Anime/cartoon with kids battling with robots in a game

Question

So I watched this as a kid, best guess was around the early 2000’s. It was dubbed in Cantonese so the actual show might be older.

The show follows a couple of kids and some professor type character. They play this game where they are booted into a virtual world, similar to the way Matrix works, and they pilot these robots/mech suits and fight. I remember that the kids end up getting hurt in the real world if they take a lot of damage in the virtual world. If memory serves me right, they enter the world in an observatory/ radar looking building in a canyon/ mountain environment. I think towards the end of the show, the virtual world somehow clashes with the real world so they have to fight to save reality or something.

Specific details I remember are:

• The main guy, black hair kid rides a skateboard. Maybe it was a hover board? (It’s not Eureka 7) I think he accidentally stumbles into the group that plays the game. I think his robot was white and red. I think the 1st episode of the show started with him jumping through the turnstyle in a subway and escapes with his board from security. He ends up booting a hoverboard for his robot in the last battle.

• Another main guy, blonde kid. He pilots a green robot and is like the pro of the game.

• Then a girl, I think she has pink hair. Her robot was all red (I think) She admires the gameplay of the blonde kid but doesn’t know what he looks like. I think she was shocked when they finally meet each other.

I hope these details will help identify the show. It’s really been bugging me in the back of my mind.

Answer 1

I may be wrong, but I think you're describing the travesty that is BASToF Lemon. Most of what you say could be from the first episode. There is a girl with pink hair, a boy with black hair, a second boy with blond hair, hover boards are common, all are super gamers, they're picked by a scientist to play a secret game in an observatory/radar looking building in a mountain like environment. It's from 2001.

The setting of the story is the year 2097 AD, the place the city of Xenon. An ultimate cyber game, where players fight as biomech cyber robots, has been developed. However, there's something wrong: the game's cyberspace and the real world are linked, thus the damage done in the game's cyberspace creates real destruction in the city of Xenon. This all started when players heard a painful scream, saw a ghostly face, and a powerful scent of lemon overcame them. To solve this mystery, the creator of the game assembles a "Dream Team," which is the top three gamers in all of Xenon. The team is composed of rebellious and arrogant teens, who have to overcome their attitudes and fears to find the answers, answers to the mystery that is much bigger than just the game.

My only counter is that I don't remember them getting physically hurt in the 8 or so episodes I got through before giving up.

I try not to put opinion in a post, but I don't think it's that good because of stuff like how, at one point in the show, it uses very early CGI-animation-replacement on the cheap:

• a Character's mouth freezes while they are talking, and a new mouth gets superimposed on top, very creepily.
• In another scene, they zoom in a shot from up on the mountain, to a close up of a character who's far away, but to do so the CGI simply zooms in on the entire scene, to a giant pixelated background.

While my club does have it on DVD, it's so bad that no one has ever made it through the whole thing. In fact our purchased-new DVD#6-case shipped with a Disk#5 in it, and no one has bothered to get it fixed. So be wary if you try to get it on DVD in the US (ADV)

I also read your description to someone else and they locked on to Bast as well without any prompting, and neither of us have seen it in 15+ years.

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