I imagine this was fairly expected given the April Fools’ Day “review” of Gunvarrel, but we’re going to take a look at Robotics;Notes this week. And I know March is over and my arbitrary Mecha theme with it, but while Robotics;Notes is at least tangentially related to mecha I don’t exactly see it as a Mecha show in the same vein as the ones I reviewed. As seen through Gunvarrel, that sort of stuff is still fictional in-universe. Instead, Robotics;Notes functions more as near-future science fiction story that just happens to include some giant robots.
It’s also one of the members of the
“Science Adventure Series”, or “Semicolon Series” based on
the idiosyncratic style of the titles (note, this one is
“Robotics;Notes”, with a semicolon and no space. They are all
like that.), the most famous of which would have to be Steins;Gate.
The main entries, including Robotics;Notes, are adapted from Visual
Novels and feature a shared universe. What’s more, they also share
some general traits when it comes to storytelling. The members of
the Semicolon series start off with a general sense that we’re
feeling strange people in an essentially real world. Some have
darker or lighter baselines than others, but they tend to have a turn
somewhere in there that catapults the story from personal drama to
the world or at least regional scale in terms of what’s at stake.
They tend to be a solid blend of Science Fiction, Mystery, and
occasionally Thriller in terms of their genre, but are seldom short
on funny (or at least fun) moments, thanks to fairly colorful casts.
They overall try to be pretty grounded, and while the science fiction
that they present isn’t exactly hard the presentation is extremely
artful when it comes to convincing the audience that this is
something that could happen. Part of this comes from the tendency of
the series to lift elements of its plot and science fiction
components from the murkier corners of the real world, including
psuedoscience, conspiracy theories, unexplained mysteries, and
scientific wishful thinking about unproven properties of the
universe. The audience is likely to be passing-familiar with some of
the topics, or at least to have heard of them, possibly even in terms
that lend credence to the show’s take.
I’ve also had a lot of fun with every
Semicolon series anime that I’ve watched. Now, don’t mistake me and
think that I’m saying everything that’s come out of the series is
equally good, or even good at all. Some of the entries are very
deeply flawed, arguably even bad, but they all do something that was
worth watching them for, in part because these are all stories with
ambition. They offer up big ideas and big emotions and try to engage
their audience on both a thinking level and a feeling one. As a
result, even when they slip up, some amount of effort shines through.
Where was I? Ah, yes, Robotics;Notes.
Robotics;Notes take place in the
not-so-distant future of 2019 (on to 2020 before the show ends), and
follows the two members of the local high school’s Robotics Club.
Akiho (Aki) Senomiya is an overeager, optimistic goofball who loves
robots and especially wants to complete the club’s grand project
before she graduates. Her classmate and best friend, Kaito (Kai)
Yashio, is seemingly a sourpuss with a flat affect who does not care
about robots, the big project, or much of anything outside of a
mobile fighting game called Kill-Ballad. The grand project is called
GunBuild-1, and is an attempt (ten years of student work old at this
point) to recreate, as closely as possible, the titular giant robot
from the in-universe famous anime Gunvarrel, of which Aki is an
insanely huge fan and which Kill-Ballad is themed after.
Of course, this means they’re a student
club of two members asking for an exorbitant budget for a pretty
crazy project. Thanks to Aki’s dogged persistence, the
vice-principal offers them a chance: Win a major hobby robot
tournament (an arrangement something like Battle-bots), and they can
have the money. Do any worse than first place, and the club will be
disbanded, no more whining allowed.
For not even having a functional robot
until just before the competition, they do pretty well: They get
controls mapped after those in Kill-Ballad, and Kai suffers from a
condition that can warp his perception of time in stressful
situations, letting him react with the real-world equivalent of
frame-perfect timing thanks to seconds feeling like eternities (Aki
suffers from the opposite condition, occassionally having attacks
where she basically passes out with minutes passing in, to her, the
blink of an eye). However, they don’t manage to win in the final
round against the flamboyant, masked champion called Mr. Pleiades.
Aki and Kai manage to keep Aki’s dream, the club, and the show going
by recognizing that Pleiades is actually their underclassman Subaru
and blackmailing him into joining the club to protect his identity
and put the win on the club’s record.
From here, we hit the “Middle
Episodes” of the show, where we work on several lines at once.
These episodes feel hugely meaty, to the point where I’m still amazed
that they are, in fact, just half hour episodes, especially since
they aren’t rushed either. Along the way we get individual character
stories (including recruiting Junna Daitoku, the granddaughter of a
local robot tech, and Frau Koujiro, aka Frau Bow, the creator of
Kill-Ballad, and learning more about them), follow the continued
process of working on GunBuild-1 (an effort that quite reasonably
requires industrial support and loads of money despite the ten
previous years of hard work that assembled basically a whole
chassis), touch on mysteries regarding Aki’s now distant older sister
Misaki, and delve into a potentially global conspiracy with Kai as he
uses an Augmented Reality app on his tablet to interact with a cute
and friendly AI named Airi and unlock the “Kimijima Reports” that
warn of the Committe of 300 and the oncoming doom they’ve prepared
for humanity.
There is a phenomenal lot to unpack
with this show.
Eventually, GunBuild-1 is actually
completed! I’ll give it this… it’s giant. In a display of
realism, the massive machine, piloted by Kai, can only vaguely
shamble forward with great labor, exciting approximately no one.
This prompts Aki to finally accept switching to a different project,
GunBuild-2, to display at the expo they wanted to take GunBuild-1 to.
It won’t be screen-accurate to Gunvarrel (at least without AR), but
it will at least be a quite tall humanoid robot that’s actually
capable of making a few cool moves rather than shambling and dying.
This build is, quite naturally, just as troubled as the last one, but
thanks in part to Aki’s family connections, they have the help of
JAXA (the Japanese space program, for those not aware) expertise and
facilities.
Meanwhile, the Kimijima Reports are
getting darker (if such a thing was possible) and it seems they’re
coming true. Strange events in line with the predictions Kimijima
makes in his reports for both the world and the Committee of 300’s
plays occur with damnable consistency, leading us a darker and darker
rabbit hole. Usefully, though, this includes magnetic monopole
meteors falling from the sky, which can be used to build some
awesomely compact motors for GunBuild-2.
At the same time, we keep following up
with all the characters, learning their individual stories and
progressing them, whether to do with Frau’s past, Junna’s odd fear of
robots and the history of her grandfather’s shop, the fact that Airi
is based on an ill little girl sealed in cryogenics, the history and
possible meaning of Gunvarrel… full detail would take all day, and
that is part of what makes this show so good to really dig into as a
viewer. What’s going on? Everything, without rushing or overpacking
it. I’m not sure how convinced I am that there’s not some sort of
time dilation effect to fit Robotics;Notes into these half hour
packages.
What at first seems to be the darkest
hour (but is, in fact, the start of the “Dark” phase of this
Semicolon show) occurs when Subaru is badly injured from GunBuild-2
toppling over on him during testing on a windy runway and,
simultaneously, Kai attempts to access the seventh and final Kimijima
report. When he does, he’s confronted by Mizuka, a friend of his
(and more, of Aki’s sister) who has seemed to know a good deal about
Kimijima and who can only walk with the help of a robotic exoskeleton
because her legs were paralyzed years ago. Before much can come of
that directly, though, Mizuka’s phone rings with the tune of “Kagome
Kagome” (said to be the Committee of 300’s calling card and heard
several times before in the middle of eerie things) and her
exoskeleton goes haywire, walking her off a nearby cliff to her
death.
That scene… that scene is one of the
ones that will haunt the hell out of you. A few shows have scenes
like that, which are effective or disturbing enough to stick with you
for a long time after you, and they all have their own reasons why.
For Mizuka’s death, it’s not because she was an indispensable
character (I hadn’t mentioned her to this point in my review because
she was, in fact, fairly tertiary along with a huge number of other
characters, and no convenient point came up to mention her role of
information broker in passing) or one who would normally be immune to
harm (like a small child). She was someone we cared about, a fixture
of the local town and a fun individual to be around, but the fact
that it was Mizuka was not why the scene was so damnably effective.
It was effective because of pacing and
emotion. The scene feels, somewhat, like “Controllable
Helplessness”. From a moment or two after Kagome Kagome plays, you
know what’s looking to happen, but Kai and Mizuka struggle against it
as well as they can, for quite some time. There are no half-measures
taken as Kai tries, with all his might, to resist the steady,
plodding advance of Mizuka’s exoskeleton. He tries to get in front
of her and push. He tries to tackle her to the ground. He
struggles, and the animation and acting really sell, along with the
raw time it takes, that he’s pushing himself to the absolute limit.
And still, no matter what he does, the machine chugs relentlessly
onward. Step by step and inch by inch, Mizuka is borne to her death.
When Kai finally knocks her over, and you have a moment to hope that
the mechanical legs will flail uselessly like a turtle flipped on its
back, the exoskeleton launches her back to her feet with enough
torque to leave her coughing up blood, and the forward stomping
continues unabated. Even though the inevitable end is seen from
nearly the beginning of the sequence, you’re offered out after out
only to have them shot down with a systematic, methodical precision
until, with Kai and the audience both reduced to helpless observers
and utterly out of options, Mizuka finally takes her fatal tumble.
The Semicolon series, especially
Robotics;Notes, is normally so bright and colorful that you don’t
realize how deep the darkness stalking our leads is until it really
strikes. We may have been aware of the Committee of 300 and
world-destroying machinations for a long time, but there was a
barrier of the unreal. Now, the worst is absolutely concrete.
Given Subaru’s accident, the Robotics
Club is disbanded, but Aki (with Kai’s support), even at her lowest,
manages to push onward, determined to finish GunBuild-2 and take it
to the expo even if the world is against her. Which, at this stage,
they manage. But while the Expo provides most of an episode of
breather, we’re in the endgame. Aki sees her sister Misaki just in
time for Misaki to boot up her company’s offering, a sinister
spider-like robot, and go on a destructive rampage. After the chaos,
in which Misaki escapes, Kimijima also reveals himself – though he
was murdered years ago (by Misaki, who was acting to save Kai and
Aki), he uploaded his mind into the AR system, and has been
masterminding events as part of the Committee of 300 ever since.
Information is controlled across the globe with sophisticated
illusions (technology based on the villainous schemes in Chaos;Head)
and the Committee will launch a black hole bomb (Courtesy of their
SERN holding, as per Steins;Gate) into the sun in order to trigger a
billions-of-people-killing solar storm, ruling the survivors with a
dystopic iron fist. He’s been running Misaki as a meat puppet, and
placed the reports to lead people down a half-right path to advance
his designs. All that remains is the launch, scheduled for soon
enough from the JAXA base at our protagonists’ home.
The entire town, touched by Aki and
Kai’s dedication and faced with the vast danger, pulls together to
help the Robotics Club enact one final project: Super GunBuild-1,
taking the GunBuild-1 chassis and upgrading it into a form able to
fight through Misaki’s Spider-robot guarding the launch site and stop
the rocket from wiping out civilization as we know it, deleting
Kimijima’s digital existence as a finishing blow.
The final battle takes, essentially, an
entire episode, and is really well done. On a technical level, even
Super GunBuild-1 and the spider aren’t the most super of robots –
they move in a more realistic and grounded way despite the
superscience supposedly behind their construction, and while I don’t
know of anything in our 2020 that operates on the same level as those
robots, I can at least believe that they’re possible with knowable
technology in our physical world whether or not it’s true (the power
source would probably be the biggest issue. Batteries are heavy and
the square-cube law is a pain). All the same, it’s more dynamic and
dramatic than lots of flashier fighting, with Kai struggling in the
pilot seat against a superior foe, risking being killed to use his
slow-mo trump card… and Aki having the trigger for that trump card
just after they confessed their feelings for each other, holding her
beloved’s life literally in her hands one way or another, having to
fight herself every time with what’s more important and dangerous:
the threat of the enemy countered by slow-mo or the threat that
inducing slow-mo with a shock will kill Kai. Add into this that the
rival pilot is still Aki’s sister, whether or not she’s acting under
her own free will, and Aki and Kai both need to face her down and
call her to task for the horrible things she’s done and face down
Kimijima to save her.
Of course the launch is stopped,
Kimijima is deleted, and Misaki and Kai both survive… but it is a
hell of a ride getting there.
Out of all the Semicolon series shows
I’ve seen, Robotics;Notes stays the lightest for the longest. There
are certainly some pretty dark overtones early, but they stay
overtones, in part thanks to Aki’s pep and optimism holding the show
together in brighter territory than, say, the fear and paranoia
rampant in Chaos;Head or the chuunibyou theatricality of Steins;Gate.
That said, when it goes dark, I think it’s also potentially the
darkest or at least most emotionally threatening of the series. Even
before the show takes its turn with Mizuka’s demise, there are some
very bleak times. Frau, for instance, seriously attempts suicide in
an earlier episode, and is only saved because Kai happens to find her
before she’s taken a step she can’t take back. And the show goes a
long way to making you feel her bitterness and despair, so you know
why, whether seriously intent on self-destruction or not, she went
through the motions of such a horrific act. Similarly, we find out
that Junna is afraid of robots because one of her grandfather’s
friendly greeter robots fell on her in a storage shed, leaving her
trapped beneath the heavy thing mindlessly repeating its salutations
in the dark, unable to save herself until outside rescue came. And
we see her grandfather’s struggle, having once loved the machines,
believing that they could be friends to people, and how he turned
bitter and jaded after his granddaughter suffered such a traumatizing
accident. But for the earlier dark incidents, there’s always a
consequent redemption. Kai drags Frau out of the depths of her
despair. Junna overcomes her fear and repairs the friendly robots
her grandfather disabled in order to show him that his dream of
friendship between man and machine didn’t have to die and stay dead.
I don’t know if it’s literally true,
but I once heard it said of visual art that if you’re going to use
your brightest lights well, you need to pull out your darkest darks
alongside them. When it comes to the writing in the Semicolon
series, that’s exactly what Robotics;Notes does, and it’s incredibly
effective.
For me, at least, Robotics;Notes is
neck and neck with Steins;Gate for the title of “Best of the lot”.
I have more personal affection for Robotics;Notes – there are
parts of it that perfectly exude a sort of warm and fuzzy feeling for
me – but I think, in an objective sense, its artistry might not be
quite on the level of Steins;Gate. And, at the risk of spoiling what
I’ll say at the end of some distant future Steins;Gate review (except
for you time travelers who have already read it and got here via a
link from there), that competition is key to whether I give
Robotics;Notes an A or an A+, because the easiest way to
differentiate between degrees of amazing is by having some sort of
metric to hold your subject up against.
I do think the story in Steins;Gate is
tighter, and stronger for that. Robotics;Notes is sprawling, while
Steins;Gate is nearly as impressive and much more contained. On
characters, it’s a little harder to say. While spending time with
Aki is really nice and Frau is very memorable, Junna was largely just
sort of there and Kai and Subaru both grated on me a little at the
start. By contrast, the characters in Steins;Gate are much more
colorful and unforgettable, and were always a ball to watch because
they went bigger and louder. But, at the same time, I think you
ultimately connect more to the Robotics;Notes characters because they
are by in large more grounded, rounded, and realistic. They can be
muddier, but they also do play more notes. Both casts are really
great, but… in the format, I think I have to hand that to
Steins;Gate as well. Robotics;Notes does pick up points for its
pacing, I feel. Steins;Gate was very good, ultimately, but my first
time through I was wishing for it to kick into gear just before it
went and kicked into gear. There was no such experience in
Robotics;Notes. Maybe it’s because I just trusted the Semicolon
series by the time I got around to this one, or maybe it has to do
with the fact that the episodes are, as I’ve said, amazingly paced to
have a lot of lines of engagement going with full time given to all
of them. Robotics;Notes takes longer by far to ‘make the turn’ but I
was never waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I had to think about this long and
hard, but in the end I think Steins;Gate is the superior complete
package of a show… but that Robotics;Notes has enough marked
positives to earn an A+ on its own merits, as long as it’s not forced
into a death match with its famous and famously well-regarded
predecessor.