Go fight, go fight
What They Say:
“Reborn Try Fighters”
Once upon a time, the Gunpla Battle world championship was held at the PPSE Stadium. After the Plavsky particle accident seven years ago, the damaged stadium was demolished, and a monument was placed there bearing the names of previous champions. Now, the Gunpla Battle Japanese Championship tournament is about to begin at the Yajima Stadium, which has been newly constructed next to this site. As champions gather from every prefecture, having fought their way through the regional qualifiers, Sekai again encounters Wilfrid Kijima of the Gunpla Academy. Meanwhile, Yuuma learns that Minato Sakai is also entering the tournament as one of the representatives from Osaka. The next day, brackets are drawn after the opening ceremonies, and the Try Fighters immediately enter battle as they are assigned the first match of the tournament. Their opponent is Okhotsk Academy, representing South Hokkaido, a team that placed in the best 8 of last year’s national tournament!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
It’s a new day with new gunpla for Team Try Fighters. Lightning Gundam, Winning Gundam, and Build Burning Gundam are all revamped to the specs of the fighters. It’s an unfortunate consequence for their opponent, Team Amorphous, who’s only there to be the fall guy.
Most of the episode is spent in the lead up to the fight. New rivals from training camp are re-met and rivals of old return in true form. Minato Sakai is back and he’s willing to be stupid to beat Yuuma. He dances around in an elevator declaring his victory, not yet won. It’s the essence of fun in Gundam Build Fighters.
Yuuma also explains that battle damage will be set to A in the upcoming tournament. I like how subtly the battle damage thing is brought up, because it’s never expressly said that B does less damage and C does even less; that much can be garnered from mere intuition. I think it took them a little too long to show that, though. I heard battle damage set to B in the earlier episodes, but I didn’t figure that meant that almost no damage was taken by the gunpla. But now with the damage level set to A, maybe we’ll see Sekai and Yuuma really working on Build Burning. Yuuma is already building spare parts.
The fight is where we truly see the gunpla’s improvement. Sekai’s the same as always, charging into battle and fighting hand to hand. But he’s hardly taking any damage, even with the higher damage level. The aura his gunpla exudes is enough to fight off the stray gunfire from the other, lesser gunpla. He breaks through one in quick order without even breaking the arms off his gunpla as he did before. The trump card, however, seems to be out in the open for everyone else.
It’s in the others that the improvements really show. Hoshino, instead of solely supporting, can now fight on her own and does successfully twice. She defeats one of Team Amorphous’ gunpla and incapacitates the other for Yuuma to finish off. Even with an SD gunpla, she can fight against the best. The other is a gunpla that can change into Trans Am mode, which outputs three times the particle emission as the normal. In default, Yuuma’s gunpla is able to keep up with this, no doubt because of his work and study on Sei’s Build Burning. He’s no doubt gained confidence as a fighter after his encounter with Meijin Kawaguchi. He’s better for it.
In Summary:
It’s easy to show growth like that, against a relatively weak team. Team Try Fighters prevailed this time, but next time may not be so easy. It seems that Yuuma and Sekai are willing to work in tandem now, but that barely scratches the surface of teamwork. Gundam Build Fighters was always one on one, but with a team, Gundam Build Fighters Try can do so much more than three individual one on one battles.
I’m excited to see how this tournament plays out. I think having Team Try Fighters win in their first appearance would be a little too much, but execution is what’ll matter here. It has to feel like they earned the victory and not like it was given to them for the sake of the plot.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: YouTube
Equipment: PS3, LG 47LB5800 47” 1080p LED TV, LG NB3530A Sound Bar
