Gundam Build Fighters

Since the 00 Diver Ace is plastered all over the advertising its probably not going to be too long before he can use Trans-AM properly.

I don't really see why the GN-Tau drives in what is essentially a Gundam video game need to function identically to the series.

If the Gunpla models were constrained by the series limitations, half the cool stuff in Build Fighters couldn't have happened.

One of the things that bugged me about GBF is why every unit didn't have a GN Drive, or EXAM System, or Zero System, or whatever. They're basically a free Super Mode (though in the case of the GN Drive you'd presumably need an 00 torso, but you'd think that more of the play-to-win people would utilize it).

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I checked to remind myself, and the GN-XI Vs exploded because their pilots deliberately overclocked their Trans-Am functions in suicide attacks against overwhelming forces. The Ogre just has to... not do that and use it normally.

What's precedent ever done for us?

So, about the episode:

Ogre is a peculiar character to me. He's not a bad fighter, and I can totally accept that he's too good for Riku to beat right now (this was, what, Riku's third battle?), but he doesn't seem *that* good to me. Definitely nowhere near champion level.

His talk of "devouring" people's strength I'm just going to chalk up to roleplaying as an oni.

It's interesting that he hasn't actually done anything really bad other than attack Riku. Hell, Do-ji's reaction to them explaining what Do-ji did in the last episode implies that Ogre wouldn't approve of what Do-ji was doing. And the whole "I seek strength" motivation isn't bad in and of itself (especially in Japan, how many To Be a Master shounen heroes have that as their only drive?).

Cool manuever Riku pulled off in that battle. Apparently he has some untapped talent (cliche, but workable).

I'm actually not bothered by his promise not to use Trans-Am for now. As that battle demonstrated, he *isn't* ready. He needs to improve his Gunpla first, or it'll just break again. Deciding not to use it "until I'm ready" is actually a wise choice, I'd say.

Also, what exactly is this "Mass Diver" thing that Dom pilot used?

Also, point against Magee and shopkeeper-girl-whose-name-I-forgot being the same person: she was playing dress up with Soccer Girl while they were in there talking to Magee.

edited 10th Apr '18 12:26:25 PM by DarkHunter

Do we know who is going to pilot the Geara Ghirarga? I'm thinking the Ogre kid is a possibility, since he's piloting essentially a straight-built Vagan suit. Makes sense for him to use a better Vagan suit for his custom later on.

EDIT: Just rewatched the OP. Yep, it's almost assuredly his.

edited 10th Apr '18 12:32:36 PM by Larkmarn

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A bit better than last week's, but I'm still not particularly impressed.

• Still not feeling any of our leads.
• So it seems like Magee is meant to be a transwoman, which could be good if handled well, especially since it looks less likely that she's Nanami.
• McDaniels, my favorite fast food chain!
• Holy shit Patrick won a fight.
• Really hoping that they don't turn Trans-Am into just another power up. 00 tried to avoid that with mixed success. Speaking of which, I'm assuming that Trans-Am works on GN-Tau drives in GBN for the same reason why the Turn X lost the series opening fight despite deploying the Moonlight Butterfly: in-universe game balance.
• Three Doms showed up and didn't do a Jetstream Attack. Weird.
• Ogre is less cringy than I thought he would be but still seems to be there just so Riku can have a rival.
• Unless Nanami can play GBN while playing dressup with Momoka, she's not Magee.
• So looks like Kyoya is this series's Char Clone and he wears the mask (and uses the pirate AGE-2 variant) as part of an alter ego. My guess is that it's so he can have fun without being recognized as the Champion.

Magee did mention to Riku and company about doing something else with his own "Force" ^note (the equivalent of "clans" on GBN), but it could be taken as an excuse to be AFK ^note Away From Keyboard for a bit.

On the other hand, it is possible that Magee and Nanami sharing similar mannerisms could honestly just be coincidence. A Red Herring, so to speak.

"Learn as if you will live forever, live as if you will die tomorrow."

Or Nanami is just really, really fast.

Someone needs to remind the GBD staff that the whole appeal of the Build spinoff series is low-stakes fun, not life-and-death drama. They seem to have missed that memo.

Seriously, Divers takes itself absurdly seriously, given what's actually at stake (ie, nothing). The original GBF destroyed your gunpla if you lost and even it didn't treat it this seriously. Sei trashes like three gunpla in the first four episodes and the most reaction it got was "aw, shucks". Divers has the main character solemnly swearing not to use trans-am because stock moe girl #392 Sarah says it makes his mecha "suffer". Getting ganked by a jackass PVPer is treated as a serious threat rather than an annoyance. A kid on his second day in GBN losing to a veteran player with aspirations on the global competitive scene is treated as a major emotional turning point, not just part of the game.

Like, turn it down a notch, guys. No one in GBD seems to be having fun. It's all very serious, which just comes off as ridiculous when there are no actual stakes.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

MM Os can have fucking awful death penalties. Play a game of EVE, and you’ll see the lengths people will go to to avoid a podkill.

What's precedent ever done for us?

A kid on his second day in GBN losing to a veteran player with aspirations on the global competitive scene is treated as a major emotional turning point, not just part of the game.

I haven't seen the second episode of GBD, but this is exactly the plot of the second episode of GBF.

That might make it a perfect comparison point, though. It's really nigh-identical scenarios, but tonally, they may be treated very differently.

Reiji, though?

edited 11th Apr '18 7:37:07 AM by Larkmarn

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If they want to go that route, then they need to establish that there are serious consequences for losing. GBF does this straight off by having Sei get a shiny pristine gunpla get wrecked in the first five minutes. The stakes are made clear immediately: if you play Gunpla Battle, you're putting all the time and effort that went into your gunpla on the line. Two episodes into Divers, we don't even know what GBN's death mechanics are, though we did learn at the end of the most recent episode that battle damage seems to require repair time in the virtual hangar.

That said, that's all besides my point. GBF was fun because they made it clear that it was a game and a fun hobby, nothing more. People played it because it was fun, and while no one wants to pour their heart into something only to have it blown up in their face, the narrative emphasis is on the fun of participating, not the rewards of winning or the pain of losing. The first time Sei and Reiji face off against Yuuki and get their asses kicked, their reaction is "that was awesome! We'll definitely have to do that again!" not "oh no, we loooooooost!"

No one in GBN seems to be having fun. Of the players we've seen actually fight, Riku and #Sidekick have spent more time worrying about getting killed than enjoying battles. One guy is a dick farming newbies for points. One guy is a hypercompetitive player who spends the whole battle ranting about his HUNGER FOR MORE STRENGTH. A few players are so salty about losing that they gang up three-on-one against the guy who beat them and also use some sort of item to unleash their gunpla's Superpowered Evil Side, or whatever happened there.

The only ones who seems to be enjoying themselves in the last episode are Shopkeeper Girl and Soccer-chan while they're playing dress-up. Kinda dramatically missing the point for a Build series.

Eh, Sei already had ties to Gunpla Battle, though. He was a crap battler, but a great builder, and his dad was former world champion. He was pretty deep in the community already. Riku literally just started.

edited 11th Apr '18 7:35:23 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

That makes sense, then. Really weird, especially since anyone who was depicted about caring about winning above all else was invariably depicted as villainous. Every sympathetic character was essentially a lighter version of a Blood Knight.

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Sei was a great battler, but was too worried about damaging his precious work.

Splitting hairs a bit, but Sei didn't become a great battler until the end of the series. He was shit the whole way through because he didn't want to damage his work. His control skills were on-point the entire time. There's a distinction, however slight.

Nah. Sei was bad at the game which is why he built Gunpla and Reiji was the one doing the fighting. He only started fighting himself after Reiji left for his home planet at the end of the season.

Yeah, that sort of came out of nowhere, to. "You were actually a great battler all along! It was just a mental block the whole time!" was pretty meh, honestly.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Okay, so yeah. Watched episode 2.

... the show managed to get even more cliché. Generic Main Kid whose name I literally cannot remember really is basically Sei and Reiji fused into one person, his naivete, gunplay skills, fighting skills, and overall abilities seem exactly halfway between the two.. For the duration of this post I shall call him Seiji. Though I have to say his lack of knowledge of GBN is utterly inexplicable (other than we need a viewpoint character to have the mechanics explained to us). Seriously, he's already into Gunpla and was so excited to start at GBN... why is it that he didn't know what a "Force" was?

And yeah, I can echo Jovian's "taking it too serious" thing. Ogre I can count as roleplaying and sure, but Seiji wants to win so bad. It is treated as kind of a bad thing (him breaking his vow not to use Trans-Am is treated as a bad thing) so it'll really depend on how they take it from here. Would really like to know what the actual "stakes" are in terms of death, damage, repair time, etc. Smart Best friend and Do-ji both said their suits were being "Customized" not "repaired" so I wonder if it's just a case of Hold Your Hippogriffs to try to remind you that this is Gunpla (which is... tenuous at best).

You know, given how fast you can materialize/dematerialize a Gundam (Seiji went from on foot to blocking a blow as soon in the time it took the severed arm to reach his friends), I'd expect a single neat use of it during the show. Like a Gunpla is being grappled and the user dematerializes it to get out of the hold, or it's about to take a hit and it dematerializes it to dodge (of course, if it's a likely fatal shot it'd just hit the now completely unprotected pilot, but still).

But yeah. Overall I'm not sold, but I'm definitely not unsold. It's enjoyable enough and has potential, but I need to see where it goes.

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I dunno. The prologue and episode one make it clear that Riku is just getting into Gundam and Gunpla as a whole with Yukio being the more knowledgeable of the two. Episode two seems to take place literally the next day or so after episode one. It makes perfect sense that Riku doesn't know much of anything about GBN.

More knowledgeable, sure, but he still has, you know, a lot of Gunpla. And the Distant Prologue shows a noticeably younger Seiji and glasses kid resolve then and there "we are going to do GBD when we get older!"

So we have, at least months of him having the express goal of "playing GBN" and yet somehow not knowing the first thing about it.

Oh, another Headscratcher for me is... do you have to go to Gundambase to play? These are full VR machines so how is GBN so large? Are they going to introduce a home version later on?

edited 12th Apr '18 8:45:22 AM by Larkmarn

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I'm pretty sure the "customization" thing is referring to their actual physical gunpla. They can't play at the moment because their gunpla is at home, in pieces, because they're in the process of reworking it.

As far as the VR rig, I sort of assume that it's an arcade thing. There may be a home version (though we haven't seen any evidence of that one way or the other), I'm sure people can go to their local place with the GBN station and log in, like how various places had Gunpla Battle tables in GBF and Try.

re: game mechanics, the main problem is that the show is mixing the idea that the GBN is Like Reality, Unless Noted and the idea that it runs on MMO mechanics without distinguishing between the two. In the first episode, oni kid had to trick Riku into accepting a battle request, but in the second episode, Riku has to summon his Gundam to protect his friends from getting caught in the crossfire, and then ends up attacked by both sides of the battle-in-progress, all without ever actually pulling up his menu like he did before. Did the have their PVP flags on for some reason? Were they in a PVP zone as opposed to the first episode's tutorial zone? It's not really clear, so it comes off as plot convenience, which is unsatisfying.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I got the feeling the mission they chose (the flower gathering one) locked them into "Free Battle" mode for the duration.

They mentioned the mission allows you to explore the entire GBN world, which would necessarily include Pv P areas. Hence, Free Battle by default.

... which really is a fucking terrible recommendation for Magee to make. "Hey, there's this quest. It's 'pick some flowers.' Oh by the way, you will be going through several active combat zones and can be shot down by anyone. Hell, some Rick Dom with a Beam Bazooka might just shoot you down anticlimactically. Who knows!"

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So, apparently the GM III Beam Master Gunpla manual has information on what that "Mass Diver" thing is:

Mass Divers are cheaters who have hacked in illegal modifications called "break decals". The GBN is not doing a good job preventing their use, but players in-game are proving more effective.