I love model kits. I have made no secret of that this month, and will probably be happily assembling various mechas and mecha musume into the future. I also happen to have a fondness, from the days when I consumed more Western media, for a little cult classic of a film called Tron. For those who know Tron is – I would say – a delightfully dated little adventure that tries to show what goes on deep inside a computer realm, with some very memorable visuals and basic conceits and characters, it can kind of be considered the granddaddy of the “Trapped in a video game” genre that underscores a lot of the “VR MMO” stories you see these days when, you know, MMOs exist and VR doesn’t seem equally implausible compared to digitizing a person’s entire physical existence.
Naturally, where all this is going is Gundam Build Divers. Along with its sequel, Re:RISE, Divers takes the Gundam Build idea and translates it into cyberspace, and we’re going to be looking at it as a double feature this week.
Gundam Build Divers
So after taking on Gundam Build Fighters, how best to introduce Build Divers? Well, it’s basically the same premise to start out with, except this time instead of Gunpla Battle being played in physical space, it’s instead a sort of full dive VR MOBA or MMO. We’re introduced to our main characters, who are a bunch of kids in the same class, and who of course get involved in this iteration of Gunpla Battle.
And before going too much farther, I wanted to address something that I think is broadly interesting: in Build Fighters, Build Fighters Try, and Build Divers, the characters are all supposed to be in middle school, and around 14 or 15 years old. However, these characters are drawn radically differently from each other. In Build Fighters, I think you got the most realistic spread of kids that age. Sei is rather small, while Reiji has clearly hit his growth spurt. China’s not short, but she’s also clearly still a kid. In Build Fighters Try, they skewed the characters to looking older. Sekai’s pretty much the only one who wouldn’t be immediately believable as High School, and late High School at that: Fumi, Yuuma, Sakai, and Gyanko I would not bat an eye if you told me they were 17 or 18.
Build Divers skews to depicting its characters as younger. Riku (the hero type), Yukio (the nerd type), and Momoka (the girl, soccer-playing tomboy though she is) all look like they could be in grade school. Like the Try characters this isn’t strictly impossible for kids their age, but what I honestly think is that Divers was setting its target audience a little younger, and thus made its leads look more like the folks expected to be the primary viewing demographic. The fact that the VR Gundam-battling universe features a host of fantasy avatars including cutesy animal people, elves, furry-eared friends, and so on rather than the look and feel you’d expect out of an in-universe Gundam cast, also adds into this. Though, I will admit, there’s a kind of brilliant visual pun when a player going by Rommel has his avatar literally be what I think is supposed to be a desert fox. Yeah, I don’t think the kids in the audience are getting that one, but it made me smile.
Anyway, we start off with Riku and Yukio getting their first taste of Gunpla Battle Nexus Online, or GBN, the system by which you can scan your built Gunpla model to do battle piloting it in a virtual world. They meet up with an eccentrically-styled pro doing outreach, Magee, and have an initial little adventure running the tutorial, rescuing a mysterious little girl, and fending off a rookie-hunting ganker. If the girl, Sarah, weren’t a plot trinket I think this would be pretty typical day 1 stuff.
Now, far be it from me to say the stakes in Try or even the majority of Fighters were anything to write home about, but those did at least have elimination tournament settings and model damage. The stakes here… are not anything that’s really going to get you invested, so off the bat you know the show needs either a strong plot or heavy charm to catch.
For that plot, we start off with two lines. One is the mystery of Sarah, who just seems all around weird and has the good old “Can tell how things that probably don’t have feelings feel” ability, here referring to the (digital avatars of) Gunpla. The other is that there are hackers called Mass-Divers going around using Break Decals that power them up and cause glitches and, absent any actual admins, the pros seem to be trying to hunt down and crack down on the practice and its techniques, including the big champion teaming up with our leads incognito in order to ambush a few. Champ even ends up friending the group after a harrowing fight with some Mass-Divers and a glitch induced by their BS.
In the process, Momoka starts to tag along, as a generic ball-robot (Haro, to use the Gundam term. It’s kind of a mascot) in the Mass-Diver incident, and then with her own Gunpla, because I guess she wants to hang out with the boys more than she wants them in her soccer club. Together, the lot of them get the “There is no spoon” lesson and some Sun Tzu from a top-ranked player, and then set off for their next destination on the incredibly vague quest to become stronger, during which they’re picked up by a ninja girl, Ayame, who was following them at the behest of a mysterious cloak dude. She disappears and leaves them to their location, an Arabian fantasy themed land of builders and modelers.
Through one episodic villain or another, they eventually find another member for their Force (guild or clan, whatever you call it these days): Koichi, an expert builder who happens to be the older brother of the young lady who handles the gunpla shop. He’s initially angsty because he was a big-timer in the Build Fighters style gunpla battle days (not that it’s the same timeline, we see one of the old machines and it’s neither Fighters PPSE nor Try Yajima Trading), but his team slowly broke apart when the virtual version took over, because I guess fewer wrecked gunpla and VR style immersion was worth not actually seeing the physical things move.
Also, one of Koichi’s former friends, Tsukasa Shiba, is clearly the mysterious dude behind the Break Decals and Ayame, and its fairly transparent if you look at the character models, but I don’t think the target audience is supposed to realize that quite so quickly.
The kids manage to get the guy to reconnect with his toys, and onto the team, dubbed Build Divers, he goes. The first event they want to deal with is 5-v-5, but Sarah doesn’t have a Gunpla, so why not stumble into and invite Ayame? For a ninja, she sure is easy to spot. Together, they take on some of Rommel’s new recruits and win handily
After a filler episode playing around with Ayame (in which we get a few hints that she might not be telling all when she says she’s been a solo player. You know, aside from that “working with the villain” thing.) and another dealing with that newbie-hunter from before deciding to go ahead and be a cheater too by using a Break Decal, we actually get some breakdown on the situation.
It seems the admins can’t intervene because, despite the Break Decals being quite obvious, they’re also self-cleaning and leave no incriminating trace in server logs. I guess this means no punishment for the sympathetic characters who were tempted once like random girl from the filler episode, but more it means that the whole “top players going after it” thing comes to the forefront. The champ and Rommel put together a team and organize a sting operation, but of course Ayame is on the team so that doesn’t go as well as hoped, with an army of Break Decal enhanced mercenary players barring the way. During the battle, Riku peels off based on Sarah’s advice and, since Sarah is clearly unnaturally aware of things, that means he goes the right way to confront the mastermind. Ayame goes with him, though, and gets her orders to intercept, leading to her sudden yet inevitable betrayal and a fight in which we get her backstory delivered to us through a series of flashbacks.
It turns out she did have a team once, that she grew to really like. They all used SD gundams, like she does, and the leader even put a special one together with parts from all the members. Because SD gundams are a little weird and the team was at least kind of good, they made it into upper ranks… and then hit a brick wall against players who actually knew how to deal with them. This caused slowly growing discontent as loss after loss set in, even as their ranking dropped (I guess lower and lower ranked teams got wise) and eventually the fun, happy team stopped having fun and slowly disintegrated, leaving Ayame alone. This would have been bad enough, but that special Gunpla that was proof of the old guard’s friendship? The Mastermind, who was known to them before the fall, has it, traded to him presumably IRL for what was supposed to be an awesome winning gundam (but not the Winning Gundam from Try, which was an SD) during the fall.
Even if Ayame couldn’t get back her broken friendships and happy days, she could at least get back the toy that was the symbol of them, and so she cut a deal with the mastermind to help him out in exchange for the gunpla that stood for her Force core’s friendship. By this point she knows she’s in the wrong, but is also deeply mired in a sunk costs fallacy about all the bad things she’s done as a henchwoman.
I have to say, in a show that has had almost no real character growth and limited dimensions at best for its leads, Ayame’s whole story is the one thing that actually feels real. Sure, it’s small stakes when looked at objectively and not via giant robot battle, but it’s balanced small stakes: she wants an item that holds a deep sentimental value to her (even if it is a plastic toy), and in order to get it her crimes amount to aiding and abetting cheating at video games. Not even cheating herself – she doesn’t use a Break Decal – just helping a cheater prosper. Given that when we eventually do see her IRL self she looks like she’s at least still school age, this is a pretty understandable motivation and course of actions. Not a good or right one, but one that makes perfect sense for a character.
Since this has been brewing for at least a while and she’ll have a bit of debriefing after, she’s also the only character who really feels like she has an arc beyond one episode. Koichi comes close – after all, he has RL ties to the mastermind – but his emotional stakes largely began and ended in his introductory episode. The rest? Riku is a flat character with no clear goals or motivations beyond the incredibly vague “get better at this game”. He’s not even aiming for anything in particular like Sei or Fumi. Yukio has no arc or growth, he’s just the nerdy one. Momoka… gets into Gundam and Gunpla for the first time I guess, but that’s quite quick and smooth and really we have no concerns from her. And everyone outside the main Force is pretty much a single note or gag, which isn’t terrible for assist characters but becomes grating when the leads don’t do any work either.
In any case, since she evidently explained her whole motivation to Riku mid-fight, he and Sarah are able to friendship speech Ayame into submission and move on.
We confront the mastermind and find out his evil plan has nothing to do with cheating and everything to do with those “side effect” bugs, since he seems to want to basically Format C:/ (or sudo rm -rf /* for those using other operating systems) all of GBN. As for a motive, if you’ve guessed who he is you can guess it pretty quickly: it’s Koichi’s story, but where he becomes petulantly angry and vengeful at GBN rather than depressed. This, however, takes forever to get out, with the guy roleplaying the grand evil philosophical JRPG villain while in the body of a Haro. His bugs threaten to actually do the crashing, and since GBN apparently has no cybersecurity nor backups that would allow them to just take the servers offline and revert them, it’s up to the hero legion to take down his hax giant space weapon. This is accomplished when Sarah decides she’ll believe in the heart of the Gunpla too, causing Riku’s machine to sprout giant green fairy wings that erase all the icky bugs and also the Break Decal buffs that were making the baddie invincible.
Because it would be far, far more surprising if the mysterious waif was just a cute mascot and not some kind of plot trinket.
In the aftermath, we hear that the logs of the whole fairy wing thing should allow a patch to eliminate the Break Decal exploit, but of course our mastermind, having just been a nobody on a guest account, is still up to no good and challenges Riku to fight him IRL. In a Gunpla Battle of course, with Ayame’s treasured gunpla as the stakes, since everyone important lives in the same town in this global online game.
He’s actually quite fair and sporting about it for someone who used his offscreen villain darkmater to find Day 0 exploits, develop and distribute hacking tools that have to have physical existences since they’re decals attached to Gunplas, and hire an army of mercenary gamers rather than, oh, sponsoring a small-time league for his preferred version of the game. He busts out his unreasonably cool Gunpla and they have the last great Gunpla duel, with Riku’s maimed and beheaded 00 diver the narrow winner. Tsukasa stalks off, getting a talking-to from Koichi on the way, but evidently does make good on his promise and return Ayame’s special gunpla to its original owner, letting her meet and reconcile with her old friends when they find out.
So, just to recap, the core conflict of the first half of Gundam Build Divers was… the edition wars?
In a sense, Gundam Build Divers captures its subject matter perfectly. Except where Gundam Build Fighters Try captured the best parts of its subject, the fun and excitement of being involved in competition and gaming, Gundam Build Divers captures the worst: the irrelevance, salt, and sometimes sorrow of online existence. I’ve been through Edition Wars. D&D 3rd Edition versus 4th raged for an age. Warhammer Fantasy Battle 8e into Age of Sigmar had the elder side face absolute devastation. D&D 4th to 5th had a long playtest in which sleeping battles awoke once more. But really, they were all internet arguments, and none so epic as to carry 13 episodes of anime.
Anyway, as the second half begins, Ayame says hi IRL and joins the team for real with no premeditated misdeeds this time, and we get a bloody recap episode while Riku rebuilds his Gunpla into its new form. It’s at least as graceful as such a thing can be, and gets us a little new data, like the working theory that the wings thing was GBN’s self-defense program strengthening itself.
Following that we kind of putter around for a bit. Build Divers wins a huge prize from another Force’s challenge, which at least gets a half-decent battle by this show’s standard, and then plays Warsong Gulch for the right to buy an island with their winnings, allying with Ayame’s old friends (who now have a bunch of kids on their team) in the process. We get more pretty much intermission episodes, and during this phase there are two simmering background elements: the admins tracking a weird bug, and a weird golden bird thing following the crew.
Both of these come to a head when the admins pin down that the bug is associated with one of the participants of a certain event, and send their most inconspicuous big robots to go check out the suspects. Most are cleared, but Sarah is not, and as the mech goes after her, she causes quite the storm. At this point the bird intervenes, puts things on hold, and reveals herself to be the main dev behind GBN’s core program. She explains that Sarah is, in fact, a program, or rather an electronic life-form that came into existence in GBN. Her very existence causes bugs, and has spiraled out of control thanks to the big deal AI magic she did to fix the Break Decal problem. The dev sees no way to save both her and GBN but hopes one can be found. The admins have not such a kindly opinion on the matter, and are already preparing a patch to delete her.
Personally I think that if you managed to create what is acknowledged as a living, sapient electronic being (signified as such by being called an EL-Diver) it would at least merit some study, maybe from research institutions that could help with the software and hardware issues said to surround attempts to transfer her somewhere safer, but let’s just pretend such options don’t exist in this universe unless mentioned.
Sarah goes off on her own, and in good time as the admins are hunting her, and announce her existence and the hunt to the entire playerbase to get it done.
Somehow, after dropping all of this in the course of one episode, there are still five more to the show. In that, Champ finds Sarah and Rommel and the Admins find him. They come up with a compromise where they’ll look for another way until the patch is finished, then announce it as an emergency bulletin that sounds more like declaring war on the already-captive Sarah
Koichi, meanwhile, does the smarty pants thing and contacts the one guy he knows who clearly has more ins on the system than its own dev, Tsukasa, and hatches a plan with him to use the Break Decal tech in order to transfer Sarah to a physical body. Dev gets on board with this, but when the message is sent to Team Admin (with the champ, despite his dissenting view, acting as their mouthpiece) they say that a 5% success chance (which goes up as they refine it, but still) with an unknown chance of catastrophic “lose both” failure isn’t good enough. Riku goes to talk with the champ, who pretty much tells him that GBN isn’t a democracy nor is it a dictatorship – it’s more of a punchocracy, so everything will be staked on battles.
The big one, taking up most of the remaining run time is Build Divers and scattered allies against… pretty much everybody else. We do get some cool fights, at least as much as Build Divers can deliver them, along the way, and Sarah is rescued in a complete victory… but wouldn’t you know it, there’s one last buggy raid boss standing between her and tagging the real world. Everyone, and I mean everyone, teams up on it: Build Divers and friends, their enemies from the previous battle, the Admin, even Tsukasa logs in with his badass Build Fighters gunpla for a cool save. This delivers Sarah to the Real World, where a combination of bodgework and repurposed “Actual moving gunpla” tech allows her to exist as a six-inch version of herself.
Yeah, they say that her new body is built to absorb the particles (not explicitly the same ones as Fighters) and that because she has no beams or thrusters, she can go a good while without recharging. This lets all the protagonists, even the ones who don’t normally live in the same town, meet up and have one last party to play us out.
So, how was Gundam Build Divers?
It was far from the worst show I’ve seen, but it was certainly a good deal weaker than Fighters or Try. This is down to a few factors.
The most damning is that point I mentioned where Ayame is the only character who really has an arc, and because she’s a satellite protagonist even that is kind of understated. I guess Sarah feels things too in the end when the plot is all about her, but she’s still more of just the mysterious waif archetype or living MacGuffin that I don’t really credit her too much. Riku is painfully flat, Yukio isn’t much better, and Momoka might have even less to her. We get assist characters, but they’re all fairly single-noted as well, with the award for actually having two notes going to Rommel, since he’s both a cunning strategist and a father to his men who fights against Build Divers in the big battle to rescue Sarah because he knows people (and specifically one of his closest guildmates) who are crippled IRL and need the virtual world to experience being an ordinary human, much less anything more.
Speaking of that, there are the stakes in this show. Once the “Sarah is an EL-Diver” plot kicks off properly, they get a lot better, but it only does that in episode 20 of 25. A stronger finish didn’t save Revisions and it doesn’t save Build Divers. For the entire first arc and half of the second we engage mostly in fairly meaningless virtual battles. Sure, the characters are invested in them, but because the characters are so flat I’d be more invested in my favorite Let’s Players doing the same thing. Seriously, I think there are more dramatic moments in a good playthrough of the HBS Battletech game than there are in this show.
It’s not that you can’t have a story taking place in a digital world be dramatic, but you have to control carefully how you present it. Some have real stakes. Others, like Bofuri, have good moments combined with a greater scope understanding of what they are and what makes them fun. Sure, there are no stakes in that show (even less than in Build Divers) but the writers clearly knew that and made it part of the charm. Build Divers is at this awkward place where it wants to be a “real stakes” affair but can’t manifest them.
The stakes in Build Fighters weren’t high. It was a sports competition, nothing more. Nobody was dying. Most people could try again next year. But at the same time, each battle typically presented two forces, one of whom would be going home empty handed because of the results when neither of them wanted to. This led to the characters being able to get invested and go all out. Here, the motivator is basic gamer pride, and little attempt is made to sweeten the pot, outside of the mid-season and final climaxes which don’t feel as awesome as they could because the journey getting there was arbitrary and meaningless.
Most of the rest of the show is a downgrade too. I guess if you really hated the super robot tropes in Try you might prefer the battles here, since most of them involve some actual strategy and it’s not as though the first season of Fighters (or Gundam in general for that matter) is entirely bereft of the occasional screaming beam battle. But even then, the animation – while not objectively bad – is certainly below the par set by Fighters or Try. Maybe the best battles here could match in raw art quality the weaker ones there, but blow for blow it’s a clear downgrade.
All in all, Gundam Build Divers gets a C from me. It’s a wholly mediocre affair. What few interesting ideas it may have raised with Sarah it didn’t really do much to address, and the greater part of the whole is just a morass of middle schoolers in an MMO.
Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE
Much like Gundam Build Fighters Try compared to Gundam Build Fighters, Re:RISE takes place years after the original Build Divers (though only two this time) and features new characters as its central cast. I said when reviewing Try that I thought this was a pretty ideal setup for a sequel, and that holds just as well when I didn’t much care for the first outing, since it makes more of a break… and what a break it is.
Though still beholden to some of the aesthetic choices of Build Divers, Re:RISE has a drastically different feel from the start. Part of this is down to the cast – main character Hiroto Kuga is a dark and brooding late teen sort of figure, a 17-year-old high-school student unlike the previous Build series protagonists, who clearly has a lot of weight on his shoulders. He starts out as a veteran solo player, looking for something in the upgraded and expanded GBN world and haunted by memories of a blonde girl (who we come to understand pretty quickly was Eve, an EL-Diver like Sarah) while brushing off others who might try to approach him for his skills.
Right after introducing this hook as a player, we also see his reality, including a frazzled writer of a father, a caring mother who works as a translator, and childhood friend Hinata Mukai, who doesn’t play GBN but does seem to look after Hiroto as he goes through this teen brooding phase of his, and works at a cafe attached to the Gundam Base store so we can see her a reasonable amount.
Despite his standoffish nature he still gets dragged into a mysterious mission by a fellow player who’s pretty much his opposite: the loud, boastful Kazami (Justice Knight as he calls himself). Along with them, due to the circumstances of encountering the quest trigger, come our fellow main characters Parviz (who is painfully shy and timid) and May (Also a tall, dark, brooding loner, so of course there seems to be a connection between her and Hiroto). Together, they complete the quest to save an NPC major character for the show, Freddie, which sees them thrown into a team with the name “Build Divers”, just like the heroes of two years ago (well, thanks to May thinking quick they’re the legally distinct BUILD DiVERS. To be fair the name was a default and they only had a few seconds to change it)
Hiroto seems to have some particular concerns or hangups about Build Divers (the originals) too, but it’s not immediately made clear what that is.
After this first rescue, the crew might have gone their separate ways (particularly Hiroto doing his thing and May seemingly acting as an agent for the just as flamboyant as ever Magee), but Freddie is able to resummon the team when they’re all logged in to continue with the next step of his mission, during which it becomes clearer that in this new hidden area, a lot of normal game mechanic conveniences like summoning and desummoning your robot seem to be disabled, having the new world operate on more realistic physical law. This is what we’d like to call a hint, along with comments that the NPC scripts seem a bit overdeveloped.
In this area, it seems that villages of fuzzy animal people like Freddie are being menaced by purple-themed AI Gunplas the locals know as One-Eyes. Over the course of a few battles defending the local village against the One-Eyes and taking on one of their bases, we cement two more huge differences between Divers and Re:RISE.
The first is that Re:RISE has a much more concrete story. The first arc in Divers, about Riku wanting to become strong and thus doing, let’s be honest, mostly random stuff involving meeting side characters and sparring with episodic cheater villains who don’t matter, was quite wanting. Here in Re:RISE at least we’re following what’s theoretically a Story Mission, which has a clear progression of its plot even if it’s not entirely real to the players involved. And on that score, May is rather focused and taciturn in general, while Hiroto and Parviz seem to get invested and Kazami… Kazami is the perfect example of “Player character sociopathy” where even though he’s playing a theoretical good guy he clearly doesn’t care about anything except the mechanical rewards, which is pretty standard in gaming. Admit it, you’ve skipped quest text or cutscenes in the past. To watch, though, his attitude is a mixture of callous and boastful that is often kind of annoying even if it does represent a valid player type. At least it makes amusing the fact that he usually ends up in pain of some description.
Speaking of the characters, that’s the second big difference: we have characters with issues. Hiroto and May are somewhat slow burn, but fairly quickly we leap into an arc for Parviz. It’s clear from the start he’s timid to an extreme fault, and is established fairly early that he seems to be afraid of heights. And before any complaints form, this makes a lot of sense: people with even mild phobias of things like heights (I know a few) will react to the scenario coming up in games that are played on a screen. In a VR game that’s explicitly extremely realistic you bet it will come up. Naturally, this matters a good deal seeing as most Gundams (and thus Gunpla) have some ability to fly and Par… can’t. His machine, as it turns out, is perfectly capable, but he can’t handle it emotionally.
Between that and his general inexperience he even wants to withdraw from the group (which it’s established would mean they’d all “fail the quest” and be unable to re-enter, quite the nuisance when there are multiple IRL days required between steps even if it were possible to re-trigger and restart it). But gets taken along into one last fight where the threat presented to the NPCs, characters with which he’s grown to care about, causes him to overcome his fears and fight like the badass he can be.
This entire sequence is the meat of two episodes and was set up earlier. In a sense it’s a rather minimalist character arc, the sort of basic sequence you would expect, but after Divers? It’s a breath of fresh air that also gives hope that one of the two more annoying Re:RISE characters will be less frustrating to watch going forward.
We follow this up with a growth arc for Kazami. Yeah, the screaming idiot who manages to contribute even less positive than Parviz through the early bits? He actually has somewhere up to go as he stews over his old failure, the team meets some of his old “friends” (at least some of whom feel bad for him even if they split up on poor terms), and he has to face up and actually learn the lesson his idol, Captain Zeon, tries to evoke. During this phase, we’re introduced to more of the resistance against the One-Eyes and the fact that there are bigger and scarier than automated grunt suits, with a real bad guy blowing up a base the team was getting supplies to, but mercifully missing the MacGuffin for their next stage of “quest”.
This phase also works with Hiroto as well, as he’s called out on his lack of faith in his friends, and is brought more to mend his ways and accept some teamwork after who knows how long being a gruff rogue. It’s small, but it is there. The boss Gunpla that does the destroying also seems to be related to a mystery that May is investigating for Magee, so there is that.
And from there, we move into looking more into Hiroto and May. The similarities between them are noticed, and seem to intrigue May, as does the fact that she can’t read Hiroto as easily as she does others. They have a few good talks, including one that runs in parallel with a chat between Hinata and the friendly Gundam Base clerk who knows Hiroto pretty well about what might have hurt him in the past and what he’s looking for now. Something that can’t be found, he says, while May admits that she’s searching for a purpose, or “mission” to really call her own. This while the team readies itself for an underwater raid to help scout a One-Eyes base that seems to be pretty important.
They take on the giant aquatic robot monster that’s guarding the way to the enemy space elevator, during which Hiroto learns his important lesson about teamwork, but that surprise boss shows again in the aftermath and puts Hiroto on the ropes. May intervenes, taking a hit for him that wrecks her Wodom Pod, only for a new machine to emerge from the wreckage: Mobile Doll May, the re-scanned from of an EL-Diver’s outer world body just like the one Sarah had in the epilogue of Divers, revealing that she, like Eve from Hiroto’s flashbacks, is an EL-Diver (and one with a physical world version at that)
Not only does this get us a cool if brief sequence where she seriously shows off her moves piloting the mech that’s essentially her body, allowing her to confront the mysterious boss with a name and force him into retreat, this is our first real follow-up on the EL-Diver concept. Sure, we got the idea Eve (still unnamed in the actual show) was one, but now we sort of see how this has matured. Evidently, there have been eighty-seven recorded EL-Divers salvaged the same way that Sarah was, and even though this should be a kind of reality-shattering truth on the conceptual level, the birth of independently thinking beings from human technology, most people don’t seem to have strong opinions one way or another about them, as they’re allowed to live quietly among humans both when logged in to their birth-realm and out in real life.
In the wake of this revelation about May, we mostly focus on Hiroto being in something of a state, while getting more hints about the fact that this “story mission” is something quite different, seeing as they note more mechanical weirdness, and that Hiroto has an injury mimicking one he took in the battle. This also opens us up to exploring May better. To keep the reveal at least a little subtle (and guessing it isn’t entirely free from the start, even if it is possible), we couldn’t focus too much on May’s inner world. Now that we know she’s an EL-Diver the show can and does do more work on her attempts to connect with human feelings and emotions – her “search for a mission” if you will.
After spending a respectable amount of time processing this and having downtime where the characters can actually breathe and interact, they take the captured Space Elevator into orbit, and from that position visit the enemy moonbase. There they meet a strange being called Alus that comes off very much as a glitching AI, who asks a lot of questions, provides few answers, and when told about the Resistance proceeds to convert the moon of this world, Eldora, into more of a Death Star in order to blow it away. After a peaceful entrance, the withdrawal leaves the team shooting their way out and facing both a vast swarm of enemies and that boss again.
This leads to a desperate space battle in which Hiroto sees there’s a human pilot for that boss mech, and the team noodles out they have to stop the moon cannon before it can fire on the Resistance core city… and fail. By seconds, they’re too late to destroy the cannon. The city burns, several fairly likable characters along with it. The world shudders as shockwave and dust storm blow across everything we know there. All the best striving means the cannon seems to suffer a minor explosion, likely rendering it unable to make a second shot any time soon, but the team is still deorbiting down into hell, with nothing but a crater where many of their friends used to be. They make their way to the village where their story began and find shaken, injured, and grieving refugees unable to process the scale of the devastation. In that misery, they realize – they lost the battle, but no mission was failed, no ending displayed, they weren’t kicked out like normal. This is no mere game, they start to think, as the system finally disconnects them from the maimed world of Eldora, and then from the game entirely as it crashes, seemingly part of a sudden case of server outages across the real world.
As the outside world declares the disaster to be a sort of solar storm-like celestial event, May manages to call everyone together IRL. This includes Hiroto, herself (Gunpla-sized but done up in a very nice little gothic dress), Kazami (Actually a kind of shrimpy kid), and Parviz (wheelchair bound thanks to a plane crash, super-rich, and seemingly something Arab-associated, making some clear connection to one of the side characters from season 1, who is in fact his big brother). She leads them to the comatose body of a young man with the name she used on the boss in Eldora, suggesting that his mind remains trapped in that space. In his hospital room, they’re shown a picture that proves he was part of the Eldora situation long before, working with a native who was worried about being “betrayed again” when our heroes showed up, effectively confirming the persistent nature of that world. May’s mission was to search for him, since there was no log-out record when he went comatose.
It’s also confirmed that no such setting as Eldora or story mission like the team faced was implemented in GBN, forcing everyone to shed their last layers of mental defense and come to terms with the fact that those were living, real people they failed to save. Between the heavy burden and the threat of ending up trapped as well, it’s a lot for the team to deal with.
Through that devastation, they find their reasons to go back, in Hiroto’s case thanks to a rather nice conversation with Hinata. They find each other in the alley where they met by chance and were recruited by Freddie by the first place, understanding that this is no game but feeling like they have unfinished business, and a duty to do what they and only they can do for the people they’ve met.
Just as a reminder, this is Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE, part of the Gundam Build line of shows that have up until this entry skewed light, colorful, and child-friendly. Campy sports and game shows that whether at their best or worst had not been the kind of affairs where people die or have to face choices harsher and more terrible than doing their best in a competition. You don’t suddenly have the wrong review – somebody took the wheel of the franchise and swerved hard… and it’s kind of awesome.
In any case, this was also a cour split, so Re:RISE picks back up with a recap, showing the previous story from Freddie’s point of view, where we see how he got to the point of summoning the leads and dubbing them Build Divers. Why the temple connects to GBN is unclear at this point, but basically it seems like he was able to attune to it and watch recaps of the first season (among other logs)
When Build Divers return to Eldora, all is not well. Even aside from the devastation, their Gunplas couldn’t be completely summoned, evidently because “sparkling sand” that makes up their bodies and machines was blown away from the temple (sounds like nanomachines to me, but that’s an easy handwave). Thus the team splits up on a quest to find more at other sites: Hiroto and May, who have functional Gunplas, to a temple where there are enemies, where they find more about the cores that drive Alus’s evil machines. Kazami goes a different way, being driven by the alien catgirl who was kind of tsundere with him before and who he might be developing a thing for. And Parviz and Freddie? They’re off to see the wizard, or rather the Sacred Beast Cuadorn (aka a dragon) that lives in a floating sky temple.
The other teams strike out, but as they meet up and are set upon by Alus deciding to pilot a gunpla itself at them, Parv and Freddie met Cuadorn and awaken it, gaining a powerful ally that clears the field for the moment. The dragon explains that Alus was a being created by the technological “ancients” that were often mentioned as a protector of the planet. Evidently, Alus will not rest until the Eldoran folk we know, known to Cuadorn as the “New People” are wiped out, because his job is to protect the planet for the Ancients, not some successor race, seeing them as the invaders he was meant to guard against.
Meanwhile, Cuadorn also answers why there’s the whole Isekai from GBN element. It seems that while most Ancients departed the war-torn Eldora in a space fleet, leaving it to their uplifted furries and hoping their descendants would return to reclaim it like Project Boomerang in Ergo Proxy. Some, hoping to see the regenerated world themselves, transformed their consciousness into data and departed that way, leaving the temples as a way to return. As a steward left by the Ancients, Cuadorn tried to trace their signals to retrieve them, since they could call off the awakened Alus and end the genocide, but the only signals he could trace dead-ended in GBN. This is where he found a helper in the fight against Alus – Masaki, the guy May was looking for, who was eventually overtaken by Alus to bring us to where we are now.
This also resolves the formerly very handwavey origin of the EL-Divers, as it’s strongly suggested (eventually pretty much confirmed) that they emerged at least because of the data of the Ancients being implanted into GBN. They may not be the Ancients themselves, but the idea that “living” thoughtforms seeded the rise of others from data is a less fantastical (or less dated) explanation than “Just enough random junk data became life”. And the handwave was fine enough for Divers and could have been serviceable for Re:RISE, but it’s nice to see it improved upon.
After an episode where Alus uses a possessed version of Hiroto’s gunpla to come out and play (because, you know, it’s rather nice to have actual interaction with our villain in order to build antagonism), we launch into Hiroto’s backstory, due to him having to explain what Alus, who seems to know some of it, was on about, and what he means when he talks about the promise he made in the past.
We see how he met Eve, who was probably the first EL-Diver or at least one earlier than Sarah (given that she refers to Sarah as her little sister). She does talk pretty much like a slightly more eloquent and emotive Sarah, but that’s charming enough. We get pretty much a whole episode of their good times together as friendship and possibly even a little young love seem to bloom, but then Eve asks Hiroto to erase her. The reason for this is that after Sarah did that green wings thing and started bugging out the System, Eve tried to contain the damage. However, she reached her limit and will soon invert, releasing all the bad code she’s stored in herself. Before that happens, if GBN is going to survive, she needs to be erased – to die – so she can go out as herself and take all the bad she’s contained with her.
A lot like with the whole moon cannon incident, I will remind my audience that this is a Gundam Build series. Where a young woman who does not actually want to die has to beg for death at the hands of someone she likes, probably her beloved, because the alternative is that the world she lives in goes kaput and everything they shared with it. And she gets it – shot through the heart by Gundam laser and just able to offer some last wishes as her body disintegrates into the digital aether.
I’m not sure who decided that was a good move in a kids’ show, but hats off to them. Being for kids doesn’t mean you need to have no drama or no emotions, and Re:RISE is doing its damndest to offer up both.
Later, as a member of Avalon, Hiroto was part of the massive battle when Build Divers came to rescue Sarah. He hears all of Riku’s speeches and realizes that Riku is basically him but younger, and after the champion goes down, while Avalon’s forces scramble for anyone to intercept, he has the perfect, clean opportunity to take a sniper shot and give the previous season a tragic ending, target locked in and everything, but in the last second he remembers Eve’s last wish that he stay a good person who helps others, and it overwhelms his rage and probably envy and sees him put his shot into the ground instead.
Those moments – killing Eve, and very nearly forgetting her wishes and fighting against Sarah’s happy ending – haunt Hiroto still, why he was unable to save someone so important to him, and why he nearly dishonored her memory. Back in the present, as he breaks down having been confronted with it all again and having to say it out loud, May shows her best dere side with a tender little kiss on the cheek and a hug as he cries out all the grief he probably never let himself have out with before. After that’s done, a nice speech from Freddie helps actually lift spirits, and the Re:RISE team, Hiroto included, seem ready to move forward.
Where is forward exactly? To deal with their trapped predecessor, who after the moon battle seems to be berserk, fighting both Eldorans and Alus’s forces. But first, a little emotional decluttering and track-changing, largely in the real world. Hinata, though worried because she’s learned about the “Mind trapped in GBN case” (Masaki’s sister is her senpai and friend), notices Hiroto seems to be a little more back to his old self. The team meets up IRL again and comes up with a plan, both to refine their own Gunplas and to use Gunpla parts to give the injured dragon a prosthetic wing. And before the fateful fight, Hiroto even has cause to tell Hinata the truth about it, and we see them talk out her worry for him, with his promise to both save Masaki and come home safe himself.
The team finds their mark, but Alus makes it more of a fight, determined to reclaim a piece on his board, and take them as well if possible. May gives him a good talking to while Hiroto takes on Masaki, damaging some of the mind control rig which allows him to become lucid… lucid, enough, to at first beg to be killed for the things he did while controlled. Hiroto, having just finished coming to terms with answering such a plea and with having been in a state of self-loathing himself, has no hesitation denying that wish, bringing us a pretty dang strong boss fight against a cursed tentacle-swarmed Gundam and Alus’s elite host mechs while the guy’s body in the real world starts to go into medical distress. A fixed up Cuadorn joins in, and Hiroto talks him down from accepting the “kill me” request (with some help from May and the others), so Masaki is brought to and logs back out to reality in a narrow victory over Alus. They even fake us out a moment as he has to recover from a flatline in the hospital.
And I realize I am going heavily in depth on the summary here, but once it hits the second half especially, every episode of Re:RISE is absolutely loaded with story that needs to get out because it is relevant emotional beat after relevant emotional beat with no filler. It’s the kind of review I both love and hate because I end up retelling the show like this, but it’s usually good ones that do it.
In any case, the setup for the final battle takes the time it needs. The team builds their Gunpla to spec, have their emotional talks, including with the guy they rescued, and even meet the original Build Divers when Magee sets up a training mission for them versus pretty much all the strongest players in GBN to simulate the raid on the moon cannon. After clearing the practice run (it having taken many attempts) we get a couple good moments. For one, Kazami’s idol, Captain Zeon, appears to be Rommel in an alt account, and he’s very pleased to meet a fan. For the other, we round out Hiroto’s arc as he and Riku talk, if briefly, both opening with an attempt to apologize for how the whole Eve/Sarah thing went down.
The battle is joined, and I know this has been going forever, but I want to highlight how the main space battle episode is framed: New Build Divers and their allies are fighting to destroy the moon cannon in the nick of time, and this is shown parallel with Hinata performing a bow ritual for her local shrine. This might seem odd and intrusive to say it, but part of the charm of Re:RISE is that it’s handled its characters in a way where this is actually very fitting instead: we got several talks between Hinata and Hiroto that had substance, including one just before the fateful day where they both admit that they draw strength from the fact that the other believes in them, and will be praying for success on the other side. So when all four Build Divers mechs form up into an ultimate fusion mech and win a beam battle shootout with the moon cannon at the same moment Hinata looses her arrow and strikes a ritual bullseye, there’s a sense of, while not literal causal connectedness, emotional connectedness that helps ground the show.
Even Fighters, which was pretty good, didn’t do this much work with its characters. China and Hinata had very similar roles: satellite female leads for the main boy. But Fighters wasn’t concerned with the psychology as much, so their interactions were China cheering from the stands or a few moments of mutual blushing, while Hinata, despite arguably being even less attached to the main action, feels like a more important person in Hiroto’s life. Along with the obvious bits, like all the mayhem and sorrow, this is part of what marks Re:RISE as a more mature show not just than the first Build Divers, but than any other entry in the Gundam Build series. Mature doesn’t mean better, but it does mean something.
In any case, with his moonbase wrecked beyond repair and having received a pretty good friendship speech from Freddie (on May’s initial suggestion in the planning phase), Alus is offered mercy, to sleep again until his creators truly return. Though Alus was moved to feel through this, even shedding a tear at Freddie’s speech, the emotion that overcomes him is rage and he decides, if that’s what’s in the way of his mission, the “People of the Gunpla” have to go. He infoports himself into GBN, uploading with an entire interstellar battle fleet… but of course he’d seen at most five GBN players with no real understanding of the game world they came from, so he basically just turned himself into the coolest raid boss yet seen over there, especially since our heroes were streaming the fight so everybody is waiting for him.
The look on his face when he realizes just how badly he screwed up there is brief, but priceless.
Alus gives a good account of himself, even damaging the servers themselves with his attacks as he quickly realizes he’s in a digital world, but Cuadorn destroys his server on Eldora cutting him off from the option to retreat and every player in a massively popular MMORPG is descending on him like a swarm of blood-and-loot-hungry flies, so the mood is more triumphant than it is desperate, loaded with the continuity kind of fanservice as every character from across fifty previous episodes of anime gets their hits in, ending as Hiroto and Riku, in time, do diving catches of their respective EL-Diver maybe-girlfriends (yeah, even Sarah decided to fight as a pilot) and then blast Alus’s last vessel right to the factory reset.
And that’s not really a metaphor – as he disintegrates into GBN’s data, he even sees the Ancients he hoped to meet once more, and from the ashes, a new EL-Diver is born (even in an infant-like state, so presumably it’ll be a bit before he can be loaded into a Gunpla). This last minute gives us a chance to see that Alus’s successor is born with a pendant resembling symbols from his previous life… and May has something similar, an item that’s the spitting image of a unique piece of jewelry Hiroto made for Eve that’s revealed when she takes off her outer coat to hold the newborn close to her chest, which only Hiroto recognizes (May herself doesn’t seem to know the significance). Still, May learns what it means to have happy tears, gives us the most precious earnest smile because it’s pretty much her only one and they make it count, and we move into the epilogue.
The Devs clarify a few facts, GBN thinks that was a cool event, and a war-weary Eldora rebuilds, with the team still able to visit. They even bring Hinata along to see it.
In our final scene, a couple of the comedy relief Eldorans, driving their lost tech hover-car through the desert, come across one of Alus’s core robots. It shudders in terror, lost and confused, and they consider what to do… and give it a lift and a sombrero, suggesting any cycle of violence is well and truly ended.
Whew. That was… a trip.
Re:RISE is kind of hard to view in the context of the Gundam Build series. It’s a direct sequel to Divers, by far the weakest of the lot, building on its setting and its few good ideas, but the direction it goes is pretty much nothing like the other build shows, resembling instead a more straightforward mecha-action-drama affair. It does serious emotional play with its characters, and I mean all of them, even down to characters who weren’t plot important enough for me to name in my novel of a review, and presents a plot that’s mature in its presentation and full in its action. It’s not a sports show, and the “gaming” theme is thin as well. It’s the premise, and it frames the first half, but that’s not what the show is actually about. Of non-Gundam-Build shows that I’ve actually reviewed, the most comparable wouldn’t be Angelic Layer (as it was for both Fighters shows) or Bofuri (which was kind of the comparison point for Divers), but rather actually hard to say: it’s got shades of Gurren Lagann or RahXephon, or Escaflowne but really it’s welding its pieces together in such a way that none of those is perfectly comparable.
In a sense, this makes it a massive and successful bait and switch. Until the orbital cannon fires, you could mistake this for something that would fit better into its parent series. But, because the audience could probably catch on before the characters do, it’s not the kind of swerve that just loses you. It feels very legitimate.
So, we have the strengths: memorable and rounded characters, a solid plot, decent action (better than Divers, still probably not as technically well-animated as Try or well-choreographed as Fighters, but keep in mind those are very high marks), some good sci-fi ideas, some real emotional work… but what are Re:RISE’s weaknesses?
Well, it does start slow. Part of why the characters can grow so much is that they start out with a lot of room to grow. Episode 1, Hiroto is tolerable, but isn’t the world’s most likable grump. May is taciturn so it’s easy to write her off even if she won’t offend. Parviz is painfully timid, just really this poor wilting flower so much that he’s not often a positive presence. And Kazami… poor Kazami, he starts off this show like a “Greatest Hits” reel of Kazuma’s jerk moments filtered through that one twit of a gamer who only wasn’t gkicked sooner because he was the main healer’s little brother IRL. You know the one, I’m convinced every MMO team has him. Hiroto doesn’t stay too grumpy for too long and there’s at least a reason why May is kept mysterious early on, but Parviz takes five episodes to turn around and Kazami needs even longer to start digging himself out of the nearly Daisuke-sized and shaped hole his “I’m the leader and the hero!” antics dropped him down.
Now, this is all pretty much covered by the halfway point of Re:RISE, and there was good stuff before then as well. But while it’s in a decent place for the show’s runtime, the realtime can probably drag on people. There’s an extent to which Re:RISE does play like one particular strain of fiction for kids: the coming of age story, which necessitates spending time with your lead as a twit and thus presents something of a barrier for entry. This wouldn’t be the first work I’d have to defend to an unspoiled viewer with “No, seriously, you’ll like these guys by the end!” and have those words probably fall on deaf ears.
With that, it comes time to grade Re:RISE. It has a substantial barrier to entry; I don’t think you actually need Divers, they explain the whole EL-Diver thing well enough for newcomers even if some of the specifics will be a mystery, but the first act could be a bitter pill to swallow depending on your tolerances. On the other hand, it has a really good payoff. On the third… it kind of misses some of the magic of the Build stuff? True, they actually spend more time doing gunpla-building and refining here than they did in Divers, and solve a lot of problems through cleverness in plastic model kit work, but because it’s ultimately all real it doesn’t shine through as clearly, orphaning the Gunpla (rather than Gundam) idea to an extent. That’s not a big problem, but it does bear mention.
So, I’m going to grade Re:RISE not as a Build show so much as in the capacity of being its own legit Mecha show. The grade it receives is A. True, it has some drawbacks, even nasty ones, but it also has moments that really reach for greatness, and a strong core consistency that hit beat after beat just right. If you have trouble getting into this, it’s probably in part to do with the needs of its story structure, and those potentially repulsive elements are absolutely needed to a degree.
If you’re going to check out only one of the Gundam Build series… watch Try. I’m sorry, Re:RISE, you get the same letter grade, but Try is the pure Build experience. If you want a more straight-up Scifi action show, though, Re:RISE is your ticket. Enjoy!