A kid and his 30-centimeter robot wrestler enter a tournament where the only rule that matters is winning the next match. The fights are real even though the fighters are tiny, the rivalries build the same way they would at full scale, and every opponent teaches Sanshiro something about himself he didn't know before. This is pure adventure stripped down to its skeleton: a goal, a tool, a series of obstacles that each demand something different from the person holding the remote. The lightness of it is the point. There's no world-ending threat to distract you from what actually matters: a kid figuring out who he is by refusing to lose.

Sugata Sanshiro is a player of plawres, a wrestling game in which competitors build their own robots, each around 30 cm tall, and send them into the ring to fight. His plawrestler is Juohmaru, and with it he takes on powerful rivals and comes out on top. The 1983 TV series runs 37 episodes and mixes sports competition with mecha, science fiction and adventure.