Bakugan was one of my first anime. When I first heard about it getting a reboot, I wasn’t too interested, mainly because I thought that the series has not aged well. But, when I saw the concept art for the new series, I was excited. By looking at the concept art, you could tell that there was gonna be an emphasis on animation. It reminded me of Pokemon Sun and Moon’s animation, and, as someone who enjoys sakuga (but won't write posts about it because I know nothing about it other than liking how it looks), my interest was more than piqued. I decided to try and watch the original series again. Maybe I just watched a bad episode or was in a particularly cynical mood?
But nope, the dialogue and voice acting still made me cringe. There were some good things about the original show, mainly in the monster design sense, but they couldn’t overshadow the issues I had with it. This rewatch pretty much killed any previous interest I had in the reboot, Battle Planet. I didn’t even know the episode came out until a few days after the pilot was released online. When I heard the first episode (well, in normal anime length at least. Cartoon network needs to stop this half episode bullshit) came out, I was like, eh screw it. I’ve gotta see how this is. At one point, Bakugan was my life, and if this show came out when I was younger, I would’ve been there the second the first episode was released. Surprisingly, despite my criticisms of the original Bakugan, I liked Battle Planet quite a bit.
The show still stars Dan (except this time his last name is “Kouzo” instead of Kuso), but now he’s got a new group of friends. He and his friends Wynton and Lia run a YouTube channel where they’re known as the Awesome Ones. By the way, that name sounds cringe-inducing but in context it’s actually not that bad. Probably because the characters in the show are obviously kids, so it’s forgivable.
Anyways, on their channel, the kids upload videos of strange occurrences and just cool stuff in general. One day, they go to the site of something that happened 12 years ago, called the Great Collision, in order to film a video. The Great Collision was strange because, whilst a giant meteor blasted out of the sky, no one was hurt and there was really no property damage. All that happened was that electronics went haywire before the meteor hit and that was really it.
It turns out that the kids weren’t actually there to film a video, but Wynton and Lia just tricked Dan into thinking so so that they could surprise him for his birthday, which happened to be on the same day of the Great Collision. But then, this weird orb shows up. Dan decides to touch it because he’s super intelligent and it turns out that it contains a Bakugan, and yeah, this is this anime’s Drago. When Dan touches Drago, he sees this strange grid. It turns out that the grid only shows up when you hold a Bakugan. Wynton, Lia, and, interestingly, their dog Sparky all get their own Bakugan.
Later, Dan is challenged to a Bakugan battle by a strange masked guy. It turns out that the masked guy, who we learn is named Magnus, saw Dan and co’s Bakugan battles on YouTube and he wanted to see what Dan is capable of. One thing that I liked about the first episode is that it begins in media res and then it goes back and explains things. I probably wouldn’t be praising this very heavily for any other show, but this is an anime on Cartoon Network and usually they dumb things down a lot. It’s nice to see that they take their audience seriously. It doesn’t seem like they do with a lot of the other American-written anime that have aired on the daytime channel in recent years.
When I saw the opening credits for this episode, one of the first things I noticed was that it was written by Man of Action. If his name doesn’t sound familiar, he’s the guy that wrote like all of the Ben 10 shows and Generator Rex. So, from the start, I knew this show was certainly gonna be interesting.
Like Ben 10, the comedy in this pilot was great. I laughed way more than I ever expected to. And they weren’t just shallow like “this is kinda amusing” laughs.The show made me actually burst out laughing. The comedy in this show isn’t that high brow, but it is witty and charming. It’s perfect for a kids show. The humor’s not so childish that adults (or in my case, almost adults) won’t enjoy the humor, but it’s not gonna go over a kid’s head either.
The story is obviously nothing groundbreaking. It’s a traditional toy-selling anime, but it does exactly what it needs to, which is be entertaining. And that’s mainly due to the battles, which is the glue for any anime that’s based on a game.
Unlike the original Bakugan, this show’s battles are extremely kinetic. The outcome of the battles depend on which grid tiles the Bakugan lands on or is close to. There’s one scene in the first episode where Dan has to run through Bakugan that are in a heated battle in order to give Drago a tile that would've gave him a power up. This scene was really cool and it showed me that Bakuverse really is gonna be different than its predecessor. Now, keep in mind, I’m not against card game based anime where the characters stand still and I certainly don’t think that the characters not moving in the original show is a detriment. One of my favorite franchises in all of anime is Yugioh and (most of the time) the characters are in the same place from the start to the end of the duel. I just liked how Battle Planet is trying to set itself apart and create another aspect of strategy by having these kinetic battles.
You can’t talk about movement in anime without talking about animation. The animation for the original Bakugan is barely existent. I could probably count on one hand how many frames per second there are. I’m not one of those people that thinks that an anime is worse if it has a low frame rate. If you’re animating complex character designs, as long as it’s not interfering with what the show is trying to express (such as barely animating action scenes), I’m fine if the frame rate is limited most of the time. For me, that’s not a detriment to the original series either. Battle Planet, though, is trying out new things and that makes me respect it a lot. This first episode didn’t really need too much fluid animation because not too much happened, but if the animation is this nice to watch now, I can’t wait to see how it looks in more serious and high stakes battles.
The character designs in this show, both Bakugan and human, are quite different compared to the original, but they serve their purpose well. These character designs are meant to be extremely expressive, and they do that amazingly. Dan’s facial expressions are manipulated a lot in the pilot episode and it was a really nice touch. Sparky’s face is also really animated, which is refreshing because most dogs in anime have like one facial expression and if you own a dog, you know that’s unrealistic. Personally, I prefer more complicated character designs just for a stylistic reason, but these designs are expressive and charming, and I really like what the animators can do with them.
As for the Bakugan designs, I definitely prefer the original ones. I like that over-complicated stuff, but the Battle Planet designs are still nice to look at. They’re CG, which I usually can’t stand because most CG monsters look like trash *cough* Battle Spirits *cough*, but these ones look nice. The style doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb and actually compliments the other character designs. The Bakugan are a lot easier to animate than the previous series’ Bakugan too, so I’m hoping for some really amazing battles in the near future. The designs are also much more futuristic looking than the designs of the older Bakugan. They emphasize the series’ futuristic feel.
One thing that’s also cool about the reboot is that the actual game has received a massive upgrade. Now, the game is based way more on strategy than just buying the most powerful Bakugan.
Well, that was my first "first impressions" post. I may do these in the future, I may not. This was also ported from a video script, so I hope this post was an okay read. I promise, this is the last script I will be porting over. Everything else will be original from now on. See you in my next (original) post!
But nope, the dialogue and voice acting still made me cringe. There were some good things about the original show, mainly in the monster design sense, but they couldn’t overshadow the issues I had with it. This rewatch pretty much killed any previous interest I had in the reboot, Battle Planet. I didn’t even know the episode came out until a few days after the pilot was released online. When I heard the first episode (well, in normal anime length at least. Cartoon network needs to stop this half episode bullshit) came out, I was like, eh screw it. I’ve gotta see how this is. At one point, Bakugan was my life, and if this show came out when I was younger, I would’ve been there the second the first episode was released. Surprisingly, despite my criticisms of the original Bakugan, I liked Battle Planet quite a bit.
The show still stars Dan (except this time his last name is “Kouzo” instead of Kuso), but now he’s got a new group of friends. He and his friends Wynton and Lia run a YouTube channel where they’re known as the Awesome Ones. By the way, that name sounds cringe-inducing but in context it’s actually not that bad. Probably because the characters in the show are obviously kids, so it’s forgivable.
Anyways, on their channel, the kids upload videos of strange occurrences and just cool stuff in general. One day, they go to the site of something that happened 12 years ago, called the Great Collision, in order to film a video. The Great Collision was strange because, whilst a giant meteor blasted out of the sky, no one was hurt and there was really no property damage. All that happened was that electronics went haywire before the meteor hit and that was really it.
It turns out that the kids weren’t actually there to film a video, but Wynton and Lia just tricked Dan into thinking so so that they could surprise him for his birthday, which happened to be on the same day of the Great Collision. But then, this weird orb shows up. Dan decides to touch it because he’s super intelligent and it turns out that it contains a Bakugan, and yeah, this is this anime’s Drago. When Dan touches Drago, he sees this strange grid. It turns out that the grid only shows up when you hold a Bakugan. Wynton, Lia, and, interestingly, their dog Sparky all get their own Bakugan.
Later, Dan is challenged to a Bakugan battle by a strange masked guy. It turns out that the masked guy, who we learn is named Magnus, saw Dan and co’s Bakugan battles on YouTube and he wanted to see what Dan is capable of. One thing that I liked about the first episode is that it begins in media res and then it goes back and explains things. I probably wouldn’t be praising this very heavily for any other show, but this is an anime on Cartoon Network and usually they dumb things down a lot. It’s nice to see that they take their audience seriously. It doesn’t seem like they do with a lot of the other American-written anime that have aired on the daytime channel in recent years.
When I saw the opening credits for this episode, one of the first things I noticed was that it was written by Man of Action. If his name doesn’t sound familiar, he’s the guy that wrote like all of the Ben 10 shows and Generator Rex. So, from the start, I knew this show was certainly gonna be interesting.
Like Ben 10, the comedy in this pilot was great. I laughed way more than I ever expected to. And they weren’t just shallow like “this is kinda amusing” laughs.The show made me actually burst out laughing. The comedy in this show isn’t that high brow, but it is witty and charming. It’s perfect for a kids show. The humor’s not so childish that adults (or in my case, almost adults) won’t enjoy the humor, but it’s not gonna go over a kid’s head either.
The story is obviously nothing groundbreaking. It’s a traditional toy-selling anime, but it does exactly what it needs to, which is be entertaining. And that’s mainly due to the battles, which is the glue for any anime that’s based on a game.
Unlike the original Bakugan, this show’s battles are extremely kinetic. The outcome of the battles depend on which grid tiles the Bakugan lands on or is close to. There’s one scene in the first episode where Dan has to run through Bakugan that are in a heated battle in order to give Drago a tile that would've gave him a power up. This scene was really cool and it showed me that Bakuverse really is gonna be different than its predecessor. Now, keep in mind, I’m not against card game based anime where the characters stand still and I certainly don’t think that the characters not moving in the original show is a detriment. One of my favorite franchises in all of anime is Yugioh and (most of the time) the characters are in the same place from the start to the end of the duel. I just liked how Battle Planet is trying to set itself apart and create another aspect of strategy by having these kinetic battles.
One thing that’s also cool about the reboot is that the actual game has received a massive upgrade. Now, the game is based way more on strategy than just buying the most powerful Bakugan.
This is Negative Legend’s video on the topic if you'd like to learn more about the game and see it in action. It's extremely fascinating and I'd love to play it. Unfortunately I have no friends near me who'd be interested and I doubt this game is gonna be in a lot of hobby shops so RIP.
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