The best way to describe LBX Girls in brief is to imagine that Muv Luv Unlimited and Yuki Yuna is a Hero were somehow hybridized – you have an every day normal person suddenly transported into a world under siege by horrible aliens, but granted the ability to fight. Most of the time, though, we spend with cute girls doing cute things, in a show that tries to be more about the slice of life than the war for the survival of mankind.
Before jumping in, though, a few words about this show’s history. You see, technically LBX girls is a spinoff. One that is disconnected enough even in its pitch that an uninitiated individual should find it approachable, but a spinoff none the less. Apparently LBX is “Little Battlers eXperience”, and includes games and shows (Called as such, or else “Danball Senki”) mostly about kids playing cardboard battlebots, aimed very much at the younger crowd – a sort of Pokemon or Yugioh thing, unless I miss my mark. Frankly, knowing the pitch for the other stuff and seeing this show LBX Girls is about as related to “Little Battlers eXperience” as it is to the LB-X Autocannons of Battletech.
In any case, we open with our main character, Riko. She lives in the normal world and is taking an exciting day trip to Tokyo with her friend. While there, they see some LBX models on sale and the friend talks Riko into picking up a cheap blind bag, to gift her father if nothing else. While waiting for her friend to get done being in line for the new release, Riko decides to poke at what she’s bought. She opens the box for one of the little mechs, an Assassin, and when she touches it gets the most abrupt Isekai ever. We’ll leave her falling out of the sky for a bit and introduce the world she’s falling into.
This world is undergoing the “Second Time-Space Quake” which mostly involves the sky shattering like glass and hordes of the living metal monsters known as Mimesis pouring into the world. One place where I have to give the show credit is in the animation – the action looks great, and even the monster designs are pretty good. The rank-and-file Mimesis look like somebody crossed the basic Legion units from 86 with an alien design including lots of eyeballs, which is entirely serviceable for cannon fodder. The big ones are pretty much unique and recall all sorts of things, with the largest that appears from the breach her in episode 1 more resembling the Shangri-la forces from Noein.
These monsters raining from the sky over a ruined Tokyo are resisted by the titular LBX Girls (properly referred to as “Armor Girls”), who are actually well-designed mecha musume.
For those unfamiliar, “Mecha Musume” is an aesthetic (with many different names and subgenres) that usually comes about from anthropomorphizing military hardware of some description. Most examples have a core girl wearing some sort of armor and gadgets that will often be highly designed but usually restricted to her limbs and back in terms of what’s actually covered – the face and core can be any degree of exposed but tend towards the plugsuit look to give a good outline of the feminine core of the design. It seems niche, but there’s loads of art of it, probably because it allows the character to look attractive but also like she could do some serious ass-kicking. The armor girls in this show, with their loadouts inspired (presumably) by different LBX mechas, hit a nice sweetspot that’s not overly fanservicey but that does represent the double appeal. They also come complete with magical girl style transformations, recalling the mechanical/technological vibe a lot of the hero gear in Yuki Yuna is a Hero had going on.
In any case, the defense against the quake doesn’t go so well, leading to the brass calling a full retreat. This is where we catch up with our main character, as she pulls out her mecha suit while falling (without knowing what it is) and then gets neatly hit by the cool car of a retreating squad of armor girls. After a little bit of comedy of errors where they try to help said newbie retreat (with Riko initially thinking she’s been launched into some sort of VR game), they get her out of there and take her with them, quickly giving Riko the rundown on that she’s been transported to a world under dimensional alien attack, and can be expected to fight back since she has the cool sniper mecha gear and locals don’t.
The next episode, the gang hits up a nearby military base, and we get what the core loop of the show probably should have looked like: some good downtime in which we can build character and indulge in comedy (there’s a brilliant visual gag in the hot springs scene in episode 2 where the girls in the spring are joined by a monkey, which feels normal; then a deer, which seems a little odd; and then we cut to the bear just chilling and no one commenting on it, which is hilarious. Savor it, it’s the show’s best comedy.) alongside a building plot that takes advantage of the “humanity on the brink” setting and vibe that the first episode established. You know, the Muv Luv Unlimited sort of tone that’s split, but still clear on what kind of world it inhabits.
The main plot in here involves the girls getting some of the sordid history of the base, and its fallen armor girl protector of whom there’s a statue out front. The base is fairly desperate and asks the girls to stick around, which they can’t do because they have a larger scope job. Meanwhile, one young soldier is pretty upset about this, as it turns out that he was in love with the girl who last died to protect the base, and feels like she was hung out to dry by a ranking brass that didn’t care about her at all. This comes to a head when some sabotage by the vengeful boy draws in the girl’s killer, a powerful Mimesis known as The Spider, which the boy planned to kill himself with a lot of prep work.
Our main character girls end up engaging, and having a hard fight that’s ultimately helped by a lot of intel, and the boy ultimately dying to deliver some extra firepower to the field, lasting just long enough to see his love avenged by another armor girl. With the Spider defeated and its model saved by the animators to be recycled as a “big mook” for the rest of the show, the squad and their cool car roll on.
This arc takes up all of episodes 2 and 3, which is about what the material deserves. It’s not the most moving thing in the world, but it is at least a little effective. Sadly, this level of competence in terms of managing the pacing and weaving does not continue for the rest of the show. While the setup should be comparable to Muv Luv Unlimited, the show treats itself more like Yuki Yuna is a Hero, except without the general competence and skill that Yuki Yuna actually displayed. That is, we have some very bright slice of life, but unlike Yuki Yuna that knew to also break out its darkest stuff and that could pace itself to not get overly lost in the puttering, LBX Girls mostly feels like it’s spinning its wheels when it’s doing the slice of life.
So, before going farther, let’s introduce our main characters, fitting as they do something very much like the traditional “Five man band” setup.
First is Riko, of course. She’s the newbie, and “the friendly one”, more or less becoming the heart of the team. In combat, her role is technically sniper, but in reality she’s basically useless. In the first few episodes you could say she’s just starting out, but to spare you all the wait of disappointment that I had, she literally never manages to make the shot she’s aiming for at any point in the entire show. Darkness, a character who canonically has a crippling problem in her inability to hit the broad side of a barn, has a better observed hit rate with her attacks than Riko does. It’s really lame that our main character is a disgrace to snipers everywhere, but that’s what we’ve got.
Yui, next, is boisterous and aggressive and… that’s basically her character. You’ve seen her type before like Karin in Yuki Yuna, and it’s perfectly serviceable for her to bring firepower in combat and energy (but also friction) outside of it.
Suzuno is the smart one, and also cold and standoffish, initially refusing to really make friends with her fellows. Of course, Riko does eventually get through to her, but it takes a lot more time and doing than one might expect.
Kyouka is the leader. She’s normally pretty good at getting people motivated and together, though in her own little arc (the second best segment of the show) she’s also clearly got a lot of trauma to work through. Of all the characters she’s probably the least single-noted, so I do have to at least give her credit for that.
And then there’s Miharu who is… the calm one I guess. She’s mostly just sort of there to fill out scenes and act as the voice of reason because Kyouka is otherwise only one voice, and in general to act as second-string backup to the other roles, especially Suzuno and Kyouka.
Finally, we have Nate. Nate is the AI of the cool armored car the team has, and he has a bad habit of pulling “you never asked” bull about his features and capabilities. He also, to an extent, acts as the handler for the girls, leading them in a vaguely useful direction.
I say vaguely useful because the rest of this show is less missions and war zones and more food tourism, sampling Udon from here and there and everywhere. The Mimesis do come back now and then, but while there are some encounters, it’s frustrating how much the show treats it like if one’s not on screen they just don’t exist.
So, here’s a world where time and space are broken, and roads might not even lead to the same continent because of discontunities, while alien metal bugs that can only be defeated by super isekai girls threaten to shred humanity to tatters. Again, this should be like the BETAverse, where even if we get some happy and funny scenes, there should be acknowledgments about what the threat has done to the world. Yokohama Base has pretty alright morale (at least through Unlimited), but the food is all artificial, and the entertainments are things that can be done mostly with regular stuff at hand. It has a feel that’s worn and under a dark cloud. In Yuki Yuna is a Hero, it makes sense that there’s a generally bright and safe world to worry about protecting, because the conceit is different: the Vertex don’t exist in normal space, so the siege that the Heroes must endure goes largely unseen by ordinary folk. And in that case, there’s a degree to which the brightness of the normal world serves to make the drama more potent, as we get to actually see what those girls are fighting to defend.
Here? Sightseeing like time and space aren’t broken and there aren’t killer alien bugs all over. We head to Kyoto, and while there is a reason (a mysterious signal from the overrun area) we treat it more as a make-up for the fact that Riko had a cold when her school trip would have happened and she didn’t get a chance to go.
On the way we get a hot springs episode that introduces a weird goofy guy called Otacross. He’s an Otaku mecha engineer and also the guy running the random hot springs in trapped in a space loop, so he does some tune-ups on their gear while the girls are bathing, as well as actually asking Nate to turn the GPS that can get them out of the warped space loop on. When we get to Kyoto, it turns out that while the city was overrun, it’s more that half of it was; the place is divided by a massive Attack on Titan style wall (which should be useless without heavy defense when the Mimesis are shown to be able to fly or scale buildings fairly easily), and everything on the good side of the wall is open for all the tourism that Riko missed out on. We spend most of an episode sightseeing and eating udon before scouting the bad side.
On the bad side, a lab is found where an old lady unveils the Mcguffin of the show, called the SWITCH. The SWITCH can technobabble in a way that will supposedly be really good, but as soon as it’s ready to move, it’s releasing a signal that all the Mimesis will wake up and home in on.
This leads to an episode where we actually fight. Granny turns into an Armor Girl (young form in the process) and the non-Riko party members all use the cool super ability that Otacross told them they had, Attack Function. This turns out to be a kind of bad idea, as Attack Function, while awesome, is also one use before leaving the user totally tapped out (Similar to Hero Chapter‘s version of Mankai). Ultimately they all get away with the SWITCH, with Riko managing her best shot of the show – it’s massively off target, but manages to ricochet into some explosives she was supposed to avoid hitting, taking out a bridge behind them with a giant Mimesis on it, which is net good.
The girls then have a very important mission: deliver the SWITCH to another lab, where it can be used for the good of humanity. But the first big issue out of that? Everyone is hungry from Attack Function draining their energy (well, except Riko, but Otacross calls and warns them a little late of that energy drain, and that Riko’s Attack Function is a self-destruct, cementing her uselessness). And while they’re pigging out on Udon and going sightseeing, Suzuno is reaching her breaking point. We spend the episode with Riko trying to get closer to her, and finding out that she’s scared to have friends because she was a constant transfer student in her old world and always got separated from her friends. Somewhere in the conversations between her and Riko, she decides to keep working with the team, so I guess that’s good.
Then, finally, we get another big setup. It starts out looking like more pointless puttering, with Kyouka and Yui fighting over the fact that Yui ate her pudding, but the more pressing issue is that the delivery, which has a timer until the SWITCH runs out of the ability to be in standby mode (which we are lead to believe means it would fail if they take to long), might be impossible to make since space warps are covering every road and landing except for the one on which a mountain-sized Mimesis that looks like a crab with a nautilus on top (it’s cool, really) is squatting.
The girls try to engage Nautilus, but it can both let off jamming waves that mess them up and trigger Kyouka’s PTSD. She gets injured in the retreat after freezing, and the story comes out that this is the same giant Mimesis that slaughtered her former squad, meaning that all the new friends she made in this world died in front of her and now she both has to face her fear and possibly seek revenge.
After fighting over pudding being the lead-in to the team dynamics. See how this doesn’t quite match?
That failed fight means getting support from Otacross, who alters a nearby cannon emplacement to fire a super-powerful shell that should, on a direct hit, destroy the Mimesis. The problem is, they need to spot for it, and it needs to not move. With Kyouka out of commission, Yui is made spotter, Suzuna is overseeing the situation, Miharu is a dedicated loader, and Riko is manning the gun. This last one is a terrible choice as you should realize by now. They have two shots, and each one takes off eight hours from the deadline because they’re stealing power from the SWITCH to make the cannon fire like it wasn’t designed to.
Before the first shot is lined up, the giant Mimesis starts moving, Yui, in part feeling terribly responsible for Kyouka’s sorry state given how they were fighting, stops spotting and engages directly, giving it her best face to face fight in an effort to keep it from moving out of the line of fire. Riko misses anyway. To be fair, the shell has a LONG hang time (a nice touch) but still, fail.
Yui burns everything in that effort and is in dire danger, which causes Kyouka to step up and, in order to not let another friend die to that monster, overrides the safety checks to suit up despite her injuries. She gets there, saves Yui, and engages the monster herself for Riko to take the second shot.
Riko misses again. At least this time, they notice while the shell is in flight and it becomes Kyouka’s job to bait and/or drive the enemy into the actual line of fire in order for it to get killed. From a writing standpoint I guess it had to happen this way because this is Kyouka’s episode and she had to overcome her PTSD and defeat her personal boss more on her own, but really Riko is just a sinfully lousy shot. This one’s a crew served weapon! With multiple people calculating for you! And your target is the size of a mountain. What is your excuse?
The two episodes around this Mimesis fight are sort of the return to the feel of episodes 2 & 3, and act as the other really effective fight in the show. In isolation, it’s actually pretty good, with a lot of weight given to Kyouka’s PTSD (reasonable and much more on-theme than “I was a transfer student so I can’t have friends”), but the show has lost a lot of the good will it started with by this point. And if you thought things might be looking up as we enter the endgame with a badass episode-plus-long fight? Too bad, it’s clip show time.
Yeah, they throw a Haruhi-damned whole-episode recap clip show in a twelve episode anime where painfully little has actually been accomplished. I wish I was joking. They do at least get us some new information, as we see the recap from the Point of View of the government and military brass, who Nate apparently reports to, but… it’s still painful. Especially since the brass largely mirrors the audience in growing frustration at how every new report is not about fighting the Mimesis or delivering the SWITCH, but rather about what stray cat they’re taking back to its home or, most often, what Udon they’re taking a detour to eat.
At the start of the next episode, in fact, it turns out that the girls waste so much time with their food tourism and random inconsequential Good Samaritan routines that they entirely miss the timer on the SWITCH, which should have been a maximally pressing issue. Of course, if you know anything about storytelling you know it’s going to turn out to have been fine: it turns out it needed to come out of standby anyway, and isn’t burned out or anything like that… but it’s clear that the girls had no way of knowing that, and in fact assumed (reasonably) the exact opposite.
And this here is part of the big difference in how the slice of life is addressed here as opposed to in Yuki Yuna, which otherwise provides the best comparison to the tone they actually hit: Yuna and her friends might enjoy Udon. We might even get a scene on it in the main show. Hell, we might get a whole spinoff chibi anime with five minute episodes entirely about udon and the characters enjoying udon (yes, that actually happened. Thanks, Yuki Yuna is a Hero.) But that cast would not let an outcome they have reason to believe leads to the part where all humanity dies just happen because, “eeh, busy getting some really cool udon from that one shop over there.” That’s basically what Riko and her idiot friends here do. They forget the vital thing upon which the fate of their reality rides because they’re having exotic noodle lunches. That’s an excuse for not doing your homework for school, not for flubbing an unspeakably important military mission. Even Nate, who should have a better handle on things, just lets it happen.
And I know I’m probably, in abstract, giving a momentary setup that exists just to immediately pull the “everything is fine” gag too much of a hard time, but I think it underscores part of what LBX Girls gets so wrong. We do want to see some fun slice of life, and we do want to see some military action, and they need to exist in the same universe… but the blending in LBX girls is done without skill or grace, ruining even potentially good ingredients by misapplying them.
When the Forestize warning goes out, the Hero Club transforms and rises to meet the Vertex. When an emergency siren goes off in Muv Luv, it’s time to abruptly stop playing “Tama is squad leader for a day” and address that all-out. When you have a timed superweapon delivery, it’s time for the show to make like Arpeggio of Blue Steel and have taking the thing to its destination be your top priority, on which you can be challenged. They came so close with the battle against the giant road-blocking PTSD-triggering Mimesis before the recap episode, even putting the timer in jeopardy because it would be cut by taking shots. And then they abruptly swerve into this gutterball finish because they don’t understand how to construct drama.
Or perhaps it’s not that they don’t understand how to construct drama. That’s possible, that the few effective moments could have arisen by chance or imitation, but I think it might be more possible that there’s a part of the writing staff that didn’t want to, or more than that was aggressively afraid of providing actual drama, and therefore worked to defang everything as soon as it would build up, making it “safe” but also robbing the show of any point or emotional effect. Even much harsher shows than what probably should have been the target tone for this have downtime and relief (if they know what they’re doing) but it’s generally constructed to not be horribly distracting nor to make a fool of the plot.
Realizing this puts the show’s faults into perspective. There was a critical, constructive mistake deep in what went into making LBX girls in that someone desperately didn’t want it to be a show where bad things could happen, or that would sustain a scary or oppressive atmosphere. This was completely at odds, to the point of incompatibility, with their choice to go with “A world where humanity is being threatened with extinction at the appendages of a horrifying, unappeasable alien swarm”. Something had to give, and what broke in the end was the overall quality of the show, its disparate bits tearing it apart. Even Warlords of Sigrdrifa did this material markedly better, and that show was, even being generous and forgiving, at the bottom of what’s watchable.
And in a sense, I could stop there. We found it – the moment that tells us in a definitive fashion, in a way where we can cite our sources, just what is wrong with this show: the slice of life and military drama react like matter and antimatter, destroying the show in the process. They didn’t have to, there are plenty of shows that manage, but they do here. But, for the sake of completeness, I’ll wrap this up.
The SWITCH, once delivered, is combined with another device to make a dimensional discombobulator thingy that, if it works, will use the third Time-Space quake (coming soon to a Japan near you) to cause all the Mimesis near it to return forthwith to their place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension. To this end, Mimesis from the bulk of the nation have been baited into one region, where the quake is set to hit, by the military and the Armor Girls who can actually do their bloody job.
The main characters, being main characters, are naturally tapped to act as the last (only, on screen) line of defense for the device while it’s running. Otacross buffs them all up again, giving everyone multiple shots of their Attack Function (except Riko who still has self destruct), and they make like the last mission of Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty and hold off incoming hostiles while a fancy instant-win artifact charges up to do the instant win. The girls lose their car (Nate escapes as a roomba-sized helicopter cube that wouldn’t make it off Dr. Robotnik’s drawing board) but largely manage to hold out until the giant doom boss from Episode 1 shows its ugly face, sticking out of the rift in the sky to be menacing. Riko still has an accuracy that would probably put a shot in orbit if she was aiming for the ground, the other girls are largely spent, Nate sacrifices himself as a spare fuse, and it comes down to one shot for the final go: Riko’s Attack Function.
Luckily, Otacross says that the wearer will be protected from the blast (though it WILL trash her gear), so being unable to make a bloody shot, Riko flies up towards the dreadnought. She uses Self-Destruct, it’s super-effective, but wouldn’t you know it – being from another world, she starts to drift up to the rift just like the Mimesis. The other girls fly up to retrieve her and all group hug as their armors disintegrate. Cut to the credits.
After said credits, Riko comes to right where and when she left her world in Episode 1. Her friend comes up and they find that the blind bag contains not just her Assassin, but the mech forms of all her friends’ gear (even Nate’s car form), complete with the modifications and signs of what they went through together, causing her to form an emotional connection to her toys because big isekai adventure. The end.
Can I get the full casts of every other military-themed anime to boo this one at once? I’m not asking for 86. I’m not even asking for Yuki Yuna or Muv Luv. But I must demand something to show that you have a half-decent understanding of how to address your story, and I see the opposite here.
But, for all that, how bad is LBX Girls, really? The action looked good, and the two darker arcs would have played fairly well in isolation. The Mecha Musume stylings look good, and the girls have at least the note or two they would need to work as an action show’s cast. Even the Slice of Life stuff, when it does material that doesn’t react violently with the drama (like Suzuno’s isolation), isn’t the worst possible thing – the girls have some on-screen chemistry so they do at least feel like friends, which is important. But there’s no flow and no balance to it, leaving the final show one of the most deeply broken I’ve watched.
In the end, I think that’s worth a D here. If you get the opportunity to not watch LBX girls, take it. If you’re tempted at all to watch LBX girls, drop that idea and go watch Yuki Yuna or play Muv Luv or just do a Google Image Search for “Mecha Musume” instead. This show isn’t worth bothering with… but it’s just that, not worth bothering with. Much as I like bits but can’t enjoy the whole thing, I may hate bits but I can’t quite bring myself to despise the entire show. It’s just not worth the effort. And that’s really what there is to say about it.