When Bullbuster was announced, it was viewed as a more grounded successor series to Dai-Guard, a Super Robot anime series that had its tongue firmly embedded in cheek, as it grappled with the tough questions of how do you financially justify operating a Super Robot to fight kaiju. Bullbuster revisits those questions, except with a more grounded Real Robot (though still fighting fairly large monsters), and couches the story in the conflict between small businesses and big corporations.
Bullbuster follows the employees of a small business called Namidome Industries, which has been contracted to deal with an influx of rather concerningly large monsters infesting a small island off the coast of Japan. The employees in particular are tasked with wiping out the monsters but also figuring out where the monsters are coming from and why they’re there, so the former inhabitants of that island can eventually go home – and they have to do it while keeping under budget.
The series does a really good job of, arguably, getting even more into the weeds of doing monster containment on a small scale than Dai-Guard did. For example, the monsters are only contained on this small island, but it’s hazardous to be permanently stationed on this island due to whatever’s causing the monsters to show up, so you have to take the mech there by goat. That means you need to have a couple of employees with licenses for a boat to get you to and from the island, and those licenses need to be current. This also means that you need to either own or lease a boat. So you need someone who will let you use their boat – but you also need to contain the information on the monsters, so you need to decide if they need to be read in on the issue or not. And that’s just a couple of episodes. We haven’t even gotten into the upkeep of the mech, and what to do with the bodies of the dead monsters.
And then when Namidome partners with a larger company to handle the expenses, there’s the question of will that corporation fuck them over when it comes to the monsters and what’s causing them (yes, yes they are). And is this company secretly responsible for the monsters due to waste leak they’re covering up (Yes, yes they are). This isn’t the series that is necessarily willing to say “Fuck capitalism” – but they are at least willing to say that big corporations don’t have your best interests at heart.
In all, the show is tremendously fun – and helped make Wednesday a great “Workplace comedy day” (the last episode of the other workplace comedy has yet to air), so I recommend this show.
Bullbuster is available for streaming on Crunchyroll, and I’m hoping we get a HG model kit of the Bullbuster.
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