Alas, poor Mecha Musume. Why must such a fun aesthetic seemingly always lead back to troubled outings? It’s a question both seemingly without answer and tragic in the asking. Cute girls and heavy weaponry seem like they should be a winning combination. I mean, it works when the girls are operating the weapons as in High School Fleet or to a lesser extent Girls Und Panzer, and even when they equip some serious gear in the context of a magical girl outing with a somewhat techist look and/or feel like Yuki Yuna is a Hero or especially Vividred Operation. So there shouldn’t be anything really in the way of getting a proper Mecha Musume outing.
But Busou Shinki happened. It squandered its designs on a living toys angle, and it wasn’t good. Then we get Frame Arms Girl which does the exact same thing as Busou Shinki only… less. Finally there came LBX Girl, which went with actual mecha powers in a good ol’ alien invasion bug war… and it sucked, giving us very few action set pieces and a lame plot dominated by food tourism rather than using said actual mecha powers. And a little bit after that hot mess, we got Alice Gear Aegis Expansion.
If Mecha Musume is a curse, then Alice Gear Aegis Expansion may well be double-cursed since it’s also based on a video game, first released in mobile form as, simply, Alice Gear Aegis, and then for consoles in a “whole package deal” as Alice Gear Aegis CS: Concerto of Simulatrix. Apparently it’s kind of a mix of fighting game and bullet hell with extra VN parts, which makes sense given the style of the girls, and while I haven’t played the game myself, it seems to be decently well reviewed. Of course, decently received games have a spotty track record when it comes to anime.
At least Kotobukiya, the boffins behind Frame Arms Girls (and who also picked up the Busou Shinki line) make kits of these characters. That’s guaranteed fun… even if maybe it’s also another layer of cursed.
Well, even though I’d love to waste more time before getting into this one, let’s approach Alice Gear Aegis Expansion.
In its currently streaming form, Alice Gear Aegis actually starts with an “Episode 0”. This random, out of place fanservice beach episode is actually an OVA separate from the TV release, but because it was lumped where I found the show, I felt that I might confuse someone who went looking if I didn’t mention it. Nothing more needs be said about “Heart Pounding! Actress Packed Mermaid Grand Prix!”
The show proper starts with some actual space action, as we zoom in on a battle where the girls with their mech gear fly around, dodging shots, slashing homing lasers with swords, and otherwise battling an undefined but mechanical-looking enemy called Vice with some impressively fast yet still mostly clean fighting.
It doesn’t last long, but it sets the bar pretty high for a start.
We then cut to an immediate and precipitous downgrade in animation as our main character apparent makes her way through crowds so colorless they might have been borrowed from RWBY Season 1 in order to apply for a job as an Actress – one of the mecha-suit-using girls who defends humanity against the Vice – while fangirling over her favorite among the three we saw in the battle.
So, cast, sound off!
In blonde hair we have Nodoka Takahata, said new girl and therefore our introduction to all things Actress!
In brown hair (and tan skin to complete the look) we have Shitara Kaneshiya, the excitable gamer goober.
With dark blue hair and glasses we have Fumika Momoshina. She wears glasses, so you know she’s the straight-woman foil to Shitara here.
And finally (for now) in pink hair we have Nodoka’s favorite and team-leader apparent, the endlessly motivated and hero-syndrome-bearing Yotsuyu Hirasaka.
Nodoka doesn’t initially seem to be cut out for Actress work, but Yotsuyu’s relentless positivity pushes her into a training regimen that ultimately pays off… just in time for the MIBs to come in and shut down their little gang for unspecified regulatory violations. The next episode starts with a comically overwrought black and white section (clearly intentionally evoking older cinema) with the girls pushing a cart of junk to a new location, where it turns out that their company can continue operations, but not deploying as Actresses for the foreseeable future. And thus it becomes clear what this show is going to do.
In a universe where, as the intro tells us, these Actresses are the last line of defense against a mechanoid enemy that has driven humanity from Earth and still hunts them across the cosmos (the ship interior clearly being even more well disguised as normal places than a Macross-franchise colony ship), we’re going to be focusing almost entirely on cute girls doing cute things in their downtime, aren’t we?
You know what? Sure. Fine. I’ll hold my big rant for the postscript, or at least the end.
So, let’s revise. This show is a series of vignettes centered around a quartet of cute girls who technically have a very fancy job that entitles them to social status and cool gadgets, spending their time doing… mostly random stuff.
They have a little game of capture the flag with the maintenance squad. It’s like Upotte!! but somehow even less dramatic.
They get recruited to work in a semi-seedy effectively cosplay cafe. Nothing really is done with this and status quo is restored in about fifteen minutes our time.
Then we get a random ghost story. And following it a pointless bit of running around with a ninja with a toothache.
This is followed by an episode for a shopping district festival, featuring a random game show and Nodoka making horrible alien monster dango that apparently have an addictive taste. There is no reason for this.
They go mountain hiking. Again, in what is canonically a space ship. And get lost and deal with a bear that a little bird friend spirit battles with. It happens.
And the slice of life hits keep on coming. Why not have the girls participate in a cheesy hero show with no preamble nor consequences? Clearly, anything goes. Like in the next episode after that where the Actresses are, well, actresses in a period murder mystery, or rather a pair of them, with no explanation nor preamble. I know you call them actresses, but wasn’t the job description a little different?
I would keep going with the time wastes, but there’s not much reason. The show clearly doesn’t care about anything that happens here, throwing us dream sequences and even a literal paper doll half an episode.
So I’ll cut to the chase: throughout the show there is a slow-burn little main plot, first shown in a couple of easily-missed post-credits stingers that suggest that a company is doing some unethical test-pilot-ruining experiments on new Alice Gears. In a show that actually ever used them, that would be a potentially neat hook, but here it’s… well I would say it’s relegated to the back burner, but really it’s pushed farther back than that. I don’t even think it’s on the stove any more.
Where do they go with it, and when?
Well, the head of the evil company lures Nodoka in during the Episode 10 stinger (the third stinger to feature this otherwise absent plot) so it pretty much runs for the final two episodes. In Episode 11, Yotsuyu angsts about Nodoka seemingly quitting, only to discover the whole “illegal, dangerous, and possibly deadly human experiments” thing that Nodoka is entrapped in. Yotsuyu blames herself and wants to commando mission a rescue, but is talked down as far as the boss lady calling in an unseen “captain” to arrange things.
Thus, all Nodoka’s friends get in on the action, even if Yotsuyu is the only one able to suit up. This leads to our episode 12 climax where Nodoka, being driven ever more crazy by the super-powered gear she’s operating, is confronted by Yotsuyu while the rest of the gang tries to claim some incriminating evidence and stop the evil mad scientist at the control room.
In space, Nodoka and Yotsuyu have a couple rounds of shootout (well, Nodoka is shooting. Yotsuyu can’t and wouldn’t), which the show clearly saved all its budget for since as a flying-around-beam-spam battle it looks pretty dang good. Nodoka is freed from mind control but when she realizes she’s facing the actual Yotsuyu and not a training hologram she goes a little extra nuts and slides half back in, airing sour jealousy that would have been a cool turn for the character if there had been any hints that she wasn’t just pure fangirling this whole time. Of course, the gang led by Yotsuyu talks her down and all’s well that ends well. The mad scientist gets burned, everybody lives, and the girls even get that episode 1 order to stop operations lifted, so they’re back in action… Minus Nodoka, whose Actress capacity evidently burned out and who seems to want to go on to somewhere she can stand on her own even if everybody is still set to be friends.
The end.
Well, the last two episodes were a solid dramatic climax… for a show that had stopped asking for one long ago. With so much of the running time being dedicated to nothing but cute girls doing cute things slice-of-life comedy, and often over-the-top absurd stuff at that, if you were just taking the show on its own and ignoring what it kind of promised with its premise, this would be out of place. We didn’t need a sudden dramatic battle climax at the end of Chronicles of the Going Home Club or Magical Sempai, and I’m torn on getting one here. On one hand, I was practically begging for the Actresses to suit up this whole show, while on the other… it doesn’t fit with what we were given until then.
I have to assume that this show was made for people who are already fans of Alice Gear Aegis. The game looks like it’s about actually flying around and fighting stuff, with some visual novel elements aside, so the show I guess is supposed to be this weird little companion piece that’s just the downtime skits because, hey, if you have the game and want action you can just play the game right?
And I am trying my hardest to not be too ruthless with this show just because that strategy doesn’t work for anime-only viewers, which is what I essentially am and what I write my reviews assuming for the most part. How does it stand up just as this Cute Girls Doing Cute Things story with a two-episode action-drama finish?
Well, as you might guess from how I’d been grousing until now, those elements do not blend here. They could blend if there were more integrated undercurrents throughout the show and a sense of progress or motion, like it felt like there was intended to be a real beginning and end, but that’s not what the show was like.
For the most part, you could watch the middle episodes in literally any order. 1 and 2 go at the start and 10-12 at the end, but for the rest? The characters don’t really grow or change, and all the side girls are barely introduced. They just sort of show up and you’re supposed to get what their thing is pretty quickly. Which you do. The core thread of this show should be the relationship between Nodoka and Yotsuyu, but it doesn’t actually grow after they level out by the end of Episode 1, until suddenly episode 12 happens. Which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for that last bit about plot suddenly happening.
I guess Alice Gear Aegis Expansion is reasonably well-animated (the crowd trick I mentioned earlier seems more of a style thing) and at least a few of the jokes do land even if they skew tired. When looking at it as cute girls doing cute things, there’s not all that much to fault. So, and I say this through clenched teeth as my most grudging admission, the grade that Alice Gear Aegis probably deserves is C-.
FINAL GRADE: C-
Now, I have tried to view Alice Gear Aegis Expansion for… what it is, and have stopped myself from griping overmuch about what it could have been. Because, when you get down to it, “what it could have been” is not a fair comparison nor a reasonable factor to take into account for a letter grade. But I wanted to address that, and the Mecha Musume concept in general. Let’s take a look at something:
This is one of the promotional images for a Mecha Musume model kit. Specifically, one that would build Nodoka Takahata from this very show. Looks neat doesn’t it? She’s got some imposing looking mech parts, a variety of weapons (including a gun as seen in this shot, a sword, drones, and so on) and still a cute, connectable face.
Does that scream “Slice of life comedy!”? I don’t think it does. I think you would anticipate that maybe, just maybe, she’d be in a scenario where she could make use of that firepower, where we would see superhuman feats accomplished by this girl in her machine. Where we would feel that this has a reason to exist in this universe. The kind of scenario that doesn’t happen in Alice Gear Aegis Expansion until the last two episodes.
In short, I’d love one of these Mecha Musume shows, to indulge not only in the visual wonder of the aesthetic style (which is pretty rarely used in this show), but also to have the sort of main plot that uses what it gives the characters to its fullest.
And I understand, we have cute girls here. But you can still be bright and colorful and indulge some cuteness and give us a solid storyline that includes some mecha action. And frankly, you don’t have to. Just like more than one show has proved you can have cute girls and badass fighting, more than one show has also proved you can put cute girls through the wringer if you want to do that instead. I dare say that there are several potential mutually-exclusive show concepts that could fully leverage the Mecha Musume look.
So why is it, after four shows directly targeting the aesthetic for itself (rather than arguably for fanservice with some milquetoast dude to be the main character as in Infinite Stratos, HybridxHeart, or Hundred) the one that comes closest to actually doing something with this concept is somehow LBX Girls, a show where the main character was absolutely useless and food tourism trumped what was theoretically a timed world-critical mission?
I want a Mecha Musume show that has the tone and pathos of a legit Mecha show. Pretty much any legit Mecha show, as long as it’s one of the decent or better ones. It doesn’t have to be Evangelion, though it could be if not that then at least a sort of Knights of Sidonia if you’re going to write off Earth like Alice Gear Aegis did. How much different would this show be if instead of “normal modern Japan, no way you cold tell you were inside a ship” it just had the environments of Sidonia that accept being a sci-fi show? It would change so much. But I digress, you could set the drama bar to a Macross Delta or a Rinne no Lagrange and that would be fine. Heck, there are mecha musume kits of the Delta girls fused with thematically-brightly-colored Variable Fighters. Why the heck aren’t I watching that? Right, because it’s model kits and not an anime.
Maybe it’s a personal bias. I like the “Action Girl” archetype. I like them across from male leads, and I like them when they’re all on their own like in most Magical Girl outings that have action in their DNA. So it frustrates me that shows that really push that role are few and often seem to fall flat, like Jinki: Extend for reasons utterly unrelated to the gender of their protagonist. And we have this brilliant aesthetic with Mecha Musume, that seems to move more than its fair share of product given how more and more lines of girlpla kits keep appearing, that seems to cry out to make some action girls and make them incredible, and it just keeps bombing. Alice Gear Aegis Expansion may have gotten a passing grade, but when I’ve been waiting for that show that really uses the power of its concept, I’m going to have to keep waiting.