An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

The Semicolon Seal of Fun – Robotics;Notes Spoiler Review

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.