So, some time ago I reviewed Frame Arms Girl, a show based on a line of plastic model kits, depicting the mecha musume girls from the kits as animate… well, plastic models, leading to a kind of odd living toys setup. Well, it turns out that I might have started in the wrong place: before there were Frame Arms Girls, Busou Shinki from Konami was the main and arguably original line of mecha musume snap-fit models. Being Konami, it was a multi-media franchise including model kits, manga, games, and of course an anime outing as well, which is probably what we have to blame for Frame Arms Girl taking the “tiny androids, VR Battlefields” sort of approach, because that’s exactly what Busou Shinki does. The question will be whether or not it does it better than Frame Arms Girl.
Honestly, the production history is a little interesting, so permit me a small digression: Busou Shinki came out in 2006, and the model line stopped releasing new entries in 2012, which is ironically when they got their show. Frame Arms Girl came into existence in 2015, with a sister line, Megami Device, appearing a year later. This is relevant both because the Kotobukiya lines inherited some of Busou Shinki’s creative staff, and because some of the Busou Shinki characters were later recreated in the Megami Device line. Truly, Girlpla (a term that is a mutation of “Gunpla”, itself a portmanteau of “Gundam” and “Plamo”, the latter of which is itself a portmanteau of “Plastic Model”) has a twisted yet somehow inbred history (and etymology)
I know this both because I occasionally do research to provide facts in these reviews, and because I have to revise one of my opinions from the Frame Arms Girl review. Back then I said, more or less, that the models might be kind of entertaining and the show was lame. Now, I can say with confidence that the models are amazingly fun if you, like me, are the right kind of person for them, and the show is lame.
In any case, Busou Shinki takes place in a world where Shinki are a known value. What are Shinki? Well, as the opening narration tells you, they are small robot people with their own real thoughts and feelings, which are created to serve human masters as assistants. Some masters give their Shinki a variety of weapons to do Angelic Layer style competitive combat, because of course that’s a thing.
Our main human for the show is Rihito, a high-school student freshly moved back to Japan and in possession of our real main characters, the three Shinki named Ann, Ines, and Lene. As they unpack (which involves taking up a whole episode on their interactions and chasing a random envelope they lose out the window) they find their master has received the gift of a fourth Shinki, this one a “Strarf” combat-type model who receives the name Hina.
Now’s as good a time as any to go through these girls. Ann is the generic sweetheart, who has the claim to fame of having been with their master the longest. The other long-haired blonde, Lene, is also very affectionate but is more of a ditz and klutz, or at least an oddball. Ines, meanwhile, is the tsundere of the lot, sharp-tongued but loyal and hard-working. Newcomer Hina is not interested in playing house – she believes she was made to fight and has a crisis of conscience doing anything else. She also only lets her master call her by name, insisting the others call her Strarf, per her model. I’ll use the two names interchangeably in all likelihood.
Their first adventure after Hina joins the party? Cook Master a meal while he’s off at school! This is hard enough when you’re a couple inches tall, but is complicated by some mischief sown by the neighbor’s idiot Shinki, and the fact that somewhere along the line they decided that a live octopus for takoyaki was a good idea. Hina is lured in by the sounds of combat, gets the lights back on, dispatches the octopus, and then has to deal with the two neighboring twits throwing the ingredients at her, which she incidentally cuts perfectly as she parries them. She runs the rivals off and, in the process, saves the day when it comes to cooking, especially as she’s conscripted into helping properly thereafter, as much as she complains. End result? A fine meal for master, and Hina learning that making someone happy just might make her happy even if it’s not purely through fighting.
This is pretty emblematic of the series: more of the episodes are very low key than aren’t, but they tend to find some excuse to mix in some action. A few are heavier (though the show is still not heavy on the whole), like the next where there’s a thief hitting Shinki stores and the girls’ master is made a suspect through coincidences, forcing them to track down the culprit (something Hina was already doing with the help of a friendly Shinki from the neighborhood, Clara.)
But then we go right on to doing a wacky races episode where all the Shinki in the area compete in a seemingly no-rules race for a trip to Okinawa with their master. Ines and Lene both enter (Ines to impress master, Lene to get a consolation prize that could help her patch up being on the rocks with Ines, which isn’t revealed until the end) but between the troublemaking neighbor duo acting as the Dick Dastardly of this episode and Hina having been hired by the race to act as the final obstacle, Clara wins instead.
That turns out alright, because Ann spent the episode doing an unintentional trading sequence, ending with her winning a trip to Okinawa from a raffle. So we get a beach episode anyway. Or at least that’s how it starts: the obligatory beach scenes (as one might or might not guess from the object scaling. More on that in a moment.) are part of the whole VR field thingy as the girls get ready for their trip. However, packed in a bag, they get left behind by a frazzled master at the last moment, which results in them trying to get to Okinawa themselves to meet up for the second part of the episode. Rather than express mailing themselves there, they decide to basically hitchhike, and of course they get lost along the way leading to some mild peril, before finally arriving by way of, for the last leg, helium party balloon.
Now, about that scaling: Busou Shink tells us outright that Shinki are 15cm tall, which is about 6 inches for my fellow Americans. This is about accurate to the height of most girlpla models (though they do vary somewhat). However, the show’s scaling is between somewhat and wildly inconsistent depending on the shot. We know they’re small, but they pretty much interact with other small things as the plot demands, often depicting them as a fair bit tinier than they’d actually be. They’re usually scaled pretty well when in the same frame as a human, but other than that anything goes. So when the girls try watermelon splitting and the watermelon seems sized to them as it would to a human, it’s hard to say that they’re in the simulator rather than working with a miraculously small watermelon (ditto with their interactions with things like tiny crabs. Maybe the crabs are just really tiny?).
The beach/travel episode is followed by one that goes more high tension: on the plane ride back, the gang (plus Clara) discover a group of terrorist Shinki threatening to blow up the plane. Incidentally, they’re all the same model as Ann, which is used mostly to do all the action cliches associated with impostors and doppelgangers as well as a bunch of generic ones. While the fight takes up the vast majority of the episode it turns out that it wasn’t needed. Even leaving aside how much damage a Shinki-scale bomb could really do, it’s actually a fake, and the “terrorists” are part of a training exercise, except that they boarded the wrong plane.
Following that we swerve into weird territory. It’s a hot summer day so the girls try scary stories to cool off, and end up meeting a neighbor Shinki (different than the troublemakers) who acts rather creepy. It sustains the atmosphere until it’s revealed that she’s a bit lost, thanks to having a fight with her master over losing an important hairpin. She has it now, and after it’s repaired they go to give it back, only to get a punchline that while the Shinki, Fuki, is perfectly normal her master is actually a ghost.
This would be bizarre enough as a one-off, but Japanese media doesn’t have quite as sharp a line between “realistic” and “paranormal” as Western does, so a random ghost being in something doesn’t necessarily make it fantasy on a conceptual level.
The next episode, Ann gets dosed with some magic Mario mushroom juice that Inis acquired from unknown sources, causing her to wake up at a bus stop as a full-sized human. Naturally no one she runs into believes she’s a little robot, so by the time she runs into Rihito she plays the fool and spends some time with him as a human. It turns out to be a hallucination from a virus Shinki Ann is suffering from, but a few scenes seem to try to leave it ambiguous as to if Human Ann existed, to say nothing of the “grow big” juice. The consensus seems to be no, but the way the episode is framed it’s hard to derive that except by common sense. Which, after the ghost, is a bit of an ask.
Thereafter, we start off with the girls trying to bring their master his lunch that he forgot, only to end up in a vast underground empire beneath the park, populated by masterless rogue Shinki and complete with an evil tyrant overlord, plucky resistance, and prophecy of a mythical savior that someone (Lene) just happens to fit the bill of. Like the ghost, this is supposed to be taken 100% seriously as a real thing in this world. So excuse me if I have even less of an idea what went on the previous episode.
We follow up this little weird stretch with a Christmas episode worth of fluff, and then head into what, I guess, is the climax of the show, wherein Hina is stolen away via a ruse set by a collector Master. She’s baited with the idea she might have been a misdelivered Shinki to begin with, but the truth is that the new annoyance just wants her because she’s a rare prototype. The first episode of this little two-parter ends with Hina caught in a trap and seemingly hacked to erase her memory, but check the tone of the show.
The next episode has the three remaining main girls plus Clara go on a rescue mission, but of course Hina is already kind of brainwashed. They trick the collector’s Shinki servants, and bring Hina around with a backup drive so she can kick the asses of the enemies involved before going home, all happy on the home front with it strongly implied that the collector’s chicanery may have been reported to get him arrested. All’s well that ends well.
So, one thing that you may have noticed in the summary of Busou Shinki, which is also a significant delta from Frame Arms Girl, is that Rihito is hardly in this. The girls are very Master-motivated, but he’s essentially an accessory to show up at the beginning and/or end of most episodes to give them their task and/or reward, directly or indirectly.
I actually think this works to strengthen Busou Shinki. It keeps the focus tight on the four (and only four) main characters, and while their master is a necessary inclusion he doesn’t interface with the world in the same way. The living toys angle is much more excusable when we’re actually indulging in some of the fun visual wonder that can be done with the concept. Having tiny people use familiar objects in odd ways because of how they scale to the proportions (consistent or not) provides some neat little setups. It’s not a huge deal and certainly doesn’t carry a show on its own, but it is something that’s stronger for not having to deal with a full-sized human all the time.
Busou Shinki also has a stronger bit of story writing than Frame Arms Girl did. Some of the sequences in Busou Shinki are more or less replicated in Frame Arms Girl as vignettes, and while you would think that the episodes might feel slow or padded doing one thing rather than two, the people behind this show clearly knew how to actually handle having a broadcast TV run time. There’s a good deal more drama and life to the world as well. Not that this is a dramatic show, but what did they make the plot in Frame Arms Girl? Product testing. What is it here? It varies from episode to episode but usually the girls are trying to accomplish something with actual stakes to them, whether it’s low stakes like cooking a meal or high (imagined) stakes like stopping terrorists from blowing up a plane. Even the competitive combat angle, which is really glossed over since the character we most care about who actually participates is Clara, has a little more to it where it feels like people actually care about results for emotional reasons rather than blandly because it’s what they’re supposed to do.
On the whole, I can’t avoid comparing Busou Shinki to it’s successor, and in just about every way Busou Shinki comes out the better of the two. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s objectively good. There’s a lot of puttering about in this show, and it can’t quite pick a lane, whether it wants to be screwball comedy or slice of life or just very light action. The bizarro trio of episodes throws in some head-scratching annoyance, the characters are pretty flat and static… none of it is the worst or even really that bad, but none of it is actually good.
What grade does a show get when it’s not bad, but is simultaneously not good? That’s easy: it gets a C. Busou Shinki receives a C. It’s entirely mediocre and you can easily go your whole life without seeing it. A completely forgettable little outing that could be summed up as “mostly harmless”.