Finally caught Island Wars as well. I'll preface this by saying I don't really like the original Build Fighters or Try, so I think that's important going in.
It wasn't good. It was far from the worst things I've seen and I think it was on par with some of the mediocre episodes of the BF franchise, but there wasn't really anything special here. The characters still mostly suck and no one really did anything interesting in this. It doubled down on the horrible stupid alien dimension lore that dragged down season 1 so much, which was sad to see. I was mostly here for the animation here, and though that had its moments, on the whole it honestly didn't even look great.
The new models weren't even that good. The ZZ-II was cool, but other than that I felt nothing towards the new kits. The new Quan[t] had potential, but it felt like a lazy custom overall and the cat ears on it were terrible and ugly. I was really sad to see there was no new Winning Gundam upgrade as that was far and away the most interesting Try custom. The Gyancelot was lame as well despite the hype and i think it loses a lot of the charm the original Gyan had, not to mention that Gyanko is still super fucking annoying. I was happy to see the Kamiki Burning get some extra screen time just so we can get a sense of what it can do. I wish it had use that giant sword it was carrying around and its special attack was the most stupid thing imaginable, but it still was a good looking upgrade to the Burning.
Yeah, overall I was not enthused. Like I said, I've seen worse even just within the Build Fighters sublime, but there was nothing here that was super interesting. At least this episode was self contained and we didn't have to suffer a whole season of manufactured stakes before the heroes won. Assuming we get another Build Fighters series after the OVA from the original show, I hope they get some better mech designers working on it given how lazy most of the Island Wars designs were.
