Tetsurou Okino is a young engineer who excited to start his new job at a vermin extermination company. However, his excitement stems from getting to use the new robot Bullbuster that he designed himself for the first time in the field.
However, his new employer is Namidome Industries, a small company with little funding and a huge task. The company has been hired by the previous residents of a small island community who were chased out of their homes after mutated giant monsters started to appear.
With little resources, Okino finds that his work isn’t just using Bullbuster to fight monsters, but is more about managing fuel costs, considering the cost of each bullet fired, and investigating where these monsters are coming from in the first place.
While young whippersnappers find the lack of action in this series quite dull, as an elderly person, I find this realistic mecha anime actually quite the charming story. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Bullbuster, head on down below.
Anime Like Bullbuster
For Fans of Realistic Mecha
Dai-Guard
After disappearing for 13 years, the deadly Heterodyne aliens resurface with a vengeance. In order to combat them, three office workers end up operating Dai-Guard, a robot that has long since been a big paperweight.
Can these salary men really save the world in such a junker?
The charm of Bullbuster was how it combined mecha with the dream-smothering realism of real life. It explored things like not having the budget to use your mech, not having a boat to transport it, and not having specific authorization from your number-crunching company to do necessary things.
If that is what charmed you about Bullbuster, Dai-guard will capture some of that magic as well. Mecha anime tends to dream big, but both Bullbuster and Dai-guard keep mecha comically shackled behind the corporate nonsense that would likely constrain giant mechs if they were real.
That said, Bullbuster keeps even the mech realistic. Dai-guard is a more traditional giant robot action mecha anime, but with the same corporate constraints that Bullbuster has, used for both comedy and drama.
Mobile Police Patlabor
Humanity has made a great leap forward in technology with the advent of heavy machinery-type robots called Labors. They became used for a variety of functions, from fire-fighting and construction to military combat. As such, eventually the Labors became used for crime as well.
As the Labor is a dangerous weapon, the police of the future created advanced patrol Labor units known as Patlabors, to combat their use in crime.
In the Second Special Vehicles Division, a motley crew of police officers do their best to keep their community safe using their Patlabor machines.
There aren’t actually a lot of mecha that cover what would be considered as “the early days” of the giant robot. They go right past the clunky early models all the way to giant robots dancing around giant monsters like a ballet dancer. However, if you enjoyed Bullbuster for its realistic take on mecha, Mobile Police Patlabor is a similar sort of series.
What Bullbsuter is to fighting an isolated incident of giant monsters, Patlabor is to police work. Alongside both having mechs grounded in realism, they both follow bright-eyed and naive young adult main characters that are new to their unit, and very passionate about getting to use a mech. While Mobile Police Patlabor gets quite dramatic, both series follow plots of not just intrigue, but office politics as well.
For Fans of Isolated Monster Outbreaks
SSSS.Gridman
Amnesiac Yuta Hibiki one day encounters Hyper Agent Gridman inside an old computer. Gridman tells him that he needs to fulfill his mission.
While sorting out what that all means, a giant monster attacks his city. Yuta then discovers he can merge with Gridman to fight the monster, but once it is done, everyone’s memories reset and the dead are forgotten.
While both Bullbuster and SSSS.Gridman are mecha anime, Gridman is definitely more of a traditional giant mech series. However, both series are still about men piloting a mech and fighting giant kaiju monsters.
Like Bullbuster is about fighting giant monsters on an isolated island, Gridman is about fighting monsters that only seem to be appearing in one single town. Both series have their plots dedicated to unraveling where these monsters are coming from, and using their giant mech to stop them.
A.I.C.O. Incarnation
It was at a Japanese research facility where an incident known as The Burst occurred. They had created a rapidly expanding, consuming, and self-replicating Matter that quickly took over the area. To this day, the Matter is still being fought back from consuming any further by various task forces.
Aiko Tachibana is one of the few people rescued from the Matter. Due to her exposure, she is under constant medical surveillance, but one day at school new transfer student Yuuya Kanzaki points out a number of inconsistencies about her body.
Among these claims, he also suggests that she knows more than she may believe about the Matter, and is perhaps the key to stopping it. However, learning the truth means making the dangerous journey through the infested gorge to the heart of the incident.
At their core, both Aico and Bullbuster are about isolated areas where creatures started appearing and have taken over the place. There are those who are trying to contain it and the plot is centered around unraveling the intrigue surrounding what caused the incident.
That said, while Bullbuster is very focused on keeping this sort of common anime plot grounded firmly in our reality, Aico is a series that goes full anime with it. This means there is a lot of futurism and fantasy, and not a lot of realism in the ideas that it is working with.
For Fans of Quirky Misfits At The Office
Planetes
With space travel an everyday reality and corporations taking over many responsibilities, providing an influx of new jobs, Ai Tanabe is able to satisfy her space-faring ambitions by joining the Technora Corporation.
Unfortunately, she finds out that her department, one responsible for removing space debris orbiting Earth, is just a big joke. Regardless, Ai is undeterred in her enthusiasm to make a difference in the great expanse.
Both Bullbuster and Planetes are workplace anime, at their core. However, both series also have a small bit of sci-fi injected into the the actual work. As such, what you get is two series that impressively balance the interesting sci-fi elements while also still highlighting the monotony that is getting up and going to an office each day.
While Bullbuster is about fighting monsters on an island with a realistic mech, Planetes is about what are essentially garbage collectors, but in space. While they both highlight the interesting nature of the work with comically mundane office politics, both series also have plots that follow building intrigue that goes above and beyond the pay grade of the average salaryman.
The Marginal Service
After his history of reckless behavior led to his partners’ death, Brian Nightraider is dismissed from the police force. In his self-pitying slump, he is invited to join the Marginal Service, a secret unit of the United Nations tasked with handing Borderlanders from another world in the human world.
While many Borderlanders live peacefully, a terrorist organization of Borderlanders has started a drug trafficking ring and it is up to the Marginal Service to take them down.
Similar to how the office in Bullbuster is supposed to be killing giant monsters and keeping them a secret from the rest of the world, The Marginal Service follows a group of misfits that are supposed to be keeping troublemakers from another world in line and keeping their existence a secret.
The Marginal Service doesn’t accent the modern corporation and business elements like Bullbuster does, but the similarities in these series sit with the character dynamics. Both series feature characters with various eccentricities and personality quirks that makes it difficult to work with each other. However, a large part of each series is coming together to get the job done.
High Card
In the Kingdom of Fourland, the royal family possessed a powerful deck of 52 cards. Each card has the ability to grant its wielder a special power, but after an attempted theft, the cards were scattered throughout the kingdom.
In order to get them back without a panic, the Kingdom developed a secret group of players armed with cards called High Card to retrieve these missing items of power.
Secretly ran out of the Pinochle luxury car maker’s sales office, High Card, including its newest member, Finn, are consistently thrust into a frenzy of super powered battles.
Like Bullbuster, High Card follows an office of workers who are supposed to be doing a task and doing it secretly. In High Card, they are supposed to be collecting cards that grant the users superpowers for the kingdom and doing so outside the public eye. As such, they also have a front for their business similar to Bullbuster.
High Card puts a bigger emphasis on flashy fights, but like Bullbuster, it puts a bunch characters together with eccentric personalities and gives them a task that requires them to work together.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Bullbuster? Let fans know in the comments section below.
