Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #1: Buddy Complex

So, here’s a thing I’m going to start doing. Or rather, here’s something I’ve been doing and I’m finally getting around to documenting.. I’ve been really into Super Robot Wars recently and despite promising that I would do this at some point, I’ve never really watched any anime from any of these games in their entirety. Well, I’ve watched a few many years before they appeared in the games, but those don’t count for the purpose of this exercise. What I decided to do before playing Super Robot Wars X is to watch as many anime featured in the game as I felt like I could feasibly tolerate before beginning to play it. I started with the shortest one on the list that caught my attention. What follows is a spoiler-free synopsis and my overall thoughts on the first one I watched. I’ll also follow up with how I felt it was represented in the game in terms of plot and gameplay. That second part is much more likely to contain spoilers for the anime since these games are not shy about representing crucial plot details.

Buddy Complex tells the story of a high school student by the name of Aoba Watase. At the outset of our story, he’s nothing special. He’s into basketball and is otherwise a pretty normal kid. He’s immediately curious about his classmate, Hina Yumihara when he’s seated by her on the first day of a new class. Of course, things get weird really quickly when the sky opens up and a giant robot emerges, its hysterical pilot gunning to take Aoba’s life. 

Of course, Aoba has no way to defend himself, so all he can do is run. Fortunately for him, Hina is definitely more than meets the eye. After a brief absence, she emerges in a giant mech of her own, determined to fend off the mysterious pilot and save Aoba in the process. It turns out the only way she can ensure Aoba’s safety is to guide him into the singularity that the mysterious pilot had emerged from. Her parting advice is to seek out a man named Dio when he arrives. On the other side of the singularity, Aoba finds himself in a mech of his own, smack dab in the middle of a battle in space. He’s hailed by the nearby Cygnus battleship asking for identification, but of course, Aoba has no idea what’s going on and can provide no such information. 

For whatever reason, though, it’s determined that their ace pilot, Dio, has abnormally high compatibility readings with Aoba, which means they can undergo a process called Coupling to dramatically boost the capabilities of both mechs. They’re losing the battle, so the captain of the Cygnus makes the rash decision to go ahead and have them do it, despite the fact they’re aware Aoba is a civilian. The Coupling is an immediate success and because of this process, Aoba is able to inherit Dio’s experience and understand intuitively how to pilot the mech he’s found himself in. What ensues is a successful close to a skirmish with what we’ll later learn is the nation of Zogilia.

It turns out that Aoba has been catapulted more than 70 years into the future. Aoba comes from 2014, but he now finds himself in 2088, where the political landscape of the Earth has changed significantly. The nation of Zogilia occupies a comfortable majority of the planet’s territories, while members of the Free Pact Alliance like the crew of the Cygnus fight back in an effort to create equity. What becomes apparent right away is that Hina is nowhere to be seen and none of the crew of the Cygnus know who Aoba is talking about. This is before Aoba has had the time to internalize that he’s so far afield of his own time period that it’s unlikely anyone he has ever known is still alive.

What follows is many episodes of Aoba becoming single-mindedly consumed with the desire to find Hina and figure out what’s going on, with only the occasional thought spared for the home that he has ostensibly lost forever. Along the way, he must develop a closer relationship with the blond pretty boy, Dio, who is distant and a little cold. Much like everyone else on the Cygnus crew, he doesn’t even feign belief in Aoba’s story about traveling through time. They will frequently butt heads, particularly when it comes to Aoba’s tunnel-vision focus on uncovering his personal mystery at the expense of success in combat. Despite Aoba’s lack of formal training, he’s essentially drafted into their military because his unique Coupling compatibility makes him too valuable an asset not to take advantage of.

I won’t give away the anime’s secrets, but suffice it to say that time travel paradoxes feature heavily both in satisfying and unsatisfying ways. By the end, I wasn’t totally sold that the loop was closed in a sensical way, but like with many forms of media, sometimes the Rule of Cool prevails. What time travel says about the characters involved and the paths it takes your imagination down is almost more important than whether or not it makes logical sense. 

I also really dig that the series is a pretty breezy watch. It only clocks in at 15 episodes and for this reason, pacing rarely suffers. Even one episode that I quickly dismissed as trope-laden filler due to it being billed as a “swimsuit episode” moved the plot along appropriately, explaining some of the finer points of Aoba’s Coupling System compatibility and how it comes with a notable downside. The final two episodes were originally released as an OVA that concluded the series and are jam-packed with plot that could have easily been spread over several more episodes. Overall, I would definitely recommend this series because it’s just really solid from start to finish and as a bonus, has a great opening theme.

Buddy Complex in Super Robot Wars X

I used the following units from Buddy Complex in SRW X.

Cygnus - Gengo Kuramitsu

Luxon/Luxon NEXT - Aoba Watase

Bradyon/Bradyon NEXT - Dio Weinberg

Karura - Hina Ryazan

The game pretty faithfully reproduces the major plot points of the entire anime from start to finish, with some minor embellishments depending on what secrets you unlock. For example, there are some characters you can unlock that definitely never ally with Aoba and crew in the anime. Even so, I stuck with the principal characters primarily due to their availability, since the others came far too late for my liking. It’s really cool that I liked Buddy Complex because I loved the units in SRW X. Even the Cygnus is an absurdly powerful battleship that made me think back to the Nadesico from previous games. It also has a Valiancer Combination attack that brings in some of the other pilots from the Cygnus crew that were really minor characters in the anime. I love that little attention to detail. Also, it’s really cool how Dio and Aoba’s Coupling is represented by having them share the effects of their Spirit Commands. They also have an insanely powerful combo attack both with each other and with Hina once you acquire her much later. These were legitimately some of my strongest units, if not the strongest. Although, to be honest, Wing Gundam Zero gave them a run for their money, especially with that devastating MAP attack.