One of the first complaints at the very first episode is that Riku is a Gary Stu due to his sudden talented skills displayed (like throwing his sword right accurately into a Leos' Beam Rifle nuzzle) despite it being the first time he's played the game. There are some possible reasons why that likely to be normal for most people:
1) Nexus wouldn't have used actual Gundam piloting instructions that are as complicated as that in the real Gundam Universes, and likely toned down the difficulty of controlling a Mobile Suit in the VR Game.
2) Given that this IS a game, it's likely that it has also been given some easier aiming controls, perhaps also depending on which type of MS the player is using
3) Regarding the one where Riku lands a bull's eye sword-throw into the NPC Leos' rifle. What are the Gundam/Gunplas that Riku used for his customization which leads to the creation of 00 Diver? Well, at least the notable ones... anyway, some of them are notable to have weapons that can be used for throwing or at least have a pilot in their respective universe that throws their sword. The SD Exia and Sword Impulse are 2 notable Gunplas used for the build, and because 00 Gundam is the base model for the creation of 00 Diver...you could expect that throwing its swords is possibly likely to have been one of the abilities that Riku could use, considering that Nexus probably recognize the Gunpla as the type of Melee MS that will do that
3.5)Additionally, the soccer game in Ep 1 shows that Riku has exceptional coordination and accuracy, so it might not be a stretch that he can quickly toss a sword into a target. Plus he might have been lucky.
4) And then there's the fact that as powerful his new Gunpla (00 Sky) is, he's still a beginner for good sake and he didn't get on top position on his own. The entire series makes it clear that he gets to be one through other's help. Case in point; his team won the Lotus Challenge because they brought a custom-build ship that gets them arrived on-time (not the ones reserved in-game), he's defeated by Tigerwolf's Jiyan Altron (who gives him another lesson to fix his Gunpla), he managed to defeat Kyoya and save Sarah because Orga helps him (he's defeated by Kyoya beforehand) and he managed to destroy the GBN boss through the combined powers of Age II Magnum SV and 00 Sky.
Magee's Force has the very unique name Adam's Apple - which can be a way to notice someone is Transgender.
Why all the Patrick Colasour cameos? Remember that in his home series, Patrick was described as being "undefeated in many simulator battles". Remind me, what is GBN again?
There are some complaints that the Mass Divers in episode 11 were eventually beaten through the trite method of "shooting it until it actually dies," excluding the death of the MP Qubeley Mass Diver. However, notice how during the battle, all of the regenerated damage never targeted the cockpit - thus, it's possible that the mobile suits were ejected from the system after the sheer force of the attacks penetrated the cockpit and physically killed their avatars.
In episode 7, Ayame asked the Build Divers if they were okay recruiting her, considering how she used an SD Gundam. At first, it doesn't make sense since she is a formidable pilot until her past was revealed that she was from a team of SD Gundams, whose fall was due to their restriction of said theme. She wasn't hesitating if she is a burden to Build Divers due to her Gunpla, but worried that same downfall from her team would affect the Build Divers, therefore forcing them to fire her if she needed (thus foiling her attempt to spy Riku under Tsukasa's orders).
So why does Build Divers managed to score their first victory? Its simple: the team is not restricted to a single theme of Gunpla. We have 00 Diver as a swords-type MS that's already used by a protagonist, GM III Beam Master as a custom Mook Gunpla in long-range, Galbaldy Rebake for the use of non-energy oriented weapons, Momokapool as the Cute Bruiser and lastly Zeromaru as Fragile Speedster. In fact, their first opponent is a group of beginners from a Force whose theme consist of Zeon militants that uses Elite Mook Gunplas.
There has been complaints that the Light Wings from episode 12 were an asspull. However, the idea makes sense when one remembers how the Break Decals work, by manipulating the Source Code of GBN. Thus it stands to reason, if someone could manipulate the code to break the game, someone could easily do the same to fix it.
In episode 13, Tsukasa even notes that the Wings were likely a direct result of someone manipulating the Source Code. In episode 14, Game Master even makes the suggestion that Riku and/or Sarah might have used illegal tools to do so, which Kyoya shoots down. Of course, we know Riku wouldn't do such a thing, so that only leaves one other person.
What's with the underwater and sky imagery when Riku follows the 00 Diver in Episode 14? And why the name "00 Sky"? Because all three of them represent the elemental land, sea, and sky.
Riku means "land" in Japanese, 00 Diver (Sea), and 00 Sky.
We know now that Ayame's Zeromaru can jack other people's funnels, so it's a bit of a letdown that she doesn't break this out when going against two funnel users in episode 16. Then you remember that she mentions the strength of her new team one time - she was counting on them to be good enough to prove it, and Riku and Momo's Combination Attack did just that. That's teamwork right there.
There may also be limitations to the funnel-jack ability. Either it relies on the target being unable to wrest control away (the break diver was clearly overconfident and may have been one of the newer players lured in by Tsukasa's promises), or it can only effect one unit at a time (so using it against two enemies would leave her open)
Tigerwolf's training and the idea of Your Mind Makes It Real has had far-reaching effects that aren't immediately obvious:
The Lotus Challenge time constraint is one of the first things that Build Divers manage to get around, by making a custom shuttle that was deliberately overloaded with rockets. In the real world, too much G-force from ascending too quickly can kill you, and in the interest of realism these safety standards would likely apply to any rented shuttles in GBN - but with Tigerwolf's training the G-force wouldn't even matter.
In episode 20, the GBN developer has to take on a One-Winged Angel form to take down a full-sized mech - and Tigerwolf has been training people to do the same thing without relying on something like that.
According to Do-ji, his brother Ogre constantly trains himself in the Mirror Mission. Considering that there is a level where one has to fight a reflection of their Gunpla, it makes sense since he has to become strong through defeating his own enemy; himself.
This could also explain why Riku and Kyouya can outfight him. Ogre has trained to outfight himself. He uses a Gunpla that emphasizes heavy armor and superior close-range fighting skill to overwhelm his target. Meanwhile Riku uses a fast, multi-role suit capable with lighter armor, and Kyouya uses a suit with funnels and transformation capability, both of which are things the GN-X doesn't use.
Fridge Logic
Tsukasa and Koichi shouldn't be surprised that real-life Gunpla Battle died out and was replaced by Gunpla Battle in Gundam Battle Nexus Online for several reasons:
1)Having to deal with your creations getting smashed apart by unsympathetic battlers like Adou from Gundam Build Fighters Try. Inside and outside of battles. Especially if you happen to be unluckily using a humble straight-build against an ace custom which itself ensues high chances of the battle being highly one-sided.
1.5)Your own Gunpla breaking apart should it end up dealing an attack that harmfully strains its structures, which the sequel demonstrated with Hiroto's Speed Grade RX-78-2 Gundam's arms breaking the moment it fired the Beam Magnum at the PG Strike Gundam.
2)Battlers that bully others through use of highly durable Gunpla-s (like using a Perfect Grade Gunpla against lower grade Gunpla-s as shown in the sequel)
3)Having to spend more money on duplicates of the kits to repair custom build models, which isn't always an option for other players who live in nations where Gunpla-s can be even more expensive compared to pricing in countries like Japan. All that without even getting into the rarity of products like model paints or several specific model kits in certain countries.
3a)The lack of tools to be able to fix the Gunpla-s in the first place.
3b)And when one thinks about it, the damages dealt on Gunpla-s from GP Duel necessitating duplicates to be purchased depending on the severity of the destruction sustained (and the skills and tools available for repairs from the builder) very likely brought forth a higher demand for Gunpla-s from those taking part in Gunpla Battles (Something that was never explored in the previous two Build series before Divers). Given the activity was evidently quite popular even before GBN took over, it may not be wrong for one to assume that there had been many players (decently wealthy ones especially) who had purchased copies of their kits rather often to the point pricing of Gunpla-s as a whole had to be raised to accommodate for the larger demand (to say nothing of the issues with scalpers taking up stlcks to resell them at a higher price). With increment possibly upsetting battlers who had a lower budget and collectors who were turned off by the higher price tags compared to pre-GP Duel times (especially more so if one is from third world countries), GP Duel may very well have indirectly hurt not only the sales of Gunpla-s (since by then they wouldn't be any different from the pricing of its non-Bandai Plamo competitors such as Kotobukiya and Moderoid), but also the Gunpla community's willingness to stay and bear with their hobby gradually becoming less newcomer-friendly and more pricier. Gundam Battle Nexus being greenlit meant being able to experience the benefits of GP Duel WITHOUT the issues the earlier battle system brought forth (to say nothing of it potentially safely lowering the large demand of Gunpla-s, allowing people to purchase them normally now) on top of plenty more benefits as written below:
Due to GBN's nature as a VRMMO, it completely eliminates the concern of losing your Gunpla to a battle, also indirectly encouraging more people to customize their Gunpla-s to pilot and battle in an environment where they no longer had to worry about their masterpieces getting destroyed by other battlers.
Additionally, it resolves some of the limitations of the old system. For one, it links the entire world into the game, rather than limiting it by division (North American, Thai, Italian, etc). This way, no matter what part of the world you're in, you can team up or battle the world over.
Plus, it follows the natural progression of the concept, expanding from just customizing your Gunpla to a fully customized avatar in-game, from simple PvP against players in the area to Missions with players from around the world etc.
In episode 11, Ayame mentions that Build Divers is not the first team she spied on and broke them from within when working with Tsukasa. So how many does a team like Build Divers existed back then whose potential acknowledged by top players and gets tore apart by Ayame?
So, let's talk about how incompetent the Game Master and his team are, shall we? The reason the Break Decal incident got so out of control was partially their fault. They flat out ignore the video evidence of the Mass Divers cheating simply because the game records show no evidence. They're so incompetent that they needed the help of the Collation just to get things under control. And of course, there's Sarah, or El-Diver if you lack a heart. Whether or not the No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup trope is in effect, the fact remains that any real life MMO, being an online service and piece of commercial software, is easily cloneable onto new pieces of hardware (to deal with things like server failures, updates, and releases of the game in new regions of the world). Further, as a piece of software as complex as an MMO requires hundreds of individual software engineers and game designers working on it, multiple versions of the codebase would be held on one or more private repositories, along with multiple coders' work machines, entirely separate from the production servers actually running the game. So either they don't realize this, or they never even bother to do any of this (Episode 23 seems to imply the latter). If the Break Decal incidents and Sarah (who's the world's first truly sentient AI) were made public knowledge, then the backlash would likely force them out of the job, or worse severally tarnish GBN's reputation.
There's also the fact that the people working on GBN knowingly and actively implemented a feature allowing Forces to lock out even the highest authorities and those above them from performing the most basic of actions. And when Game Master encounters this, he's dumbfounded despite being the highest authority in GBN. This essentially means that Force Nests automatically strip the powers and authority of administration when they step in, and they knew such a thing would happen.
Alternately, perhaps the feature is limited to certain Forces, among them Avalon. Kyouya is the Champ after all and seems to be considered something of GBN's white knight considering he's heading things like Break Decal invesigations. Perhaps Avalon was given admin-level access to investigate the Decals.
Regarding Kyoya's ability to lock out the Game Master, the two have a conversation that establishes that they once worked together to debug the game. While he's a player, Kyoya still has his admin access, which might have been given to him by Ms. Tori herself, so the Game Master can't do anything.
One more related to the sequel: It turns out that getting past Kyouya did not mean Riku was in the clear to make it to Sarah. One more Force Avalon member was lying in wait and had locked onto him, ready to shoot him down. And this member personally had it in for Riku, more than the Coalition's image of him being selfish to risk GBN just for one EL-Diver. Had this member shot Riku down, Build Divers would have had a Downer Ending and pretty much Re:Rise would be completely different or not happen at all, among other things due to one main character needing Sarah's existence. Who is this diver? Hiroto Kuga.
Also revealed by the sequel is the fact that Sarah was not the last EL-Diver (or the first, for that matter), nor was her birth as random as everyone believed. Following a precedent set by deleting Sarah would not necessarily have halted the emergence of new EL-Divers, given what they really were. At best, there would have been a race marked for extermination from the moment of their birth only to reincarnate again and again, or worse, the effects of dozens of souls (at the very least) trapped and struggling to be born in a world increasingly hostile to their very existence.
The entire last concept of the last arc. Bugs and errors have started popping up all over GBN, threatening ALL of the game. The only solution? Kill Sarah, an innocent child who’s existence is the reason why the bugs. Moreover, while the audience and Build Divers have watched Sarah and KNOW that she’s a living and sentient being, most of GBN (including the ADMINS) just see her as a bit of bad code that needs to be erased, and don’t know (or CARE) that she’s a person in her own right. In other words, most of GBN is perfectly fine with killing an innocent little girl in order to keep the game intact. CHILLING.
As the sequel reveals that Shayrar also has a younger brother, Parviz who was left permanently crippled after a glider accident, leaving him as a depressed and traumatized shell of his former self until Shayrar introduced GBN to Parviz as a way where he might have a chance of being able to walk freely again, it might not be a simple coincidence that Sharyar initially also sides with the administration over the EL-Diver situation alongside Rommel for the same reason as to why Rommel did so. It's possible that just like Rommel who just wants to preserve GBN, a world where those who cannot walk and talk in the real world, such as Rommel's teammate Kurt, can do so in virtual reality, Sharyar might also want to preserve the same world which might be the only way for his beloved younger brother, Parviz to enjoy something resembling a normal life where he can walks freely again...
