Recap

Team Try Fighter’s next big opponent is Shimon, a junior boxing champ competing with his younger brother’s snap built gunpla. Despite its shoddiness, Shimon proves to have more than enough skill as a fighter to compensate. Can our heroes bring themselves to beat the man fighting for his brother?

Gee’s Thoughts

This week we run into an old classic of the kid’s anime genre. The rival who’s fighting for a sympathetic reason! Shimon is fighting for the sake of his ill brother with shitty taste in Gundam. Personally, I can only assume the reason the kid is in the hospital is because he has a terminal case of being a Gundam SEED fan. Still, the real issue of this episode is that it brings in the inevitable moment where Yuuma and Fumina hesitate and question their motivations for fighting. Honestly considering how devoted Fumina is to gunpla battle, this episode comes off as intellectually dishonest and a cheap way of trying to make us care about the characters. The problem though is that unlike Fellini or Yuuki, Shimon’s big fight is in the same episode he’s introduced in. As a result, it doesn’t feel particularly interesting or important.

On a side note, seeing Team Free and their ugly Zeon aquatic suits getting destroyed due to terrain shenanigans was probably one of the highlights of this episode.

The fight itself is great, and it’s a ton of fun to see Sekai using his martial arts against Shimon’s boxing. Hell, the Build Burning basically knees the Destiny so hard in the face that it explodes. Seeing a SEED suit getting trashed so thoroughly is immensely satisfying. And theoretically, this is the equivalent fight to the Yuuki fight from episode 6 of the first season. The issue is that unlike this fight, Yuuki’s had episodes of buildup and we had a chance to see him as a character. Shimon seems like a decent enough guy, but with so little development, it comes off as just another fight in the tournament. It is undeniably a great fight, but there’s no emotional backing to it. So far as I can tell, I’m not even sure if Shimon will be making a return. Due to the elimination-tournament style narrative, there’s very little reason for beaten characters to come back. Overall, this week’s episode was a stronger outing than the disappointment that was last week’s, but we’ll have to see if Try can manage to overcome its limitations.