It feels weird to call Byston Well, the setting Yoshiyuki Tomino created for Aura Battler Dunbine – a series that many Isekai novels draw their lineage from – as a “joke”. However, arguably no creator has so desperately tried to “make fetch happen” with a setting that Tomino has done with Dunbine – not only with New Aura Battler Dunbine, but also Wings of Rean and Garzey’s Wing. Yet, with the degree of traction the original work obtained, there has to be something there – right?
Promotional art for Aura Battler Dunbine showing the series cast

Aura Battler Dunbine follows Sho (or Show, depending on the localization) Zama, a motorcycle racer from modern Tokyo who, right before he has an unfortunate accident with a truck ends up getting summoned to the fantasy world of Byston Well – a land where souls go before they are reincarnated. There he ends up getting caught up in a massive series of fantasy mech wars, between the kingdom of Drake Luft – along with his advisor Shot Weapon – who are trying to take over Byston Well with their magically powered mechs, known as Aura Battlers – along with their magically powered warships.

Things progressively get worse (this is an ’80s Tomino series, after all), as the war goes on, with the war taking a progressively worse toll on Byston Well itself. This leads to everyone getting straight up kicked out of Byston Well, with their mechs, to “Upper Earth” – meaning our world – where it turns out that Aura weapons are considerably more powerful – an aura blast that had the power of a conventional missle in Byston Well has the power of a nuclear weapon – and the vehicles and equipment are more resiliant, with aura power allowing pilots and captains to generate energy fields for their ships that can allow warships to even withstand repeated attacks with nuclear weapons.

The first half of the series is basically Sho and the scrappy resistance group he’s fallen in with going from battle to battle against Drake, and only getting the occasional minor victory, before getting pushed back once again. Eventually they put together some allies to wage a serious fight, letting them press the attack – only for everyone to get booted to Earth and ending up on the back foot again. From a viewing perspective it causes the series to feel like it’s spinning its wheels a little bit.

This is not helped by the fact that while this has better writing for women in the series than most other Tomino shows, that’s… not saying much. It’s not as bad as Gundam Zeta gets with some of that series’ women being wishy-washy with their loyalties, but instead it has real issues with the effectiveness of the women of the series – they never quite pull off their plans effectively as well as the men do – and if they do it also often ends up getting them (and a lot of other people) killed. It’s something we need to consider when talking about the agency of women in fiction – a character having agency – trying to have an impact on their own destiny – is wonderful, but it’s meaningless if they either fail, or the men around them are frequently shown as being more effective then the women are.

On a better note – the mechanical designs in this show are great – as in “Why aren’t we talking about Dunbine Plastic Models” great. They have this crustacian/insectoid appearance – even the heroic units like the Dunbine or Billbine – that really fits for the setting. Even better, the capital ship designs definitely recognize that “these are powered by magic and fly by magic so we don’t have to obey the laws of aerodynamics in the same way”, so the ships and their bridges and command centers just look cool.

So, the question becomes, why didn’t Dunbine have the same legs that Gundam had? Why hasn’t Byston Well had the myriad spinoffs and sequels that other series has done? I think that’s because the ending of Dunbine is so irrevocably final. Not to put too fine a point on it but:

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There’s no room for sequels and spinoffs because everyone’s dead, and their souls have been purified and sent back to Byston Well. Even when they did a sequel with New Aura Battler Dunbine, they had to have the cast be reincarnations of the old characters, with an contrived excuse to bring in one of the original antagonists to also explain why the Aura Battlers were also back, since all the Aura Battlers and all the Aura Battleships were also destroyed. Everything wrapped up so well here, that you can’t really draw the same sort of narrative connection between the original series and other Byston Well stories. Plus, because the story goes to our world and back again rather than being confined to Byston Well, that means that if you do a story set later (or with someone from a setting more contemporaneous to when the new series was made), this becomes a more difficult decision, considering the… calamatous effects that the series has on our world.

To be clear, Aura Battler Dunbine is a really good series. But it’s also a series that makes clear that no, Tomino, “Fetch” (by which I mean more Byston Well) was never really on the table, with how you left the story once you were done.