It’s unfortunate when you had an anime that you really likes, was sadly overshadowed by a subpar earlier installment so nobody gave it a chance

Okay, this might be borderline media blasphemy, but I need to get this off my chest.

What are some movies, shows, anime, etc. that you genuinely think are great — like, personally meaningful, emotionally impactful, even “absolute cinema” to you — but liking them also makes you feels like you’re committing some kind of war crime? Like you’ve got the worst possible taste, or you’re the only person across the entire Earth who sees something special in it?

For me, that piece of media that makes me feel this way is Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise.

And yeah… I know how that sounds. But yes, I’m not joking to say that not only do I enjoy Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise more than both WFM and GquuuuuuX combined — I honestly even go as far as to say that it’s unironically one of Gundam’s best shows in recent years.

For me, Re:Rise succeeds where a number of recent Gundam series like Witch from Mercury and GQuuuuuuX fell short for me – Both of those shows looked nice, shiny and flashy at first, but quickly collapsed under the weight of trend-chasing, nostalgia overload, or rushed, overstuffed storytelling.

Re:Rise, on the other hand, simply just told a story. A real story — with stakes, with growth, with emotional payoff.; At the center of it are four flawed, broken teenagers still struggling with their inner demons — Hiroto, Kazami, May, and Parviz — who begin as a dysfunctional team with little cohesion. Watching them gradually become a real team through failure, grief, and growth felt surprisingly genuine to me. It didn’t feel forced — it felt earned.

Unlike its predecessors (Build Fighters, Build Fighters TRY, Build Divers), which were fun but very obviously “shows about Gunpla / toy commercial with plot dressing”, Re:Rise breaks the mold entirely by being a more grounded character-driven drama focused on telling a compelling story about broken people learning to heal, and finding purpose through each other…. that just happens to include Gunpla, VRMMORPGs, and isekai elements. Re:Rise isn’t really about becoming better at Gunpla like the previous Build series, but rather it’s about becoming better people.

And yet… because Re:Rise had the misfortune of being the sequel to the original Gundam Build Divers — a series most fans dismissed as shallow or underwhelming — Re:Rise was almost dead on arrival. Everyone skipped it, ignored it, or never realized the show even existed. Even among hardcore Gundam fans, only like 10 people ever watched it, a fact that honestly breaks my heart. Because Build Divers Re:Rise was an anime that nobody ever asked for, nobody ever asked for it to be great, or even wanted it to be.

And yet, the show still tried to be the best possible anime that it could be, even if the show got every cards stacked against it from the start. And the fact that Re:Rise ended up as a commercial flop that would never ever get the level of recognition it truly deserves is, to me, the greatest tragedy in modern Gundam history.

So now whenever I say “one of the best recent Gundam series is Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise” I feel like I could get sent to the Guillotine at any moment. Is this a sacrilege stance? Or maybe I’m the one whose taste in anime is shit here?