the out-of-control magic crystal at its core.
With the crystal gone, the CEO gets sucked back to the other world where he came from. His secretary decides to go with him by way of a tackle hug at the last second. Yuuki and our main leads decide to have one last battle, since without the big crystal, it might very much be the last, and the idol makes herself useful and broadcasts it to the world. But, before it ends properly, with Sei taking the wheel and seeming ready to deliver a final strike, the magic wears off as Reiji’s crystal breaks down too and he’s sent home too. One crystal is left: Aila’s, and that ends up with her popping over to the other world to be with Reiji, or at least to tsundere with him and presumably get pretty pretty princess status in due time.
In the epilogue we see that Gunpla battling isn’t dead (thanks to Nils and Blondie working out how to make their own magic particles), Idol makes it big, and Sei is aiming for the top under his own power. That’s Gundam Build Fighters.
Contrasting with Angelic Layer, the human elements are generally weaker, while the action is generally stronger. Seriously, the animation does everything in its power to make you forget these are little plastic models, and delivers some really awesome mecha battles. And when it comes to the battle side of things, the emotions are right on point. Every match, both sides have their reasons for fighting and the audience plenty of reason to root for a side given what their feelings are going into it. While the characters aren’t as round nor as dynamic as Angelic Layer’s, they’re serviceable enough.
That said, Angelic Layer was a show that barely squeaked into A ranks, and I do think Build Fighters is, on the whole, a little weaker. Yeah, the fights are awesome, but the fights in Angelic Layer were really good for what they were trying to be, and the whole other world and evil CEO schemes do drag down the latter half of Build Fighters just a bit. I thought that Aila’s deal with her evil corporate masters worked pretty well, and the championship bout with Yuki that flowed from it made the last fight feel as intense as the last fight should, rather than a match between friends like the one versus Mao was… but it’s still a pretty forced way and reason to have the CEO go against the heroes at every turn, especially considering it’s pretty clear he engineers his own downfall by antagonizing them when Reiji had no idea who he was and was fully inclined to leave him alone otherwise. Contrasting this with why people are fighting and its hard in the last acts of Angelic Layer, it’s easy to see why Build Fighters is going to come away with a lower grade.
Not that much lower, though: Gundam Build Fighters gets a B+ from me. There’s really very little more you can ask of what it is, and while it is held back by its need to slip in more of these scifi-fantasy adventure elements that don’t mesh, it is a fun show with some superb stuff blowing up.
That means it’s time for…
Gundam Build Fighters Try
Gundam Build Fighters Try is a sequel to Gundam Build Fighters. If you think Fighters wrapped up pretty well, such that it wouldn’t need a sequel… it did, which is why Try takes place seven years later, following a new cast as its primary actors. I actually think this is kind of an ideal way to handle a sequel: it takes place in the same universe, expands on the same ideas, and even shows us more of what the characters we cared about might have gotten up to, but it doesn’t snatch away their ending and throw the same people into a needless new disaster, instead telling a new story that, while beholden to its predecessor, is also it’s own thing.
Right off the bat, you can also notice that Try isn’t going to totally replicate Fighters in terms of the characters either, as we get our primary-colored leads. First and foremost, in yellow, is Fumina Hoshino, aka Fumi. She (yeah, fancy that in a show still clearly aimed at younger boys) is the president of the Gunpla Battle Club at the school Sei once attended… and at the start of the show its only member, having been abandoned by people she trusted to share her path and help her along her way. One of those people, in blue, is Yuuma Kousaka (China’s little brother), a prime modeler who supposedly lost interest in playing Gunpla Battle rather than just making the best artistic models he could make.
Lastly, in red, we discover Sekai Kamiki. He’s a rough and tumble kind of kid introduced terrifying bullies into submission and asking after the wherebouts of a certain young woman he has a photo of. Of the three leads, he’s the one that cleaves closest to the original Build Fighters, since he looks, sounds, and feels a bit like Reiji without that whole “prince from another world” deal. He is instead a new transfer student to the school, being looked after by his drop-dead gorgeous big sister Mirai, herself a more senior student.
Since Sekai is a bit late to the party when he comes to school and runs into Fumi, she takes advantage of the school’s lack of any martial arts clubs to recruit him as Gunpla Battle club member #2, out of the three she needs to enter the presumably restructured world tournament as a team. It takes a little doing, including a battle with the model club president (this season’s jerk with a stupid haircut), but he shows off that his martial arts skills are transferable, wowing Fumi and the first actually reappearing character, Ral, who was and remains pretty much the perpetual wise old man spectator – this time as the club coach.
Initially, Yuuma is on Team Model Club, but we get his not-so-secret secret backstory where his ego was crushed in a previous loss at Gunpla Battle. He gets dragged in when the Model club president, being kind of a creeper, tries to absorb the battle club on the grounds that his club would do it better, forcing a 2-on-3 fight with Fumi and Sekai against him, Yuuma, and his vice president. The latter gets knocked out right away (in a pretty good joke, the end of the fight implies she lost on purpose since she has a crush on her club president while he’s being a creeper towards Fumi, so she wants no rivals absorbed into their club), and in the resulting 2v2 the jerk gets desperate enough to basically cheat with a paper thin excuse. This, Hoshino’s resolve, and a talking-to from Sekai mid fight, convinces Yuuma to go turncoat and help shoot down his club president.
Thus, Yuuma is roped into the club and our team of three is complete: Team Try Fighters! We have Sekai, master of fisticuffs, piloting a hidden masterpiece left behind by Sei, Yuuma the top-tier sniper, and Fumi… she’s working on it. Her first machine doesn’t seem to be cutting it, so she’s looking to trade up.
We then launch into dealing with episodic plots. The theoretical Sekai-Fumi-Yuuma love triangle doesn’t manifest: instead Yuuma seems more interested in Sekai’s big sister, even beyond her apparent ability to charm everyone the moment she walks into the room, while Sekai is too thick for any interest from Fumi to go anywhere. The three of them work together as a team, and while they do have interesting interpersonal stakes, those typically don’t interfere with their friendships in the annoying way they often would. Eventually Fumi, clever girl that she is, develops a new Gunpla to take advantage of their team as a whole while also representing her role in it: it can split apart mid battle and lend pieces to the others in order to supercharge them.
In the midst of this we get a couple recurring figures. The first individual they fight as a team is from an all-girls school, and is the little sister of the jerk with a dumb haircut from season 1. She’s nicknamed Gyanko after her Gunpla of choice, and seems to fall for Sekai hard. The other is a member of Mao’s school of Gunpla building – Sakai Minato. He doesn’t fight himself, but he considers Yuuma to be his rival in the world of art building, and tries both to understand why Yuuma now fights and to convince him to not. And yes Sakai is going to look a lot like Sekai throughout this review. I don’t make the names.
Talking about differences with Build Fighters, I’d say the interpersonal dynamics in Try are significant as well as better put together. In Build Fighters, Sei and Reiji were buddies, most of the important males had their exactly one un(der)developed satellite love interest, and that was enough. Kicking it off with Try we have a main team of three instead of two, with shipping aside a moderately complex web of assorted baggage. Given that weakness in the human elements was one of the things holding season 1 back, at least a little, this is solidly an improvement.
The action is also… different. Gunpla battles in season 1 were harsh and destructive affairs that skewed grittier, especially earlier in the series. In Try, the battles take on a more “Super Robot” look and feel from the start. Gundam, as a series, has existed on both sides of the fuzzy line between Real Robot and Super Robot affairs over its run, so that much is neither for better nor for worse nor is it completely unexpected and different. The quality, however, remains very solid. Sure, we’re in a space where rather than being worried about manipulating terrain, targeting joints, and what damage goes where it’s more about fighting spirit and shouting at the dramatically appropriate moments… but, again, it’s a style thing and the animation is at the level you’d expect.
Fitting with the change to super robot stylings, the enemy teams are much more thematic and colorful than the episodic opponents in season 1. Sure, some of the season one foes had loud styles, but they were mostly individuals. Here, we have the team that likes aquatic combat and shows up to the match all dressed in swimsuits, complete with caps and goggles, and the team that does data analysis all clad in lab coats. At least in the first arc, the trade-off for rounded leads seems to be flat, disposable opponents.
Frankly, that trade is one I’m happy to see made. The role of an episodic villain is to provide a specific challenge. Sure, you may wonder how someone with a colorful crippling overspecialization was hoping to get all the way (the water team, for instance, is dead if they draw desert or space for the battlefield… or a totally frozen field, as happens to see them obliterated before the OP of the episode they’re slated for), but at the same time what you ultimately need to understand is how they threaten the leads. If that’s clear and a little silly off leads who are complex and engaging, it’s better than the threats being complex and engaging but the leads basic and familiar.
That does change somewhat, though, in the episode that starts by wiping out the water team. The main opponent of the week is a team from another middle school, where the lead player is Gunpla Battling for his sick kid brother, and his two friends up and beg Try Fighters to throw the match. Though none of them are receptive to the idea, it shakes all three. Both Sekai and Fumi get the idea to visit the brother, which Sekai beats her to the jump on, showing off his Gunpla and (in the friendliest of ways) challenging both brothers to an fair and fierce fight. Big brother talks it out with his mooks, and they support him in the fight by sacrificing themselves to tackle Fumi and Yuuma out of the arena, making the match a 1v1 between the boxer and the martial artist, ending with a narrow win for Sekai and big brother opponent learning a valuable lesson about enjoying the sport for its own sake as well as for his sick kid brother.
That kick continues as Try Fighters take down their overly themed opponent, in the next episode – after all, the episode’s real focus is on Gyanko as she and her team face the odds-on favorites. She goes out with Sekai a bit, they bond, the mean girl from the opponent team tries to really break Gyanko’s spirit… and then in battle she loses hard, if not for a lack of trying. The end of the battle even has pacing, music, and reactions like it’s a real death scene, which is both dramatically effective in the moment and kind of hilarious in hindsight. Plastic robots are serious business!
There’s another member of the rival team that’s worth mentioning, though: a transfer from the former champions, who uses martial arts, recognizes Sekai’s style, and says it won’t work on him. He comes off as a slimy sort of fellow at first, but is later shown to be more of a class act when he calls the mean girl to task (with a slap. Yes, that is still “more of a class act” than his previous impression.) for trying to crush Gyanko’s heart the way Yuuma’s was years earlier post-match. And the team captain? He’s piloting a Gunpla built by Yuuma’s rival, so you know there’s a personal stake there.
Both Gyanko’s team and her opponents have more neutral themes (like most of the people in Build Fighters) and Gyanko and the transfer, Akira Suga, get enough time and effort to be at least as rounded as the better opponents from Build Fighters. After opening as just fun, Try really begins to stretch its legs and do everything it can to make the basic tournament structure really sing.
For the last fight of the qualifiers, Yuuki (or, he’s wearing the glasses, so I guess Meijin Kawaguchi) comes to watch, so you just know something is going to go down. And, sure enough, it does: after a hell of a super robot smackfest with all the splitting and combining you could ask for, Sekai synches enough with his gunpla that he actually takes real damage from what happens on the tabletop, winning the match with the power he’s gained that way but also not being in a good state thereafter.
So, we’ve just learned that apparently Gunplas getting punched can get you punched by this point in this universe. What do we do next? Beach episode!
After that, it’s time to visit a grown-up Nils (who evidently did marry the pushy girl. To be fair she did seem to have a good heart), as might be expected now a scientist and researcher behind the gunpla battle system. Ral uses his connections to book Try Fighters some training camp time at the labs, where all the best teams come to practice. This brings Yuuma face to face with the guy who tormented him and drove him from the sport two years earlier, which makes him go a bit berserk. Of course, he can’t win off the bat, but he has friends this time as Sekai and Fumi jump in to the battle to bail him out. They don’t do very well even ganging up on one member of the top team, prompting Meijin to step in before Sekai gets broken. It’s amazing that he and his old handler (who is the coach of the win-streak-holding Gunpla Academy team) tolerate this level of bullying rather than teaching their students sportsmanship, but at least he’s cleaning up.
Meijin also seems to know what’s happening to Sekai and regard it as a known phenomenon that’s not a huge problem, so at least there’s that, but perhaps more pressing is Yuuma’s mental breakdown. Fumi, deducing Yuuma’s story, goes to give him her best friendship talk, but Meijin gets there first to haul Yuu off for some (battle-based) important life lessons. He is, I suppose, a friend of the family after all. Fumi is then intercepted by Lady Kawaguchi (which is, of course, a psuedonym), who is her occasionally-mentioned idol in the Gunpla Battle scene. She offers some possibly tough love with battle training to help Fumi realize what she lacks.
Both battle training sessions go well, and Sekai runs into a mysterious white-haired girl who helps him fix his Gunpla (Much to Fumi’s chagrin. And she’s actually the third member of the Gunpla Academy team, Shia Kijima) and all around team Try Fighters is on the mend: Sekai literally, Fumi learning she needs to rely on herself more and Yuuma learning he needs to stop self-imposing limits.
Thus, Try Fighters returns home with new rivals (and an old one, as Sakai joins a team to rival Yuuma) and new determination to build and/or upgrade their Gunpla before the big tournament. We even get Gyanko back on scene, making Fumi feel rather jealous since Gyanko’s overbearing obviousness actually plays off Sekai’s dense wall of protagonist.
We get to the National Tournament. It’s the final “big one” for this season, being about the 18 and Under Nationals rather than the vaunted World Tournament, I guess because the writers didn’t want to bring too many old hands out on deck. The opponents have really stepped up (though we still see some goofy theme teams, like a ninja gunpla team, when the major players need to advance a round), both in terms of their writing and skill that sits at least on level with the first season, and in terms of their super robot vibes. Sakai’s team even fields a combining robot with rocket-powered fists and chest laser so goofy it stuns the audience into silence, even as it wins.
It’s a charming sort of goofy – Sakai very much feels like the Harmless Rival compared to the Gunpla Academy trio. Similarly, the show’s real love triangle, Fumi and Shia for Sekai (or quadrangle – don’t forget Gyanko) is also the kind of thing that makes you smile. It’s not honestly much more drama than the simple pairing-off of Build Fighters season 1, but it leads to at least a few good reactions.
In terms of rivals, we know each of the members of Try Fighters has one among the Gunpla Academy team – Sekai and the ace team captain, Fumi and Shia, or Yuuma and his former tormentor… but in addition to Yuuma’s side rival of Sakai, Sekai gets a side rival in the form of Junya Inose, a former member of his martial arts school he once trained with and looks up to. This ends up being the round 3, where most of the fight is taken up by their 1v1 as Fumi and Yuuma deal with his teammates and then decide to let the martial artists have their duel.
During this, Junya makes more psycho faces over the course of two episodes than the rest of the cast of both seasons in their entire running times combined, and beats the tar out of Sekai. This leads to Sekai seeing the heart of the Gunpla, allowing him to pull a new ultimate technique of having magic gunpla particle duplicates of his mech attack from every angle and finish things with a mountain-rending super-energy-punch. Like a lot of things in this show, it is equal parts silly and awesome. I think in that aspect it perfectly captures the energy of a kid playing with his toys.
And remember how back in Build Fighters I mentioned how Aila yelled at the little kid she was playing for to win himself, and how that would be relevant? Well, that pops up just after as said kid is now the undefeated European champion, playing here due to a last minute transfer to an appropriate Japanese school, and of course he gets the “unstoppable force” sort of buildup.
However, clever viewers may note (as I had not made obvious) that there are four teams left by this point: Gunpla Academy, Try Fighters, Sakai’s team, and the European Champ’s team. Somebody’s not fighting Try Fighters, and if narrative logic is anything to go by, the dreaded newcomer is probably jobbing to Gunpla Academy, since the all-rival team needs to be the final match while Sakai has the more compelling individual rivalry, doing for Yuuma (in theory) what Junya did for Sekai.
Sure enough, that’s how it falls out, and it gives us a nice, clean, refreshing, almost Season 1 style fight between Gunpla Academy and our European Champion. A battle where tactics are employed and fast thinking is rewarded, and everyone on the battlefield is enjoying themselves to the end. Really, Aila’s angry little outburst couldn’t have had a better result.
Since the next battle is against Yuuma’s personal rival, it’s also more of a shooting war than the usual magic martial arts fest, with the combining robot (invincible or at least shielded during its transformation scene, not that Try Fighters didn’t try) taking out Sekai and Hoshino leading to a one on one with Yuuma, which Yuuma manages to pull out in a narrow contest. That just leaves Gunpla Academy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also a clean (if vicious) battle. With all but one gunpla on each side busted, it even goes to overtime, with only three minutes to prepare… however, Yuuma made sure all the Try Fighters parts were interchangeable at the joints, allowing him to assemble the broken bits into one awesome mech that can slugfest with the series themesong and conjure up the most over-the-top explosion in the bonus round to finish things with a Try Fighters win.
There’s one more episode after that, but we don’t have a forced adventure aspect this time for an epic 1/144 space battle, so what is it? A little happy denouement with the Builder’s Contest. We get to see everyone (and I pretty much mean everyone) having fun in downtime as they tour the exhibition of entries, including Yuuma’s (which looks like it was inspired by the final FrankenGundam of the championship, but in ya know matching colors and not broken) and Sakai’s as his rival, which isn’t shown at first, just shocked (and laughing) reactions to it. Fumi finds out she’s an inspiration to little girls everywhere just like Lady Kawaguchi was for her. All eyes turn on Fumi in what seems to be pity and embarrassment.
The winner of the junior division is revealed to be not the sick kid from before, but… Gyanko’s also Gyan-loving little brother! Who is the spitting image of the eldest brother, who also ran Gyan-type gunplas. And seems ready to be friends with the sick kid, so that’s happy. Sakai gets the rug pulled out from under him as Yuuma wins (Entry 6 rather than the initially-read entry 9, which would have been Sakai’s) and finally reveals his ultimate creation: a girlpla figure of Fumi in mecha musume maid cosplay gundam armor, much to Fumi’s horror. That is a real kit, in our world. In character I wonder where he got the base plastic for the girl parts.
Since we can’t go without seeing that thing move, we even force a battle between Sakai and Yuuma. Sekai jumps in to defend Fumi’s honor, revealing that when he was on a “training trip” it was gunpla training with Shia. This means that Gyanko and Fumi jump in targeting him, Shia on the defense, Gyanko’s brother… you get the idea, it becomes the most absurd free for all gunpla battle as the entire audience is dragged in. I guess Fumino Hoshino gets to be the face that launched a thousand Gundams.
Thus does the show play us out with everyone having fun playing a game that is supposed to look fun.
Well, there is one last tidbit: Gundam Build Fighters Try: Island Wars, a single episode OVA that sees Team Try Fighters testing out a new edition of the battle system for Nils (along with friends Gyanko, Sakai, Mirai, and Shia). However, the artificial crystal for the new system goes bonkers, forcing Try to do the Fighters ending, super robot style, with the cause being a mysterious little girl revealed at the end to be Aila and Reiji’s visiting daughter. Honestly, I’m not going to count Island Wars for or against anything.
I think that a lot of the unique elements of Try – Super robots, love triangles, over-the-top themed enemy teams – add in to the biggest core divide between Gundam Build Fighters and Gundam Build Fighters Try. You can count one more factor as well: Try has no forced supernatural adventure subplot. It is, legitimately, just about the sports tournament, and the feelings of all the kids (explicitly kids since its an 18-and-under tournament) involved. Given that the meddling CEO and the other-world climax were some of the weakest elements in Build Fighters, their absence in Try is welcome. The synthesis of all this? Compared with Gundam Build Fighters, Gundam Build Fighters Try is much more comfortable being itself.
Gundam Build Fighters might end up being the one of the two that appeals more to Gundam fans, because it’s trying to be more like the most typical core-line Gundam shows: combat that skews tactical and Real Robot, dependent on technical systems. There’s a (theoretically) sweeping storyline about big scifi things and big scifi ideas. It’s still its own thing, but those elements keep it familiar. Build Fighters Try knows its a Gundam-themed sports anime for a younger crowd more than it is a Gundam anime, and so inherits the most Super Robot (flashy, colorful, and “cool”) end of the Gundam spectrum, and dispenses largely with the technobabble and scifi-fantasy plot in order to deliver a stronger core experience with faceted yet colorful leads and powerfully thematic accessories.
Personally, though… I think Try is a significantly stronger show. Because it’s honest, earnest, and fun, it manages to bring some really top level enjoyment. I’m sure you can watch this show and not smile if you’re really trying to hate it, because if you go in trying to hate something in general there are very few properties that can overcome that… but really if you’re going in neutral, hopeful, or even just unimpressed, how can you not?
It’s hard to describe, really, the kind of energy that Build Fighters try brings to the table. It has its sourpusses and its battles that are heated and feel desperate, but generally there’s also someone enjoying themselves, and the whole finish of the show is sweet sweet gunpla love.
This is the vision that Meijin Kawaguchi wanted to show the world at the end of Season 1, when he took on Sei in the ruins of the stadium, desperate to let the people know that it wasn’t all misery and evil CEO’s disaster-causing mind-control helmet BS. That Gunpla was supposed to be fun, something that people do because they love it.
If you’ve ever done competitions, gaming or otherwise, Try really makes you remember the best times out of that, the times when it really didn’t matter who won or lost because the getting there was just so great. It’s a feeling that a lot of these weird sports shows, like Angelic Layer and Aokana have tried to tap into, and Gundam Build Fighters Try is, so far in my experience, the one that gets it best.
And that’s not to say that Try doesn’t have other, more definable and core, strengths. I mentioned at the start that this is pretty much what you want to see out of a sequel, something that’s beholden to its predecessor but respects that part’s ending. I mentioned in the middle, and will mention again, that the characters are solid. Team Try Fighters, Gyanko, the Gunpla Academy Team (Team Celestial Sphere), Sakai… not all of them are necessarily the most rounded or realistic people, but they still feel like people, and people that it feels good to spend 25 episodes with. And take this for example: In Fighters, Class Rep China was the main love interest, and her role in the story was being the girl sitting in the stands who could be cut to for reactions. She wasn’t bad, but she didn’t have a whole lot to her. In Try, the girl in the stands is Gyanko, who had a battle run that felt more coherent than China’s one episode and who made an impression with some real personality… and who isn’t the most core female lead relegated to that post.
The action is the only scale on which Try might be a little weaker than its predecessor. Chalk this up to the differences between Real Robot and Super Robot, but it can get a little old to have “shout louder” or “Believe in yourself harder” be the solution to all your battlefield problems – I kind of wish we got more fights like Yuuma versus Sakai where the other members of Team Try Fighters were really able to strut their stuff, particularly Fumi. I guess she did finish off one match? Generally, the opening salvos and meat of any fight are very good, though, it’s just the ending blows where the cheese is something you either love or leave, and which you do can vary from iteration to iteration.
When we get down to the rating scale, it’s clear that Gundam Build Fighters Try sails on past Gundam Build Fighters in my book. But what about the other clear benchmark, Angelic Layer? Well, when talking about their strengths, there’s a degree to which it’s apples and oranges. Their strengths are different, in a way that I think speaks to their different demographics. In Angelic Layer, the angel battles weren’t quite as engaging as the drama around them, and that was fine. In Gundam Build Fighters Try, the drama around the battles serves to season the battles first and foremost, and that’s also fine.
That said, I will award Gundam Build Fighters Try an A, which is a slightly higher grade than I gave Angelic Layer. My reasoning for restricting Angelic Layer to an A- was that it was more of a show that had B-rank ambitions but did them so darn well that B+ wasn’t good enough. Try does, well, try… and in terms of raw enjoyment factor, it brings something to the table that really goes above and beyond, and earns it that full grade.