Review: Buddy Complex

Aoba just realized that there is fanfiction of him and Dio "coupling" outside the cockpit.

3ET: Buddy Complex

Review Scale

Warning: the following review contains SPOILERS and the Bootstrap Paradox.


There is no mistaking Buddy Complex for something new or exciting in the mecha genre. Aside from the time travel element, it's the basic show aboutt giant humanoid robots that punch, slash, and shoot each other in the middle of war. It has the standard miraculously competent new pilot as its main character. And since this is made by Sunrise, everything looks perfectly serviceable. But, despite reveling in these cliches, Buddy Complex managed to stand out by just doing these cliches well.

Oh yeah, that's the money shot.

One major difference from most mecha shows was the scale of the story. Instead of giving a wide view of the war between the Free Pact Alliance and the Zogillia Republic, the focus is instead on two opposing squadrons. One, the Alliance ship Cygnus, has experimental technology where pilots can connect to each other by "coupling". This is also where the main character, Aoba, ends up after traveling around seventy years into the future from modern times. The Cygnus is also where he meets his coupling partner, Dio, a capable pilot who is a bit of a brat. On the other side is a capable squadron leader, who commands the girl who Aoba remembers helping him escape the attack on him back in his own time, Hina. What this smaller scale allows for is more time spent with the characters on both sides of the war, as opposed to cutting to a bunch of generals and leaders talking about the larger war. That means that I get to know characters on both sides better, which means I care more about what happens in the show. This is a good thing.

Also, in addition to providing enough time for the audience to get to know the characters, the smaller scale allows characters to get to know each other, and actually develop relationships. For example, Dio and Aoba's relationship is icy at first, as Dio is disbelieving of Aoba's story and annoyed that he has to work with such an amateur. Then, Aoba does a couple nice things for Dio's younger sister, who was injured when Dio screwed up during a mission, and their relationship begins to thaw. The event that really melts the ice is when the boys share memories during a battle where they have to pilot older, experimental robots with the coupling technology. Dio actually sees Aoba's memories and learns that he has been telling the truth about being from the past. It's this event that finally turns them from just partners in giant robots to genuine friends. And it sets up the ending nicely as well.

Now, fight nice, children.

Before I talk about the ending, I need to talk about the relationship between Aoba and Hina. When Aoba comes to the future, he's confused when he finds that Hina doesn't remember him. While any science fiction nerd worth a damn would realize the problem (that when Aoba ended up is before Hina went to the past), the fact Aoba is established as a jock makes it reasonable he wouldn't figure it out. He probably doesn't even know what a time paradox is. The later scenes when Aoba and Hina are stranded on an island after a battle develop their relationship. It's the basic enemies cooperating becoming friends cliche, but it works and sets up stuff later in the show that eventually pays off.

Now to the time travel stuff. If readers get a mild headache from this explanation, that's normal, time travel stories are meant to do that. So, during the climatic battle, a super-powered laser hits Aoba and Hina as they are coupling (Hina has been forced into this by a Zogillian scientist). This causes a hole in space-time back to the year 2014 to open in the skies above the ongoing battle. I'll note that even this plot point is foreshadowed, as the coupling system sends information a couple billionths of a second into the past.. This keeps the couplers in perfect sync, as even a time lag of that small fraction of a second would mess up the coupling. And if a metric fuckton of energy was poured into the magical bullshit particles that made this possible, I can see how it would tear open a hole in space-time. Anyway, a Zogillia pilot who is obsessed with Hina is sucked into the hole, where he loudly vows to kill Aoba in the past. To prevent this from happening, Hina follows him, where she lands some time before her former comrade will eventually show up. She then hides out, waiting for him to attack Aoba, and intervenes to save Aoba. This is exactly what happened in episode one.

"Um, I don't think it'll fly. The engine's on fire."

And that means that Hina is stuck in a time loop. Every loop, after she returns to the future several years younger and without her memories, she gets picked up by a Zogillian soldier, is then raised as his daughter, becomes a Zogillian pilot, meets Aoba, goes back in time to save Aoba, and so on and so forth. In the final battle that we see, probably after many time loops, Aoba realizes that the time loop is happening and tries to save Hina. While he expects to be stopped by Dio, his new friend and partner instantly agrees to help him. The reason being that Dio shares Aoba's memories, and therefore his knowledge of the time loop. They succeed, and thus Hina is a human example of the "bootstrap paradox", a common trait of time travel stories where an object or person has no clear origin outside of a time loop. Again, don't worry about that mild headache. It's a feature, not a bug, of thinking about time travel stories.

And as time travel stories go, I think this one was well done. Of course, I'm a sucker for a good science fiction story, but I also enjoyed how the relationships between the characters formed. Not just between Aoba and Dio or Aoba and Hina, but Aoba and the crew of the Cygnus as well. It helps that the crew has characters with good personalities, my favorite is the easy going captain, but watching Aoba get accepted into this group was good. There were also little touches that I appreciated, like the crew trying to find any of Aoba's family still alive or letting him visit what is left of his hometown. Touches like these made it easy to see Aoba as an actual person, instead of just some kid who miraculously can pilot a giant robot.

Seventy years later, Aoba returns to school.

That's not to say that Buddy Complex was a great show. It still is limited by the simple story it tells, and even with the time travel aspect, it is quite predictible. There also isn't anything particularly interesting as far as developing the characters goes independent of how they relate to each other. With that said, it's a solid show, one I would absolutely recommend for fans of giant robots and science fiction. And yes, I'm excited they are going to make a second season, especially with the reveal in season one's closing seconds.

Final Score: 6/10