LITTLE. TINY. BOYS. LITTLE GUYS. LOOK AT THESE GUYS,
THEY’RE SO LITTLE! Don’t you wanna buy them? DON’T YOU WANNA CATCH EM ALL—
Hi I’m Jett Kuso! And uh, you can see that I’m wearing glasses to show that time
has passed. Today we’re looking at the newest Bakugan gimmick toy:
Nanogan. First I’ll talk about what they are and what I think of them as toys, and at the
end of the video we’ll talk about how to use them in the game and what this means for Bakugan fans!
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Nanogan… Another toy that sounds kind of like a different toy but isn’t that toy.
…Right so right off the bat, these aren’t BakuNano. BakuNano
were a support piece introduced in Mechtanium Surge. They were like…tiny little weapons…
Little, spring-loaded weapons you could plug into a Bakugan.
They were kinda like the ‘Small Bits’ that came with BakuGear but with /ACTION/
We got a morningstar, some uh, some Shurikens… And uh… GUN.
In-game, they did nothing but add a very small B-Power bonus to your Bakugan, but
they took up a non-miniscule amount of space in your deck.
Months ago the fans found the name ‘Nanogan’ leaked way before we knew what they looked like,
and golly that was TERRIFYING. The reboot has thus-far borrowed most of it’s gimmicks
from Bakugan’s past, redesigning them and for the most part improving upon that past.
Battle Gear to BakuGear, Trap Bakugan to Geogan. And now we’re in year four, which is
the equivalent to legacy’s Mechtanium Surge; the legacy season where the quality of both toys and
gameplay took a sharp dive and dragged Bakugan into the mists of obscure cancelled toylines.
The idea of modern Bakugan taking inspiration from BakuNanos or Mechtogan is terrifying. They
were the worst gimmicks to that point. In my opinion, even worse than ‘RIDIN ON CARS’
So if Nanogan aren’t BakuNano… what are they?
LITTLE. TINY. PERFECT. BOYS. Baby boy, baby. Evil.
Nanogan are the smallest marbles Bakugan has ever made. Even smaller than B1’s,
and as-such they are NOT spring-loaded and NOT magnetic. Each Nanogan has to be manually
transformed from ball-form to monster-form, and lemme tell you… They’re really friggin cute.
We’ve got Widow, Sludgem, Riptide, Bug, Scorcher, Lancer, Tingler, Fury, Scrumbler and Sucko!
Four of those names were made up, and I’m not saying which.
The designs are simple, but every one of em still has a distinct
look. Even more distinct than their designs are their color
palates! Nanogan possess factions and faction symbols just like Bakugan. Pyrus, Darkus, Ventus,
Aquos, Haos and Aurelus. But curiously, they bear very different color patterns…
As far as I can tell, Nanogan take the Secondary and Tertiary colors from the NEW
Bakugan Evolutions color palates and makes THOSE their primary colors.
All in all nanogan display a LOT of color variety, to the point where it can be a liiittle tough to
tell which faction a Nanogan is supposed to be at a glance until you get used to them.
You may be wondering what the point of Nanogan are if they don’t pop open or anything, and to
that I say SCREW popping open, they can ride your Bakugan like little pets!!! HECK YEAH. YES. YES.
WOOOO. LET’S GOOOO.
They’re really good. I like em. They’re really good.
Now, on some of them the little peg that lets them attach to a Bakugan...
Sometimes the peg is in a spot where they kinda have to ride upside down? Does this look silly?
Does it ruin the immersion for the Nanogan that have this problem? Could this have
been avoided? These questions don’t matter, and I would prefer if you didn’t ask them.
Either way, Nanogan like Widow look p’good on the back of pretty much any Bakugan.
Compared to BakuNano, Nanogan represent the degree to which Spin Master now
understands the *true* appeal of Bakugan… Back in the legacy series, they thought the point was
springs and magnets. ‘Oh if it has springs and magnets well then
toe to tip, that’s a Bakugan toy!’ NO. NO IT’S NOT. Bakugan is NOT about magnets,
and it’s NOT about spring-loaded transformations! Bakugan, first and foremost, is a ball
that turns into a monster. It’s all about the ball, and it always WAS about the ball.
The instinct to collect comes from some deep base trait in the human psyche.
The simple appeal of having a hoard of things that look the similar.
a book of stamps, or a jar of pennies, or a box full of soda caps, or a bag of every
fortune cookie fortune you’ve gotten for the past 12 years, or a bunch of parking tickets
that you keep ignoring cause if you ignore them maybe they’ll go away and you’ll be fine.
The point is that they look similar, but still every single item in the collection has it’s own
story. A unique feature, or a detail that makes it special IF you know your stuff.
With Bakugan, the unique factor comes from the story of how you got it,
the rarity or value it holds, and the fact that they turn into y’know… FREAKIN’
MONSTERS man. It’s the transition from the mundane to the exciting. The spring-loaded magnetic
quality is there to make that transition explosive and cool, but it’s the transition from mundane
ball to cool monster that serves as Bakugan’s core appeal. Your collection can be a shelf full of
crazy unique monsters, or it can be a bucket full of near-identical looking orbs hiding their power…
Nanogan fit that description /perfectly/.
Now you may be wondering, dear viewer, if they don’t pop open and they don’t
have magnets or b-powers, wwhhhhat do they do? How do they fit into the game?
…They don’t. The toys are non-essential to gameplay.
Nanogan ain’t support pieces like Geogan were, because Nanogan can’t DO anything other than
be a neat toy! This was my big praise of BakuGear and my big criticism of Geogan. And
while I did come around to Geogan being a better integration into gameplay than I expected…..I’ve
gotta say, it’s *really* nice to not have to worry about stuffing any more plastic into my deckbox.
All this is NOT to say buying Nanogan won’t help you in the game! Every Nanogan TOY comes
with a Nanogan CARD with uh…some…some symbols? And some numbers… and uh… uhhhhhhhhhhhh……..
Stay tuned, I’ll explain everything.
Alright, frickin, buckle-up, it’s rules time.
Let’s see what the booklet has to say. OhOh no…
Page one is just a glossary of terms, showing gate cards, character cards, b-power, etc.
This is just standard gate battling game rules. There’s stuff about Geogan and… Ah!
“Up to 3 Nanogan can be used in a game. Nanogan must match faction colors of your team.
Turn face-up during a brawl and get the bonuses you have unlocked with Gate and Core symbols.”
OThis leaves a lot in the air… Since this version is using Gate Cards instead of cores,
how are we supposed to like get multiple cores on our Bakugan to activate abilities, like
Siphon’s +500? And can we *bring* more than 3 Nanogan cards but only *use* three of them?
Do we have to choose them in advance? And what does THIS symbol do???
Every other page in the booklet is another language with the exact same stuff. There’s
no glossary of symbols, no clarifications. There’s nothing on the website or the app and no updates
to the official rules. The only official public source for any of this information
is a ‘How to Play’ video made my studio going up on the Bakugan Official Channel.
Which would’ve been a lot harder to make if not for Toolbox24,
who got in touch with game designer Gary and got some important clarifications to
how Nanogan work in both toy battling AND the TCG AND the gate battling game.
So Nanogan are essentially a 3 card side-deck.
You choose three based on the factions on your team. So since I’ve got a Pyrus and an Aurelus,
I can have two Aurelus and a Pyrus or I could have. Darkus since I’m running a darkus.
Effects are triggered not by the cores or gate cards attached to the Bakugan
in this specific battle, but the cores or gate cards attached to your entire team.
So if we’re two battles into the game… First turn I get colossus onto a normal shield. Next turn
I got gorthion on a green fist, so then I can roll Leonidas onto this helix and activate nano
chrysalin’s effect to give myself +1800. And if I already had a ton of B-power I wouldn’t actually
have to play that effect, I could just save it for next turn if I wanted to. So as the game
progresses and as you win battles, your Nanogan cards scale up and you become more powerful.
If you use them in Gate Battling game where you use gate cards,
it turns the game into…essentially 3 gate cards, three Bakugan and 3 ability cards just like the
legacy game. And they don’t only provide stat bonuses either, they sometimes give you symbols!
SYMBOLS! YEAHHHH! LOTS OF CONFUSING HEXAGON SYMBOLS!
…I don’t…I don’t know what that was…
“That was AC/DC”
…Was it???
“Yeah they’re still goin’”
The hexagon + symbol~ Add a core or Gate Card to the active Bakugan~~
The hexagon - symbol~ Remove a core from the opposing active Bakugan~~
The hexagon arrow symbol~ Steal one core from the opposing active Bakugan~~
On a character card, these are ~compulsory static effects~ that activate immediately if
your Bakugan is holding one of the correct cores when it opens. If both Bakugan have
one of these symbols, they resolve in order of priority rather than reverse batch order
They only activate when the Bakugan first opens or when the Nanogan is first played; adding the
core to the Bakugan later during a battle doesn’t trigger the effect.
Most of these weird specific rulings apply when they’re on a Bakugan’s character card.
It’s much simpler to grasp when they’re on a Nanogan card cause they just go on the batch.
Since gate cards now feature Core symbols, these effects
also apply to Gate Cards in the Gate Battling Game. Which would
mean stealing an entire gate card from your opponent, which is kind of hilarious.
I’ll be honest, these effects are…very strong. If you want to win you HAVE to have them in
the TCG or TBG and the… GBG? If you don’t use them, you’ll just be weaker, plain and
simple. They’re pure power-creep, BUT that doesn’t inherently make them a *bad* addition to the game.
So far I’ve I found the mechanic of trying to get specific cores to activate your
nanogan…interesting? It’s not mind-blowing, but it is
*different* and it’s been pretty neat in how much it effects deck building.
Now do we really NEED another thing to think about while playing the tcg? …………No.
What the TCG needs is interesting card effects like Fury or Rapid Fire or Underdog,
that do more than just add numbers or interact with BakuCores or gimmick triggers.
Nanogan aren’t *for* the TCG because the TCG is on hiatus. …So what ARE Nanogan for?
BABY GAAAAAME
You want COMPLEXITY?? You want STRATEGY?!? You want DEEP ENGAGING GAMEPLAY? NO!
You want PAY TO WIN ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS! You wanna huck plastic and do basic math for three minutes
then get bored and play video games instead!
But seriously, Nanogan are CLEARLY designed for the toy versions of the game,
and compared to how LITTLE strategy the baby game has had to this point,
Nanogan actually bring a lot to the table. Now, instead of brainlessly picking the
strongest Bakugan and aiming for the strongest cores, a kid will be rewarded for carefully
building a Bakugan team that works well with the Nanogan that they’re using.
You have to consider static character card effects, carefully choose what core you roll
on to activate your Nanogan abilities, you need to look at what effects your opponent’s character
card has, carefully choose when to use a Geogan or a Bakugear… The toy game still isn’t as fun or as
evergreen the TCG, but it’s been made more complex and a little bit more interesting than it once
was. There’s some tools for counterplay now, and it’s going to take some careful strategizing and
deckbuilding and timing to make the most of these tools work. but uh……..wouldn’t it be a little
simpler to just put all these effects onto ability cards…? And make an actual deck for them? And
make it a TCG?
That’s probably a topic for another time…
We’re here to talk Nanogan, so what are my thoughts overall?
They’re friggin cute toys. Highly collectible critters that fit really well with Bakugan’s
image and appeal. The product design is also more ethical than previous gimmicks,
since you don’t need 3 playsets of Nanogan to use them effectively.
Nanogan have made the simplistic toy game more interesting for 2022,
but at the expense of power creeping the TCG to a needlessly bogged down place without giving a ton
for the hardcore fanbase to sink our teeth into.
But regardless of all of that, given the TCG hiatus, I think Nanogan are a really
solidly designed gimmick for the year. I know I’ll be collecting as many as I can
get my grubby little consumerist hands on. Sometimes I truly disgust myself.
Thanks for watching! Do a… a like and do a subscribe, comment your favorite
uh…let me know uh…what your favorite little guys are! This is Jett Kuso and I’ll see you next time.