BF Episode #14 Worthy Rivals

During a Battle Royal among representatives from each school under the Meijin’s supervision, Sekai Kamiki and Wilfrid Kijima have acknowledged each other as rivals, and they promise to fight again at the national tournament. Yuuma Kousaka, meanwhile, declares that he will get revenge on Saga Adou and looks to the tournament with fresh resolve. Elsewhere, the final regional qualifiers are completed, after being delayed by problems with the venue. The winner of the Osaka qualifiers is team Build Busters from Tendaiji Academy, to which Minato Sakai now belongs. With the national tournament 10 days away, the champions from the participating schools steadily make their preparations. Fumina and her comrades, aiming to defeat the Gunpla Academy, set out to power up their own Gunpla and address their shortcomings based on their experiences at the Nielsen Labs. As the start of the tournament draws near, Gyanko and others come to help, and at last the Try Fighters’ new machines are completed.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I guess if battle damage level is set to a certain level, it’ll “show” the damage through the Plavsky Particles with minimal actual damage to the gunpla. I realized this by Sekai’s Build Burning having its arms broken apart and then the Plavsky Particles turned off and the arms were fine. So that’s how Build Burning was never really damaged! Now I know. Minor upkeeps have been easy enough for Yuuma.

But enough of that! Gundam Build Fighters is hardly about poking into what’s wrong about it. It’s too much fun for that.

This episode is about gunpla. For a commercial about gunpla, though, we hardly learn anything about the toys themselves. It’s a lot of montages of them fixing, but not any “tutorials,” so to speak, of them taking from this and that machine to customize their gunpla. I’d like to see this! I’m a gunpla amateur and can barely manage to build my own machines, but I’m always curious to see how other people customize their own machines. I love browsing tumblr for customized machines and I sit in awe of them. I’m only a little disappointed that so little time was spent on the customization aspect.

It’s made up for with the character interactions. This episode reminds us that Gundam Build Fighters is really fun, even without the constant battles. Gundam Build Fighters is about friends doing stuff, and the stuff they happen to be doing is gunpla battles. It’s exciting inside and outside of them. Watching them build is just as fun as watching them fight, just as watching Reiji and Aila argue about food is just as fun as watching them battle gunpla. Seeing Gyanko and Shimon come back to help just confirmed everything; this show turns enemies into friends and rivals into companions. It isn’t about the game, it’s about enjoying it.

In Summary:
I was really temped to just say, “Man, I really love Gundam Build Fighters!!” and call the review a day, but I’m more professional than that (hardly more, but still!). Gundam Build Fighters Try, even in its interim episodes, manages to do something. In the last few training episodes, it got straight at Sekai, Hoshino, and Yuuma’s weaknesses as fighters and as builders. In this episode, it got to why they work so well together despite never really seeming like a team on the battlefield. I can’t wait to see how these new machines work together and, more importantly, how the three builders work together.