Gundam Build Divers Prologue

Gundam Build Divers Prologue operates less like an actual prologue and more like an exhibition of the concept; it’s a demo that shoehorns a relevant main character in an eye-rolling manner at the last second. That aside, there’s no denying the spectacle provided by this demo reel.

The visuals are as good as ever, with impressive new designs that finally give some love to Gundam Age and most cathartically, Gundam Thunderbolt. The battles are as flashy, destructive, and fun ever, but with a slightly grander and more chaotic scale. No longer bound to reality, we get to see new character designs based on animals and whatnot. ... Call it cashing in on the popular Virtual Reality concept, but you need to remember that Gundam Build Fighters is the epitome of the commercial side of Gundam, with it being the most open about selling plastic model kits and showcasing the appeal of giant robots to a wider audience.

The music is unfortunately less praise-worthy. There are no new tracks of note, which is a shame since while the OSTs of Build Fighters and Try are both good, they cannot be the only ones used for what is the demo for the third big installment in the Build Fighters timeline. Nothing is particularly bad, just not worthy of note.

The characters do a passable job for what they are, largely irrelevant teammates showing off a 10 on 10 battle where the objective is to take down the most important member. They are nothing more or less, with some decent banter and rivalry between the two team leaders. The main character did not need to be here, or if he was, he should have been shown rushing to the seats of the virtual colosseum, watching it unfold, rather than merely being revealed at the end to be the guy who was inspired by this. It would be such an easy fix to really solidify this as a prologue that it's a shame it didn't do so. Regardless, it will be interesting to see Gundam Build Divers unfold as the third big installment in the Build Fighters saga, and see how it stacks up to the original and the first sequel, Try. Until then, as always, I bid you adieu.

This preview episode essentially continues the trend of the Build Fighters subseries by focusing on fights to the exclusion of all character and story. Not only that, we have completely abandoned the semi-realistic premise of the first two series by including anthropomorphized animals to the cast with no explanation. I hope the main series gets into an explanation of that, but I'm really mourning the first show's focus on the characters and their love of Gundam as the main driver of the show, not necessarily the fights.

In the end, we see that the characters featured in this are considered inspirational by the actual main character ... of the new show, which just drives home again how pointless the time you spend with this preview is. We know that gumplay fight in this universe. We didn't learn anything new about any of the new cast except that some are now animals.

[[Edit: It's been pointed out to me that the reason there are animals is because this takes place in an online world this time around. I think that's a pretty lazy direction to take the series. It's already included some ridiculous stuff like alternate dimensions and mind control, gunplay design as martial discipline, and megacorporations basing their entire businesses around gunplay. Rather than extending any one of those ideas into a new plotline, you're going to throw us into a different world? So that we can get animal characters? I just don't think throwing more stuff into the pile without any rhyme, reason, or connection to how we understand the world is a great direction for the series.]]