zetatype wrote:Honestly I think Try's biggest problem isn't the asspulls, which quite frankly don't bother me, its that most of the rivals aren't interesting.
It's both, really. That, and the fact that outcome of every battle is completely predictable because of the way they've built up the rivalries. I don't think anyone actually expected Junya to beat Sekai, because he'd been set up as the evil version of Sekai (or, well, the jerk version at least) so of course Sekai has to beat him to prove his philosophy superior. Similarly, we still haven't settled Fumina's rivalry with Shia or Yuuma's with Adou (or Sekai's with Wilfred, for that matter, though that's been given less attention), so the chances of Lucas beating the Gunpla Academy before they face Team Try Fighters is basically zero.
Junya also had no development beyond "older, jerkier Sekai", so it's hard to care about him. We don't even know
why he turned evil, even -- okay, he wanted to grow stronger and the Jigen Haoh master wouldn't teach him the school's ultimate techniques (which according to Mirai don't actually exist anyway?), so he got bitter and left. But we don't know why he's so obsessed with strength in the first place, or why he was deemed unworthy of Jigen Haoh's secrets, or how he got from martial arts to Gunpla Battle, or
anything about him really, other than he became a jerk after being denied the ultimate secrets of Jigen Haoh school -- and even that little development came pretty much entirely in his two focus episodes, while he was battling and well after he was introduced, which just comes across as too little too late. If you want us to care about the battle, you need to do it
before the battle starts.
Plus, Sekai's win came completely out of nowhere. There was no build up, no foreshadowing, no hints or suggestions. He just pulled a (second!) ultimate technique out of nowhere because the plot required it. I could accept that if he'd been shown to be experimenting with different things he could do or if there'd been some discussion between him and his teammates (and maybe people like Ral or the Meijins) about the nature of his Phoenix Death Punch and other ways he could use that ability. But none of that actually happened. Instead, we're shown that Junya is clearly the better fighter, until suddenly he's vaporized by plothax. There's no sense that Sekai
earned that win. He was losing, badly, until he suddenly learns a (complicated and complex!) new technique out of nowhere and wins with it. It's emotionally unsatisfying.
There's also the fact that they haven't made very good use of the 3v3 format. It would have been a much more satisfying end to that fight if Sekai won with Fumina and Yuuma's help, instead of them standing around watching because they believe in the power of Sekai's plot armor. You could even spin it as Sekai being stronger because he has friends that add to his strength, where Junya has forsaken his friends for the sake of his own power, which ironically leaves him less powerful. Seriously though, how many times have we actually seen teams fighting
as teams, instead of just having three 1v1 fights going on simultaneously? (When someone's not going 1v3 to prove what a badass they are, that is.) If you're not going to use GBF's format of having a fighter/builder team (which was actually a new and interesting dynamic in the Gundam series -- there's never been a regular "backseater" role in any Gundam show I'm aware of), then at least make use of the 3v3 team format you've set up. Instead, we get increasingly strained excuses to focus on 1v1 battles within the 3v3 format. There's some teamwork in some battles (the Try Fighters worked together somewhat to defeat the SD Hydra, for instance) but there hasn't been any focus on it at all since Fumina stopped using the Winning Gundam as booster parts. Why bother changing the show format and ditch part of what made the original interesting if you're not going to use the new format for all it's worth?
Cuz we know there's a chance of it if the gunpla's been selling. 