Reviews Anime / Gundam Build Fighters Try

Island Wars: A tire-fire in hell.

Hi guys! I'm curious; do you love cliches? Well, Island Wars doesn't so much scrape the bottom of the cliche barrel as it does hire an industrial excavator to dig an open-pit mine where the barrel once stood.

This OVA encapsulates every single thing wrong with modern anime. Try Fighters didn't have good characterization, but you'll be happy to hear that whatever development occurred in that series hasn't so much been dropped as it has been brutally murdered in a dark alleyway. These aren't characters anymore; they're caricatures. Yuuma is a spineless worm that drools over adult women, Fumina has no character that isn't 'awkwardly tsundere towards Sekai', and Sekai is a cardboard box with the words 'matial artz' written on it in crayon.

It gets worse!

Every other character in this OVA is one-note. Worst of all are the girls. Island Wars is shockingly sexist. I dare you to find one line of dialogue in the entire OVA spoken by a female that isn't A) combat related and B) doesn't refer in some way to the dreadful, cancerous 'every girl loves Sekai' theme this OVA has going like a stream of diarrhea. Put it in the comments if you can find one! The females have no personality that isn't defined by cliche, either. There's the bitchy one (Gyanko), the coy one (Shia), the awkward one (Fumina) and the mysterious one (whoever the fuck that girl was.)

What about the 'action' part of this OVA? Well, that fairs slightly better in that it's merely bad instead of unimaginably terrible. The animation is bog-standard, often failing to match the visual flare of contemporary Gundam shows like Iron-Blooded Orphans. Also, do you remember how the final battle in Build Fighters was fraught with tension because of how hard the main characters were struggling against the overwhelming hordes of enemies? In this OVA, nothing even gives the main characters pause until the final battle. They slaughter mooks by the thousands without sustaining damage, pulling off absurd Super Moves that would make the most die-hard TTGL fan cringe with embarrassment. As icing on the cake, these mooks are kits that Bandai hasn't made and never will. Fuck you, HG Psyco Gundam Mk II.

It gets worse!

Apparently the power scale is so absurd by now that the main characters can tank hits from the 80cm GN Laser, Gryps Colony Laser and Photon Ring Ray all at once. Remember how in Build Fighters a colony laser nearly killed everyone? Now even fucking Gyanko can tank one with minor damage. Holy fuck. Even better, these twats developed these gunpla to compete in the Regionals. That's right, they're technically on a tier that Reiji and Sei blitzed through effortlessly on their way to the World Championships nearly a decade ago.

There is so much more I could highlight, but I won't. Instead I'll be reviewing each episode one by one as they come out. Saddle up my friends, it's going to be a long trip.