The real world has many robotics competitions. While actual robots, often built by students and hobbyists have nowhere near the capability of even the simplest fictional robots and seldom fight to the death – unless you, like me, grew up watching Battlebots, which was amazing – they’re still pretty cool. So why not make an anime about one, in this case the Chinese-based RoboMasters tournament?
To be fair, while RoboMasters seems like the “safe and sane” alternative to the mechanized bloodsport of Battlebots, it is still more of a combat robot competition, with teams playing a sort of paintball/capture the flag game of shooting each other with various calibers of ping-pong balls and maneuvering around a complex arena.
After a bit of seeing this we meet our main character, Hong Kong University incoming freshman Dan Dan. He’s not interested in having fun, and wants to 100% study without anything like club activities. Least of all would be any interest in getting involved with something like the RoboMasters tournament his big brother was involved with years ago. He only has time to make a voice-activated twin rotor drone that can play fetch. You know, simple stuff.
This holds even when cute girl Shou tries to recruit him to their team, one of two rival teams at HKU, who are having an exposition match later. Shou later screws up with her team’s drone, and when Dan Dan unsuccessfully tries to rescue it from flying out to sea (knocking it into the water), the arrogant jerk who is the head of her team tries to conscript him and his drone into the little exposition match over his and Shou’s objections alike, by hook or by crook.
Well, eventually Dan Dan finds he can’t say no to a crying cute girl who praised his robotics skills. Despite some deep-seated antipathy, he tries to help, but despite everything they lose and he gets chewed out by the jerk again. We see that evidently Dan Dan and his childhood friend worked on this kind of stuff with big bro, but that big bro’s team had some internal strife that made him hate the idea of being involved, so seeing how egotistical the team lead is, it’s an easy refusal.
That said, the show does kind of need to go somewhere. Because of that, Dan Dan (pushed by the childhood friend everyone sees as his girlfriend despite their denials, and his roommate) ultimately accepts both a drone race against the club and its gigajerk leader and an invitation to use the facilities to repair his work. While there and trying, doggedly, to do anything other than get involved in RoboMasters, he learns that the jerk may have backstabbed the main team in a fairly heinous way, only to have it explained as a simple case of creative differences gone wrong.
Since the cuts we see to Dan Dan’s traumatic past seem to involve his brother-figure getting beaten up for similar reasons, he ends up on the team. Thus they work on building jerk boss’s ultimate vision of a six-legged walker robot for the challenge between the Hong Kong University teams to represent their school.
We get a good little making stuff sequence, at the end of which they’re ready to test their hero bot.
Unfortunately, it overheats and dang near destroys itself, fairly close to the deadline for the match. It’s nothing a little late-night work and a stroke of genius won’t solve, though, letting us dedicate the sixth and final episode to the RoboMasters match to be the university rep.
I’ll be honest, most of this show tries, but doesn’t quite get there. They know the parts to have a character arc or to make the “making stuff” montage at least a little dramatic, but they don’t really apply anything at a high level. The actual match, though? They knew how to choreograph it, work in a ton of little notes and tension points, and really sell it. At worst a good bit of the action is based on folks doing the FPS waggle, but I think that’s probably just representing what a RoboMasters match would actually be like, since not getting shot in the sensor panel is a skill and waggling erratically would help that.
With a hard-won victory for status, though, that’s the end of the show. Oh, sure, it throws in a random “to be continued” as the stinger, but that’s not important. What’s important is that Dan Dan learned to admit he likes robot stuff and to get over problematic attachments, the jerk kinda learned to listen, and the whole crew got through to the next level of competition. That’s that.
Well, one big thing I can say about RoboMasters the Animated Series… it’s short. This one clocks in at just six episodes, and it shows; the plot could be done in less, and in fact was in Gundam Build Fighters Try. They are honestly pretty similar series except Try had better characters, better action, and a stronger sports story that didn’t end at the first defeat of the model club or Gyanko – a character I will remember far more than any of the jerk’s rivals from this show, much as Fumina, Sekai, and Yuuma will long outlast Dan Dan, Jerk-senpai, the generic big sis, and the off-brand Winry in memory.
But in that, it RoboMasters also has strong fundamentals and gives little offense, the worst bit being when you’re called on to forgive the one guy for being fantastically unpleasant. All in all, I’ll keep this brief: B-.