The Official Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE Thread Mk I

[AceWhatever]

Finally finished this a few weeks ago. Hoo boy where do I start unpacking this mess.

Spoiler

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I think a lot of people went soft on Re:RISE because it ended with a giant no-nonsense feelgood finale. I personally found too many problems with it.

- The big elephant in the room is a problem that plagued all Build shows from the start and never let up. Mainly that Gunpla Battle and GBN have no limitations and will do whatever the hell the plot needs them to.

- Case in point, the way a gunpla's strength is arbitrarily decided. In Re:RISE they establish that the game measures how much love (read: effort) is put into building the kit. That means the gunpla scanner is so advanced it detects material changes, paint applications and nubs left on. The latter of which gets translated to mechanical failures in-game. Let that sink in for a bit: This game punishes modelers for not being perfectionists. Heaven help some straight builder novice who wants to try the game out but his kit has loose joints or seam lines. TLDR the scene where the Core Gundam's boosters short out in the flashback is dumb.

- For as much as Re:Rise thankfully ditched the gunpla is awesome/gunpla has feelings claptrap that plagued the previous 3 Build shows, bringing it back with the Eve flashbacks was very disappointing.

- Hiroto has the Uranus armor sealed up with duct tape! PTSD from MMOs are serious business!

- I had a big rant about how ridiculous the ancients' technology was but decided it wasn't worth typing up. Mostly because I'm assuming anybody else who tried to complain about it just went numb thinking it over like I did.

The TLDR of it is that while this Ender's Game by way of Galaxy Quest story didn't have the many problems that plagued the first Build Divers it still had a lot of problems of its own.

[DragoMaster009]

You're not a big fan of Build Fighters/Divers? Honestly thought Seto Kaiba was the only one who doesn't like the subseries as a whole on this forum.

[AceWhatever]

Seto hates the Build series more for the commercialization aspect whereas I have problems with the actual writing of these shows.

[MythSearcher]

I think a lot of people went soft on Re:RISE because it ended with a giant no-nonsense feelgood finale. I personally found too many problems with it.

The last two episodes final battle makes as little sense as it does, Alu had all the information(he kept watching the world) about how much players the GBN world has will be in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. He just got beat by 4.5 (one of them didn't even participate that much in the battle) what makes him think he can beat thousands of them?
Also, the Tri-AGE commercial part is just too stupid and forced into it with nothing fore-shadowing it, Champion didn't use any of those moves before that battle, and script seems to tell us he was a new player of Tri-age, using the boxer's card but making a slashing attack, seriously?

- Case in point, the way a gunpla's strength is arbitrarily decided. In Re:RISE they establish that the game measures how much love (read: effort) is put into building the kit. That means the gunpla scanner is so advanced it detects material changes, paint applications and nubs left on. The latter of which gets translated to mechanical failures in-game. Let that sink in for a bit: This game punishes modelers for not being perfectionists. Heaven help some straight builder novice who wants to try the game out but his kit has loose joints or seam lines. TLDR the scene where the Core Gundam's boosters short out in the flashback is dumb.

You can pick a lot of holes technology-wise, just like any other soft Sci-fi shows, but the game system itself isn't unreasonable in views of MMO players.

How would you distinguish the levels of players otherwise? If they are novices, of course the game is going to be showing their skills as such. Or do you think awarding the players for their playing time is any better? Most MMORPGs basically does that because you need to pay to play, and you basically just level grind the hack out of the game.(most quests are basically just "beat a certain number of monsters", either for the kill number or for collecting certain number of drops. A few let you collect field items but usually are also in areas where you either have to walk very far and will have lots of monsters on the way. You get a lot of areas that are very unfriendly to novices, monsters will have the power to instantly kill low level characters and even if you try your best to hide from them and successfully go to a new town, you'd be pretty helpless if you accidentally make it your save point because now you have no quest available for your current level and you cannot beat surrounding monsters to level up. GBN seems like you can at least go to all of the parts of the world without worrying about high level monsters popping up randomly and killing you.

Building a gunpla and have lots of reasons limiting its power level actually aren't much different from this. Most of their normal off-the-shelf gunpla don't have much problem in regular, level appropriate fights and game play. If your missiles aren't flying straight enough, it pretty much just translates to a "low hit rate" in current games. If you go further with the Pay to win model, you can likely just buy better kits, the fact that they actually let you use your skills to save some bucks from buying their kits, or from the previous show, they actually award players with custom kits for finishing missions, and scratch builds actually works in their system makes me wonder about their business model(anime creators aren't businessmen) and their development will be hellish(which shows their lack of computer programming knowledge), but at least it makes a lot of sense in terms of game play if their technology can scan the gunpla to that level of accuracy. At least it make more sense than the previous GBF shows where your expensive gunpla with lots of customisation and perfect built is destroyed or highly likely damaged even if you win the fight. If you are scratch building something by hand and testing out its limits, it is just natural to expect some level of error, and the game is visualising it for you to fix that error, unlike current gunpla competitions, where you have no idea why they chose A over B. It also makes much more sense than the last season's plot where their reaction to a sentient AI is to delete it instead of setting up payment systems to grant access to the sentient source code which will likely earn them tons of money.



The game is also pretty open to casual players, as long as you don't go into fights with high level players, you don't need to have such a high accuracy models to begin with. Notice the players we see are mostly top tier, and most real life E-sports players have to be perfectionists to win in competitions to begin with, and a slight error can cause your championship. Like-wise, you don't walk into a real life gunpla competition with an off-the-shelf model and you just learn how to straight yesterday, without paint job and the gates are cut with nail clippers without sanding off the rest. Also, it was mentioned more than once that they have system models that you can use, just like the most recent battle log. So trying out the game with a regular grunt level model shouldn't be much of a problem and novice units with loose joints will likely just have bad stats(like moving slower, lower thrust, etc.) as long as they don't try to tweak it to try to become a supreme power.

Most of the system seems to be copying from the 90's manga "Plamo Wars". In that story the top tier players sand out the inside of their gun barrels to increase output powers, which likely also weakens the strength of the material and you will have to test it out whether you weaken the structure too much.(Worse in that story is they don't have regular access to the system as in GBD before the first main tournament where they just randomly picked gunpla builders from around the nation to join.)

[Henyo]

I liked rerise better than the previous season. but it still has a meh plot overall. and yeah, the ending is too clean. the other anime that had the same kind of ending was Kanata no Astra. all of the plot points were concluded without much a hitch. all of the main characters had their happy endings. i was like..WHAT!!!! or as the Japanese would say. SUPER BENRI.

another thing rerise did is t fully add furry fan to my list of otaku creds...i also put the blame on beastars...

[MythSearcher]

or as the Japanese would say. SUPER BENRI.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BE%A1 ... B%E7%BE%A9
This is the more common term they used, Gotsugousyugi 御都合主義

[AceWhatever]

the game system itself isn't unreasonable in views of MMO players.

Alot of your arguments rely on assumptions about information we either simply do not know or is contradicted by the show. For starters, we don't know the pay model of the game. We can be sure that players are paying money to buy/rent the kits they use in-game and the probably pay a fee to use the GBN terminals at Gundam Cafes. As for GBN itself? Koichi had a dormant account that he could still access years after quitting Gunpla battle from a terminal he had at home, so we know at least that a subscription fee isn't mandatory if not non-existent. If the game had any kind of pay to win model they'd just have a lot of whales running around with MG/PG kits and Break Decals wouldn't be the rampant problem they were in the first Divers show.

Also, a system to distinguish players already exists because we know GBN players have individual ranks (which are tied to unlocking specials moves) and force ranks.

Your missile example also doesn't make sense because IIRC nothing in either Build show implies that GBN is running on RPG stats. It's still a reflex-based action system like the older Gunpla Battle, otherwise there wouldn't have been a universal abandonment of Gunpla Battle. Again the point of contention isn't that customized Gunpla are arbitrarily strong. I already said that that's a problem since the first Build Fighters (and possibly Plamo Kyoshiro). My issue is that loose nubs getting inside the gunpla shouldn't be treated as an error and it sure as hell shouldn't be shorting out the thrusters. There's nothing implying that these mechanical failures will happen only to customized gunpla. That whole sequence was obviously just a contrivance written up by someone desperate to get away from Divers' MMO setting so that Hiroto can meet Eve.

[MythSearcher]

Alot of your arguments rely on assumptions about information we either simply do not know or is contradicted by the show. For starters, we don't know the pay model of the game. We can be sure that players are paying money to buy/rent the kits they use in-game and the probably pay a fee to use the GBN terminals at Gundam Cafes. As for GBN itself? Koichi had a dormant account that he could still access years after quitting Gunpla battle from a terminal he had at home, so we know at least that a subscription fee isn't mandatory if not non-existent. If the game had any kind of pay to win model they'd just have a lot of whales running around with MG/PG kits and Break Decals wouldn't be the rampant problem they were in the first Divers show.

Also, a system to distinguish players already exists because we know GBN players have individual ranks (which are tied to unlocking specials moves) and force ranks.

Your missile example also doesn't make sense because IIRC nothing in either Build show implies that GBN is running on RPG stats. It's still a reflex-based action system like the older Gunpla Battle, otherwise there wouldn't have been a universal abandonment of Gunpla Battle. Again the point of contention isn't that customized Gunpla are arbitrarily strong. I already said that that's a problem since the first Build Fighters (and possibly Plamo Kyoshiro). My issue is that loose nubs getting inside the gunpla shouldn't be treated as an error and it sure as hell shouldn't be shorting out the thrusters. There's nothing implying that these mechanical failures will happen only to customized gunpla. That whole sequence was obviously just a contrivance written up by someone desperate to get away from Divers' MMO setting so that Hiroto can meet Eve.

A lot of MMO don't delete your account just because you didn't pay for a few years. As long as you pay a monthly fee that month, you can relogin your old account without any problem. Some even have some kind of sales to encourage old players to return. I still had my account in Ragnarok Online after over 2 years of hiatus back in 2004. I'm pretty sure World of Warship still had my account after I quite in 2016, free to play game though.
Also, I did say I have no idea how they make money. My point is the game makes sense on the player side, not the developer's side. For players, the game makes sense because most of the game play doesn't involve high level of modelling skills to enjoy.
My missile example isn't talking about stats, if your missiles doesn't fly straight and fly randomly, it only reduces your hit rate and/or effective range, it doesn't render it useless. An example would be World of Warships, the BBs super long range guns are pretty hard to hit, but they surely pack a lot of punch. The idea exists in a lot of games, most FPS games shooting has a certain CEP for different weapons, it as least is as old as Counter Strike, where I tested shooting at a wall and can see the bullet holes aren't always landing on the same spot.

Loose nubs causing malfunction makes sense if they can detect it. Experienced players will clean them out after a few errors they encounter in the beginning, if that is the rule, so be it. At least I don't build my gunpla with loose nubs in it, and I am just an almost skill-less, shameless plain builder that don't even sand down the cuts but only use a cutter to cut down the parts.
The shorting of thrusters aren't even in any important mission/quest, its just world exploring and that is likely the best time to teach players how the game will judge their building skills. I foresee a lot of players will likely have slightly off shots, thrusters aren't really aligning, etc. at the beginning on the field. Sounds like pretty good tutorial material and encouragement to a long play life. Instead of having players curbstorm a bunch of weak monsters over and over in modern MMORPG beginner's quests as tutorial which gets pretty boring quite fast.