Gundam Breaker: Battlogue

*mild spoilers for Gundam Breaker: Battlogue* Gunpla anime have always been advertisements at heart. They're akin to the likes of Yugioh and Bakugan where shounen plots are created over the vehicle of selling cool new products to kids and nerds. For Yugioh and Cardfight Vanguard, it's trading cards. For Bakugan, it's small, transformable marble things with cards. For Gunpla Builders Beginning G, the Build Fighters and Build Divers continuities, and now Gundam Breaker Battlogue, it's the plastic model kits. GBB is a little different than the rest. While the aforementioned Gunpla titles were fun shounen tournament romps, VR conflicts, and whatever the hell Re:Rise did, it wasall in the name of selling plamo. GBB not only does that, but is also tying into the Gundam Breaker game series. Not only are we getting cool kits sold to us such as the High Grade Barbataurus and Livelance Heaven, but perhaps potential new Gundam Breaker players are being enticed into that game series. Combine those goals with an action romp directed by Masami fucking Oobari, then we should have a fun Gunpla spectacle, right? Well, if nothing else, we're shipping more RX-78 American Type kits. What should have been a simple and fun spectacle ends up being an annoying exercise in asking just how stupid characters can be before one's patience is as fragile as the atrocious HG Unicorn kit from 2009. The premise is that after the would-be champion named Mahara ends up losing to protagonist Takuma in a Gundam Breaker tournament, he becomes an evil sore loser who hacks into the game's system to kidnap and forcefully modify players' Gunpla to ruin the fun for everyone and get back at the man who beat him. Other players just trying to have fun now have to stop him. Simple enough, even with motivations so stupid that at least one of the protagonists snarks at him about it. That said, even excluding how there's little to the main cast and what we get to know about them, one thing is abundantly clear: they are all morons. What happens once the Livelance Heaven and Gundam Helios pilots (Touma and Ryuusei) see the masked freak? They rush at him with melee attacks despite having tons of artillery to shoot him at their disposal in episode 3. They only try it in episode 6 when he's in his fully powered up Barbataurus. When the female deuteragonist (Misa) arrives with a goddamn vaccine for the runner prison things the antagonist traps and merges Gunpla in? She only frees the trio of side fighters and doesn't bother with any of the random terciaries trapped when she reappears in episode 4. What could've been a fun and frantic game of everyone trying to keep the masked freak's Barbataurus at bay while she frees everyone is traded out for our heroes trying to beat him and eventually the AI he summons. He then absorbs a metric fuckton of Gunpla in episode 6 cuz not once did she try to free anyone else. Also, yes, there is a vaccine for the gundam runner prisons, which involves the Blazing Gundam wearing a mask, which was developed purely offscreen so it could pop up as a deus ex machina in episode 4 for the trio that was fighting Barbataurus at an event. It's as ridiculous as it sounds, and there's a joke about the U.S government hoarding and withholding vaccines joke to be made here but we're just gonna leave that where it lies. It's not even the only deus ex machina considering how Takuma appears in episode 5 to save Misa after she winces over seeing a single attack she has a lot of time to dodge. A lot of characters seem to he really good at dodging things, at least until the script demands that our heroes and the AI Kamen Rider Masara summons have to suck at dodging extremely prolonged attacks. It's surprisingly annoying when it happens all the time. You'd think that with hacker Masara's BS OP runner stuff and hacking of the system, his roided-up AI would be able to dodge attacks a fraction of the speed of what they effortlessly avoided before. Sure, not a ton of this is meant to be taken too seriously, but when everyone just acts helpless or stupid for convenient plot beats to occur, the series becomes rather obnoxious. The lightning fast pacing also means significant plot beats have to be introduced out of nowhere, like the vaccine that was developed entirely off-screen and never talked about beforehand. It also means you barely get to know anything about the characters unless you played the GB games. Their character dynamics are a tad cute at times (mainly due to some nice character animation here and there), but they're not particularly fun, engaging, or brimming with chemistry or anything. Everyone's just sorta dull and dumb, barring hints of cute charm once in a while. One can argue at this point that none of that pesky "writing" shit the armchair upstart's prattling on about matters all that much for a dumb fun simple action spectacle if the fights are cool. Yeah, sure, but the fights here aren't anything to write home about. The character animation has some fun expressions and stills on occasion, like whenever character panels interact with each other as they're chatting through Gunpla. Oobari and his team definitely had some fun there, and the art style's honestly better than in the Build continuities. That said, most of the mecha animation is nothing more or less than serviceable. They move around fine. There are some nifty particle effects here and there. It's not as poorly produced as Try or Divers, but outside of episode 6, it can't compare to Fighters or Re:Rise. Some attacks are really flashy, especially in episode 6 when the supercharged Barbatos starts unleashing absurd attacks of red death or the main protagonists start busting some seriously sick moves with their Gunpla. If most of the series was more akin to the level of animation on display at episode 6, the visuals would be more noteworthy. As it stands, the team at mainline Sunrise is absolutely getting outshined by the former Xebec division known as Sunrise Beyond with their efforts on Re:Rise and AMAIM (or Kyoukai Senki). At least some of the mecha designs like the Astray Red Frame Inversion, the Crimson Gouf Custom, and the first gundam chimera thing that got disposed of in episode 4 look cool enough. Those better all be good High Grades considering we're already getting HG Livelance Heaven, Gundam Helios, Barbataurus and the Gundam Ground Urban Combat Type among other things. Oh yeah, there also was an OST, wasn't there? While binging the show, not a single thing stood out that it was honestly kinda hard to tell that there even was music playing. There's also the ED by Mr. Fantastic. Meh. Gundam Breaker: Battlogue was perhaps the most disappointing Gunpla title with the Battlogue name. Gundam Build Fighters Battlogue was a weird episodic endeavor that would have been more fun if it focused more on being Death Battle Gundam Edition rather than doing some of the weird things it did with the garbage Try cast. Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise Battlogue was a cute victory lap after Re:Rise turned out to be astronomically better than regular Divers. This could have been the most entertaining Battlogue romp yet if the characters were more fun and less idiotic, if the script was better at staying out of the way of spectacle without being contrived and poor, and if the action animation was more consistently on the level of episode 6. There are charming moments, and bits so ridiculous that it it elicited a hardy laugh. However, this anime was more annoying and head-tilting than entertaining. Is this what the typical Oobari anime experience is like?